Word: tarp
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...some eleven hours, arriving at 3:30 a.m. at the quarry. Throughout the trip the men rarely spoke. At the quarry, the men backed their vans up to a 3-ft.-wide opening in the ground. Covering both the hole and the back of the vans with a tarp, they ordered the children to descend into the entryway, asking each of them his name and age and taking a trinket or a piece of clothing from each as they passed into the darkened entrance. The narrow tunnel led down to an old moving van buried six feet under the ground...
...show up and admiring the windshield wipers. "Well," the game's organizer said finally, "if it keeps raining for another half hour or so, and the other guys don't show up, and nobody turns the field lights on--why didn't somebody remind me to bring a tarp?--then I guess some of you probably won't want to play?" It was still pouring when we got back to Cambridge...
...field difficulty originated with the decision to cover the Harvard playing surface with a tarpaulin to protect against rain. "Instead, of course, we got snow," Harvard coach Bob Munro said. "Monday afternoon we went out and tried to get the tarp off the field. We couldn...
...really remarkable feature of Avižienis' brainchild is a specially gifted unit dubbed TARP (for Test And Repair Processor). Like a zealous office manager always peering over the shoulders of his clerks, TARP can almost instantly spot errors, determine who has made them, and take steps to discipline or replace the wrongdoer. It constantly monitors the specially coded messages -or interoffice memos, as Avižienis calls them-that pass between the units, and immediately reacts to deviations from normal in the computer chatter. "It's as if a person were to start mispronouncing or slurring words...
Majority Rule. Still, even if TARP suspects a malfunction, it does not react impetuously. Before calling in a standby, it will first give the balky unit a chance to redeem itself by letting it repeat the task. But what if TARP itself is having an off day? Adapting an idea first proposed by the late mathematician John von Neumann, Avižienis divided TARP's brain into three independent lobes. If one lobe detects an error not subsequently confirmed by its two partners, the outvoted lobe will also be dismissed. Later, it may be given another chance...