Word: parabola
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...turntable; making one revolution every six seconds, the mercury rises gently toward the edges and dips in the middle, the way coffee does when it is stirred in a cup. In perfect deference to the laws of physics, the metal's highly reflective surface takes the form of a parabola, the shape of solid mirrors used in conventional telescopes to focus starlight into a sharp image. Says Ermanno Borra, the Laval astrophysicist who built it: "It's a wonderfully simple arrangement...
...21st is fast becoming the age of the wiggle. Over the past few years, and especially after the debut of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the sturdy glass-and-steel rectangle, for decades the default mode for serious buildings, has begun to give way to the parabola, the whiplash curve and geometries so irregular, there's no point in looking them up in geometry books. Thanks to a combination of insistent forward thinking by architects and ever more ingenious computer-design software, buildings that once would have been no more than architecture-student fantasies are being green...
...climax to the story, it was a little weak. There was no conflict, no point of dramatic tension, not even a gaudy parabola for the money shot. On Monday, after fans had waited 37 years, Mark McGwire hit his record-tying 61st home run of the season, and the next night he showed up for his prime-time network-television special to hit No. 62. The record-breaking shot was McGwire's shortest, lamest homer of the year. Afterward, we looked to the media to be told what the moral significance was. It was like someone brought in the writers...
Trillin follows these leads as he traces Denny's parabola from college through abortive attempts at journalism to a slow decline in academia. Along the way he provides a superb portrait of an individual, a group and a vanished sensibility...
...life, a parabola of supreme artistry and self-destruction, was, as she says, up a little bit, then down. Way down. Her last dire days, her body racked with junk and her voice cracked like thawing ice, have been rued and romanticized. When she died in 1959, the superstructure of the legend was already raised: the instinctive jazz talent, full of early genius, snuffed out by racism, callow commercialism and self-indulgence, her best work far behind...