Word: swiftly
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Another pitfall is accepting too readily the idea of steady and rapid change. True, the scientific advances of the 20th century were watershed occurrences that created a world of swift and continuing transformations. But Steven Schnaars, author of Megamistakes, a critique of technological prognostication, says that in many cases the speed of change has been exaggerated. "If you look at the forecasts for the past 10 to 20 years," he says, "the most accurate ones assume a certain constancy to the world...
Goliath's human commander felt a wave of sadness sweep over him as the final image from his lost past dissolved into a featureless, simmering mist of white noise. Too swift a transition from one reality to another was a good recipe for schizophrenia, and Captain Singh always eased the shock with the most soothing sound he knew: waves falling gently on a beach, with sea gulls crying in the distance. It was yet another memory of a life he had lost, and of a peaceful past that had now been replaced by a fearful present...
EVERY AUGUST, COMET SWIFT-TUTTLE LEAVES A spectacular calling card. The trail of dust it sheds on its journey around the sun intersects Earth's orbit and flares into the Perseid meteor shower. The comet itself last appeared in 1862, and based on the orbit calculated at that time, it should have showed up again between 1979 and 1983. It didn...
...last week a Japanese comet hunter spotted a faint blob through powerful binoculars, and a check of its orbit confirmed that Swift-Tuttle had come back at last (it may be barely visible to the naked eye in November). Why so late? A comet's orbit is determined only by careful plotting of its position when it's visible; evidently the 1862 measurements were off. To his credit, Brian Marsden, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, had argued in a 1973 paper that Swift-Tuttle might be late. Few astronomers paid attention -- but Marsden's prediction was only...
...Asija, a Connecticut inventor, attended the conference in order to gauge public reaction to his invention, "Swift-Answer," which is a combined spell checker and grammar checker. The software, designed for "people who make mistakes," converts blatant errors into understandable prose, according to Asija...