Word: thousandths
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Most artificial smokes, Miss Raskin explained, are made of fairly heavy materials such as phosphorus pentoxide or petroleum oils. Even if their particles are only one micron (one twenty-five thousandth of an inch) in diameter, they fall through air at about eight inches per hour, which she considers too fast. Backed by the Air Force, Miss Raskin discovered a way to fluff various kinds of plastic into spherical particles that are mostly empty cells and almost as light as air. Miss Raskin's particles can be colored, and they fall 1,250 times slower than solid smoke particles...
...paradox, questions were raised about the accuracy of the statistics. To get them, the Census Bureau makes a monthly sampling of 35,000 households in 330 areas specially selected to conform with national economic and population patterns. Interviewers check 75,000 to 80,000 people, about one-thousandth of the labor force. To everyone over 14 in each household they put several questions. The first: "What did you do most of the week?" If the answer is "worked," the interviewer goes no farther. If it is "nothing," the interviewer presses: "Did you work at all?" If the answer is still...
Last Sunday afternoon Seeger sang in Boston to an audience composed mainly of school children. Needless to say, he went through his familiar introductions; but although this might have been the ten thousandth time that he was explaining how "On Top of Old Smoky" was recorded in the Ozarks in the '30's, he still managed to instill in the youngsters his dedication to the idea that folk music is folk music...
...store all the world's basic knowledge in the equivalent of a pocket-sized pamphlet-Feynman then and there impetuously offered two $1,000 prizes. One was to go to the first person to reduce the information on one page of a book to one twenty-five-thousandth of the linear scale of the original "in such manner that it can be read by an electron microscope"; the other would go to the inventor of an electrically powered rotating motor no bigger than a cube one sixty-fourth of an inch high...
...quite a year later, staring down the barrel of a microscope, Feynman saw magnified 40 times a turntable motor that easily met his specifications. Devised by William H. McLellan, a 35-year-old engineer for a Pasadena research firm, the motor was fifteen thousandths of an inch square (smaller than a pencil dot), weighed 250 micrograms, and was powered by one thousandth of a watt. Working for two months in his spare time, Caltech Graduate McLellan used sharpened toothpicks, a watchmaker's lathe and a micro-drill press to fashion his flyspeck engine, which operates on the same "synchronous...