Word: tools
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...burgeoning use of computers by non-scientists is the result of a phenomenon known as "transparency." A tool is transparent if the user is aware of the problem he is trying to solve, not of the mechanics of the operation. When you write, for example, you don't worry about the way the paper was made or how your pen works (unless it runs out of ink). When you make a phone call, you are hardly conscious of the complex path followed by the electrical impulses. Only if the line is busy do you appreciate the vehicle of communication...
...then, the mission itself was far from O.K. It had not achieved such scheduled goals as Astronaut Scott's two-hour walk in space, the first vise of a power tool in space and a host of other scientific experiments. In Houston the next move was obvious: Arm strong's decision to use his vital re-entry rockets prematurely meant that the spacecraft must be returned to earth before it ran out of the necessary fuel for controlling reentry...
...petty ambitions of each are thwarted by the fumbled intentions of the others. Davies, the old man, wants to walk across London to pick up the papers he left with a friend . . . twenty years before. Aston, the older brother and a former mental patient, wants to build a tool shed. Mick wants to make the building into handsome, profitable flats. None of the three succeed. The old man doesn't get along and is turned...
Going Down. The Kremlin's tool was Ana Pauker, a lynx-eyed, sphinx-bodied female Foreign Minister who ranked as high in the Kremlin's bevy of Red Amazons as Spain's Dolores Ibarruri ("La Pasionaria"). Ana quickly purged the Rumanian party of "nationalists"-down to and including three elevator operators in the Foreign Ministry. "National Communists" fared poorly throughout Eastern Europe in the late 1940s: Poland's Wladyslaw Gomulka and Hungary's János Kádar went to prison on Stalin's orders; others, such as Czech General Secretary Rudolph...
...Bell Tek phone Laboratories accidentally found that radio signals were coming from outer space. But astronomers were slow to recognize that such radio energy-the only radiation besides visible light that can penetrate the earth's atmosphere over a wide frequency range-might offer a powerful new tool for exploring the universe. Little was done to take advantage of the new tool until wartime radar research provided accurate directional antennas and improved electronic techniques...