Word: strickened
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Science fiction has long been at work on scenarios of robots that evolve and manufacture ever-improving versions of themselves, and eventually develop human traits - the capacity to feel, to love, to hate. In such fiction, the climactic poignancy occurs when the automaton, love-stricken, sheds a tear. This is because the robot, like Hemingway's Jake Barnes in "The Sun Also Rises," has a sad incapacity to mate; surely that is one of the first defects the shrewd robots would correct...
Those who did survive the initial flooding would have come to envy the dead. Dying always seems more gruesome when it is in slow motion, and slow-motion submarine deaths are perversely compelling because they happen in shallow water within reach of rescuers. Men who have been trapped in stricken submarines say the crew of the Kursk would have suffered from cold as temperatures fell to 41[degrees]F and from severe headaches as levels of carbon dioxide rose in the smothering atmosphere. They would have suffered too from fear and hopelessness as rescuers repeatedly tried, and failed, to save...
...Should American submariners find their vessel sinking, they have been trained to pull emergency stores of food and oxygen into whatever living space remains. They know that the rescue sub's goal is to hook up with a downed submarine within 72 hours of an accident. So on any stricken U.S. submarine, the survivors' goal is simple: Stay alive for one week, giving rescuers more than enough time to bring them to the surface...
...while conflicts simmer in Burundi, Chad, Djibouti, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Uganda. And the United States is eager to school Nigeria's military in the ways of peace-keeping, at least in part to reduce calls on the United States to send troops to keep the peace in conflict-stricken Sierra Leone and other ravaged nations that pockmark Africa. Last week - just in time for Clinton to announce it to a delighted Nigeria - the Pentagon sent the first dozen of hundreds of military trainers to the country. Over the next several months, they will train up to 4,000 Nigerian...
...surface. The use of the world collision, of course, begs the question of what exactly the Kursk is supposed to have struck. The Barents Sea's strategic location makes it one of the world's most heavily trafficked submarine routes, but there's no indication thus far that the stricken vessel was hit by another...