Word: thinly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...documentary owes something to Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line. Like that brilliantly styled film, it returns repeatedly to the crime scene, reconstructing different versions of the murder. But for the most part, it is content to let a wide range of heads do a lot of talking about the brutal death of special agents Jack Coler and Ron Williams on June 26, 1975. At that time, the radical American Indian Movement was seeking to re-establish traditional tribal ways and to disestablish a tribal leadership it considered corrupt. Its opponents responded with terror squads, and between them...
...questioned about his work for West Tsusho, a firm with ties to the Japanese criminal underworld. But it is wrong to think that such activities tell us any more about George Bush's character than the shenanigans of Billy Carter told us about Jimmy's. On the contrary, the thin quality of these brother's-keeper charges may actually have underscored the perception that the President has uncommon good sense...
...temperatures. As mirror size increases, these two requirements begin to dictate different, and quickly contradictory, solutions. Very thick mirrors resist physical deformation extremely well, but because they retain so much heat, they tend to generate shimmering currents in the cold night air that play havoc with astronomers' observations. Very thin mirrors, on the other hand, have ideal thermal properties but a daunting physical handicap: as the telescope pans across the sky, a thin mirror will bend and wobble as if made of rubber...
...Charybdis, mirror designers are charting a variety of bold, new courses. By designing the Keck Telescope mirror as a mosaic of small segments, each the size of a dining-room table, astronomer Jerry Nelson of the University of California, Berkeley was able to make his mirrors both rigid and thin. But to provide images of pinprick sharpness, each segment must be kept perfectly aligned with its neighbors, a task handled by an elaborate electronic network...
...contrast, the mirrors designed for the European Southern Observatory consist of a single, vast expanse of glass, thin (17.7 cm) and very flexible. To control wobbling and stabilize the orientation, these mirrors, like giant catcher's mitts, will be constantly readjusted by 180 computer-activated steel "fingers." A prototype mirror has already proved its worth. A flaw identical to the one that crippled the Hubble Space Telescope was easily corrected by adjusting the mirror's shape...