Word: statics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...perhaps nothing trips us up so much as what it means for something to be simple or complex. A houseplant, with its microhydraulics, fine-tuned metabolism and dense schematic of nucleic acids, may be more complex than a manufacturing plant. A modern army, with its thicket of bureaucracy and static encampments, may be simpler than a nimble guerrilla group. A guppy, with its symphony of biological systems and subsystems, is vastly more complicated than a star...
...behavior of investors, making stock-market predictions more reliable. Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize--winning physicist and a co-founder of SFI, likes to cite the case of physicist Karl Jansky, who founded the science of radio astronomy in 1931 when he was studying the hiss of electromagnetic static that bathes the Earth--part of the same hiss you hear on a car radio. Jansky realized that the sound was caused not by atmospheric disturbances but by ancient signals streaming to us from the very center of the galaxy. What everyone else heard as noise, Gell-Mann says, Jansky...
...This external pressure, both from politicians and the alumni who will be called upon to finance the next capital campaign, seems to have found its mark within the University’s leadership, prompting an institution whose financial practices have been largely static to make the first overtures at increasing spending in some time...
...There are criminals and then there are statesmen, and Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo sees little difference between the two. This is a film of great visual energy about an essentially static figure: Giulio Andreotti, three times the Prime Minister of Italy, a leading light of the Christian Democratic Party, and the star of one of the country's most notorious trials, when he was charged with complicity in the death of the journalist Mino Pecarelli, who had written that Andreotti had Mafia ties and was implicated in the kidnapping and murder of his predecessor as Prime Minister, Aldo Moro...
...Spirit and Opportunity rovers bounced down on Mars in 2004 with a similar lowball goal of just 90 days of operational life. Yet despite arthritic wheels and joints and the need for periodic power-conserving naps, both of them roll on. Phoenix, resting on the ice on its three static pads, won't roll anywhere. But what it learns just standing in one place could push planetary science further than it's ever gone before...