Word: thumbings
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...audience that froze the night, the mostly young, carefully dressed crowd of black men, women and children who had clearly come home to Brother Farrakhan. Discount some of their zeal as a thumb-your-nose-at-Whitey exercise. Discount some as exuberance or hysteria in numbers. Still, the Garden heaved with hatred. If you closed your eyes you could picture all the hate mobs ever--Khomeini's mob, Kahane's mob. Their hatred was palpable, enormous. It changed reality. Suddenly the crowd was in the millions, encompassing the living and the dead...
...dominant theme, perhaps best appreciated in Gould's retelling of the joke about a woman shopping for a large chicken. The butcher puts a two-pounder, his last bird, on the scale. "Not big enough," says the woman. Pretending to weigh a larger one, the butcher presses his thumb on the scale until it reads three pounds. "Fine," says the customer, "I'll take them both...
...Saudi talks with customers focused on a complex "netback price" arrangement, under which sellers effectively charge the market rate for oil rather than the officially posted price. As a rough rule of thumb, the system could net the Saudis $2 to $2.50 less than the established OPEC price of $28 per bbl. While Middle East oilmen could not confirm last week that the Saudis had signed any such agreements, trade sources elsewhere said that the U.S. oil giants Exxon, Mobil and Texaco would buy some crude under the discount system...
...this sudden interest in artificial intelligence? In two words: expert systems. An expert system is an AI program that captures in computer code the knowledge and informal rules of thumb used by a particular human expert to solve a particular problem. "It's the closest thing to cloning a human mind," says Randall Davis, a professor at M.I.T.'s Artificial Intelligence Lab. Expert systems for use in nuclear power plants, for example, are programmed with the relevant knowledge of the handful of top engineers who know just what to do when a dozen different alarms and signals...
Down at the post office the talk among people waiting for their mail is of how bad the cicadas are and how much worse they will get as they become more numerous. Over at the cafe the morning crowd is discussing how to do them in. Squashing them between thumb and forefinger was held to be effective but unaesthetic. A stick was recommended for bashing them. Since the adult cicadas do not chew leaves, only contact poisons will kill them, and the effectiveness of various kinds was being hotly debated. Some of the official types have been recommending dusting them...