Word: thinly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Grease. Hasselfree's The Edge of the Knife, with a soap-opera setting, gets most of its humor from the audience; participants are asked to guess the murderer's identity and motive. A bit higher up the food chain, Forever Plaid uses the singers' plangent harmonics to camouflage a thin book. And you need a doctorate in Broadway shows and lore to get all the jokes in the new edition of Forbidden Broadway -- but for insiders, and good guessers, the musical malice has its own witty thrill...
...real explosion in electronic services may have to wait until U.S. homes are rewired with hair-thin fiber-optic cables that can carry hundreds of times as much information as old-fashioned copper cable. So far, the fiber-to- home project has been bogged down in Washington politics. The technology exists, but the question is, Who pays? It will cost an estimated $150 billion to $500 billion to rewire America. Regulators have opposed phone-industry attempts to stick ratepayers with the bill. Cable-television companies, meanwhile, are also overlaying their old networks with optical fiber. With fewer restrictions...
High on the mountaintop, where the life-giving star is worshiped, no one slept a wink. There in the cold, thin air of Hawaii's Mauna Kea, home to the world's greatest concentration of high-powered telescopes, the scientists paced, fretted and nervously tuned their instruments. Night is darker than pitch at the crest of the 4,300-meter (14,000-ft.) dead volcano. In that utter blackness, the ultimate sun worshipers waited for the day that would dawn not once but twice...
...shadow appeared, gouging out a perfectly rounded bite from the upper edge of the sun. Moving at 10,000 km/h (6,000 m.p.h.) -- but as slowly as a distant airplane to the human eye -- the shadow crept down the face of the sun. Soon it obscured all but a thin lower crescent that gleamed against the darkening sky like the Cheshire Cat's smile. Next the corners of the smile vanished, leaving a single dazzling gem of brilliance at the bottom of a circle of light -- the so-called diamond-ring effect. At 7:28, the solitaire blinked...
Veteran eclipse watchers who caught the show on July 11, 1991, declared it to be one of unsurpassed beauty. But from the standpoint of science, it was something of a letdown. High, thin clouds made a rare appearance above Mauna Kea that morning, interfering with the quality of data gathered through telescopes. "It was a miserable sky in the infrared," complained astronomer Robert MacQueen. Even more damaging to the infrared readings was the fine dust accumulating in the earth's atmosphere since the June explosion of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. "It's just heartbreaking that after being dormant...