Word: smallest
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...perfect fable for our time: HAL recast as a billion tiny bugs, his omnipotent malevolence replaced by our own innocent oversight. Technology had become so all-encompassing and incomprehensible, the fable began, that we had unwittingly lost control of it. So the smallest thing, our human habit of hiply referring to years by the last two digits, was going to topple this electronic pack of cards, sending planes crashing to the ground, nukes leaping from their silos, electricity to a standstill and all of humanity back to a time much earlier than the 1900 our computers would believe...
...based on a thought experiment: imagine being in an enclosed lab accelerating through space. The effects you'd feel would be no different from the experience of gravity. Gravity, he figured, is a warping of space-time. Just as Einstein's earlier work paved the way to harnessing the smallest subatomic forces, the general theory opened up an understanding of the largest of all things, from the formative Big Bang of the universe to its mysterious black holes...
Already, in fact, theoretical physicists have succeeded in constructing a framework that offers the best hope yet of integrating gravity with nature's other fundamental forces. This framework is popularly known as string theory because it postulates that the smallest, indivisible components of the universe are not point-like particles but infinitesimal loops that resemble tiny vibrating strings. "String theory," pioneering theorist Edward Witten of Einstein's own Institute for Advanced Study has observed, "is a piece of 21st century physics that fell by chance into the 20th century...
...Picking" means roaming the aisles of the Seattle distribution center, filling customer orders from shelves packed with titles arranged according to a bewildering strategy called "random stow" that leaves Toni Morrison: A Womanist Discourse abutting Garfield's Extreme Student Planner. This facility is the smallest of Amazon's nine worldwide distribution centers. But today the place is humming with hundreds of pickers pushing around carts piled high with books and other products destined to land under thousands of Christmas trees...
Still, crimes motivated by hate--even in the smallest amounts--sends a clear message of intolerance to the entire gay community. Unfortunately, because the acts appear to be the work of one or a few isolated individuals and do not reflect a campus-wide sentiment, the House Masters and administration can do little but continue to condemn the incidents strongly...