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...Luxilon shot" all down to Luxilon string? In a 2006 article titled "The Inch that Changed Tennis Forever," Rod Cross, a physics professor at the University of Sydney, argued that the innovation in equipment that transformed topspin from a looping, defensive shot into a dive-bombing, offensive play actually happened in the late 1970s, when equipment makers widened the heads of professional rackets from nine inches to 10 (they also dropped wood for metal and eventually graphite). The extra inch allowed players to tilt the racket forward and swing from low to high without worrying about clipping the edge...
...topspin strokes with Luxilon because they felt they needed to swing harder to generate the same pace. As former world No. 1 Jim Courier says, "Technology has been the catalyst, but my guess is that if you forced all players to go back to technology from 1950 they would play much more aggressively than previous generations. The new style is working for them." Whatever the exact interplay of man and equipment may be, it has allowed fans to witness a thrilling revolution...
...well as a writer. A workaholic who was haunted by memories of his impoverished childhood, when he worked in a blacking factory, Dickens was never the most emotionally stable of men at the best of times, never mind at the worst. In 1857 his friend Wilkie Collins wrote a play about a failed Arctic expedition. Dickens became obsessed with it and, like a rapper who's tired of the recording studio, volunteered to play the role of the villain. Then he fell in love with his 18-year-old co-star and left his wife...
...ninth child, Dora, and feeling increasingly alienated from his wife and from himself. "They say Christ was a good man," he cracks, "but did he ever live with a woman?" Flanagan's Dickens is a man who has only ever lived emotionally through his novels. Acting in Collins' play, which was called The Frozen Deep, he sets free feelings he was accustomed to keeping tightly confined, and his co-star, the toothsome Ellen Ternan, finds herself right in the splash zone...
China is using the stimulus package to play catch-up on another front: the environment. Three decades of rapid, unchecked economic growth has turned many of the country's rivers into cesspools and lands into wastelands and much of its air into grimy soup. Some $30.9 billion has been officially allocated under the stimulus plan for "environmental projects" to help clean up the mess and put the country on a path to more sustainable development. The government of Jiangsu province, for example, recently announced a $16 billion plan to clean up Lake Tai, once famed for its beauty and abundant...