Word: thickness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...CLICHES have come thick and fast, but there are two that crop up inexorably when the subject comes up. There is the idea of the definition of democracy being the right to swing one's arm only so far as the tip of someone else's nose, but bit is difficult to apply. The four teenagers had no right to be riding the rails looking for unsuspecting owners of five dollars, but were no more or less entitled to do that than Goetz was to shoot them...
...computer has changed all that. Led by Astrophysicist Jerry Nelson, a team at the University of California designed an unorthodox mirror that will not be a continuous concave surface, like Hale's, but 36 hexagonal pieces of specially shaped glass, each 6 ft. across and 3 in. thick; the segments will be fit together and will move in concert to act as one giant parabolic mirror. That harmony is possible only with the aid of a computer- controlled sensing and positioning system, which will realign the components 100 times a second by as little as one one-thousandth the width...
...telescopic brobdingnagians now in various stages of development around the world. In Tucson, scientists at the National Optical Astronomy Observatories (N.O.A.O.) and the University of Arizona are working on still another novel optics scheme: four 295-in. mirrors placed on a common mount. Each mirror would be 2 ft. thick but largely hollow, shaped like a honeycomb. The four could either be used in tandem, creating the equivalent of a gigantic 590-in. mirror, or separately. Overseas, Japanese astronomers also have their eyes on Mauna Kea; they hope to build a 295-in. telescope on the volcano by the 1990s...
...blew in the double-paned windows in most of the train's 14 cars. Antonio Algieri, 33, one of those wounded by the flying glass, described the scene as "a hurricane of slivers--and then so much terrible screaming in the dark." The train came to a stop, and thick smoke billowed through the tunnel, initially frustrating rescue attempts as dazed passengers stumbled around in the blackness...
...Square that the crack battalions of troops standing at attention seemed to sway slightly as soldiers moved from one leg to the other trying to keep warm. Looking down from atop the Lenin Mausoleum, members of the Politburo of the Communist Party tugged at the earflaps of their thick fur hats and pulled their coat collars tight. They had braved -7 degrees F weather last week to pay tribute to the late Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov and to witness the sealing of his ashes in a burial niche in the Kremlin wall...