Word: width
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...four were stalwart enough to sign up (and pay the $100 it cost). At around 7:30 p.m. we set out in the back of a rickety pickup truck for a 45-minute drive to the top of a 6,500-foot mountain on a dirt road exactly the width of the truck's wheel-base. As the non-English speaking driver shifted into lower and lower gear in an attempt to climb the mountain and I looked over the side of the truck and out over the cliff, I felt like I was going to throw up. At this...
...bikes moved from the road or racing models, with their skinny tires and hunched-over riders, to mountain or off-road bikes on which cyclists in a half-upright position rolled on fat, nubby tires, cushioned by front and rear suspension. Then came the hybrid, combining tall, medium-width tires and a broad seat with springs, allowing for an upright riding position. Now comes the ultimate body-coddling machine: the "comfort" model. It marries the seat, tires and upright ride of the hybrid with the shock absorption of the mountain bike. The industry's fastest-growing category, comfort bikes...
...double every 18 months or so the number of transistors that can be crammed onto a silicon wafer the size of a fingernail. They do this by etching microscopic grooves onto crystalline silicon with beams of ultraviolet radiation. A typical wire in a Pentium chip is now 1/500 the width of a human hair; the insulating layer is only 25 atoms thick...
...decades. As physicist Carver Mead puts it, "The Chicken Little sky-is-falling articles are a recurring theme." But even Mead admits that by 2014 the laws of physics may have their final revenge. Transistor components are fast approaching the dreaded point-one limit--when the width of transistor components reaches .1 microns and their insulating layers are only a few atoms thick. Last year Intel engineer Paul Packan publicly sounded the alarm in Science magazine, warning that Moore's law could collapse. He wrote, "There are currently no known solutions to these problems...
...Weather, for example, a middle-aged couple must cope with the aftereffects of a strike by the National Association of Meteorologists. Not only have forecasts ceased, but so, in a sense, has the weather itself, leaving them, as the wife notes, "stuck in a bland width of grayness with day after day of neither heat nor cold." In Windows another couple, both painters, decide to board up their house, depriving themselves of indoor access to natural light, to protest the government's new window tax. Reportage offers a breezily journalistic account of how local residents react when a Roman arena...