Word: thumb
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Dropping his regular research to investigate, Dr. Rindner led a Raytheon task force in painstakingly devising a tiny bit of metal shaped like a thumb tack and mounting it so that its stem pressed on a transistor's sensitive spot. This device, smaller than a pinhead, performed as an excellent microphone. It can be made to transmit music faithfully, and can even pick up ultrasonic sounds to which the human ear does not respond...
...peekaboo crouch. Three times the ineffectual champion attempted to clinch; contemptuously Listen shoved him away. At last, Liston bounced a left hook off Patterson's head, followed it with a chopping right to the heart. Patterson lurched dazedly back into the ropes, rubbing his right eye with his thumb, unable to fight, or even to run. Another ponderous left and he was out. His eyes glazed, his hands pawing feebly for the ropes, he sank to the canvas and rolled over on his back while the referee counted...
Curses for Friends. Last week a touch of mass schizophrenia rubbed off on West Berliners. Normally they are a cynical, cocksure breed who thumb their noses at trouble. "Mir kann keener," they brag in the local dialect. "No one can push me around." In 17 years as a cockpit of the cold war, West Berlin has usually reacted more coolly to its recurring alarums than Washington or Whitehall. Even the Wall seemed barely to have dented the city's composure...
Through the five boroughs of New York City last week prowled a dozen inspectors of the Department of Markets, their eyes peeled as usual for butchers with a thumb on the scales or too much fat in the hamburger. But they were snooping-perhaps uneasily-for a different kind of quarry: the soothsayers, crystal-gazers, palmists and tea-leaf readers who gull money by the barrelful for telling people what the future will bring, and thereby are liable to prosecution as "disorderly persons." More surprising than the seedy collection of fakers and phonies, love potions and hex-chasers that...
Ever since Wall Street's Blue Monday crash, economic sages ranging from mutual fund managers to Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon have been recalling the late John J. Raskob's half-forgotten rule of thumb (TIME. June 1) that even the stock of a promising company should be priced at no more than 15 times the company's per share earnings. If that ratio held, the warning ran, the Dow-Jones industrial average would have to sink to 540. Last week it fell even farther than that; in five days of almost unbroken decline...