Word: rodding
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...very brilliant student" but also "a very entertaining guy to live with." On weekends, the roommates often would drive to Nahant and picnic on Lodge's beach. Three of them, including Cabot, had drivers' licenses and bought an old Model T Ford which Newell describes as "the hot rod of its day--sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't." When it didn't, it occasionally involved the owners in embarrassing situations. Once the car stalled in front of the Massachusetts State House with Cabot driving. Three or four of his roommates got out to push, while a small crowd...
...crude extract from this first step was purified and separated into fractions by treatment with various chemicals, and each fraction was tested for sex attractiveness. A slender glass rod was touched to the sample and brought near the antennae of a male moth held in wing clips. If he fluttered and made mating motions, the sample was adjudged to contain the sexual lure of the 500,000 martyred virgins...
...standards of measurement are a present-day perplexity. On a laboratory wall in the U.S. Bureau of Standards hangs a blow-up of a 16th century woodcut showing 16 men lined up heel to toe to define the rute, an old German measure of length related to the English rod. That was fine for the 1500s. But since then, each advance in technology has required better measurements. The standard meter bar, adopted by 28 nations, including the U.S.. in 1875, was considered the last word. Used with elaborate comparing devices, it could measure with an accuracy of one part...
Surrounding the ruby rod is a spiral flash tube rather like the tube of a photographer's strobe lamp. When a pulse of electricity passes through the tube, it gives a powerful burst of white (mixed) light, some of which strikes into the ruby rod. Certain wave lengths are absorbed by the chromium atoms, raising them momentarily to very high energy levels. They drop back down almost immediately, but instead of falling all the way, they accumulate at a level that still contains considerable energy. After the light flash has shone on the ruby rod for a few millionths...
...chain reaction happens. A few atoms drop spontaneously to the lowest energy level, emitting photons (units) of deep red light. The photons hit other chromium atoms, knocking them off their energy shelf and making them emit more photons of red light. The photons that move sideways escape from the rod, but a few of them hit its polished ends, which the scientists have covered with a thin film of silver that reflects nearly all of them back into the rod. This reflected light moves lengthwise between the two end mirrors, traversing .all of the ruby rod, knocking billions of chromium...