Word: button
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Order was enforced by electronic means. Before speaking, a member had to push a button that winked a light on the console in front of Staffer Louis Vance, who turned on the member's microphone. Only Presidential Special Counsel James St. Clair did not have a microphone. Under the rules, he was allowed to say nothing unless he obtained permission in advance from Rodino. St. Clair's principal functions were to relay the committee's evidence to the White House and, two or three times a day, defend the President to reporters gathered outside the door...
...extracurricular role of calculators emerged as mathematically minded users found that the versatile devices could be used to play sleight-of-button games and spell words. Because on most calculators, the glowing digits of the readout screen, when inverted, look more or less like letters of the alphabet,* the calculator owner can use the machine to compose more than 100 words and endless riddles. For example, to get the calculator to devise words suggestive of the energy crisis: put 42.46407 into the machine, divide by 3 and multiply by 5. Upside down the machine spells ShELL OIL (the floating decimal...
...fuel shortages within the next century. More recently, less apocalyptic prophets like Economist Robert Heilbroner have taken a dim view of man's future. To British Science Writer Adrian Berry, tomorrow is not all that bleak. In a forthcoming book, The Next Ten Thousand Years (Saturday Review Press/E.P. Button; $8.95), Berry boldly predicts that technology will confound the prophets of doomsday. What is more, he says, mankind will eventually reach out to tap the resources of the entire solar system and, ultimately, the far reaches of the galaxy...
...Yeah ... Len is the panic button type. If we had reacted in Garment's way in other things, we wouldn't be where we are. That doesn't mean he isn't right this time, incidentally...
...really can't sit and worry about it all the time. The worst may happen but it may not. So you just try to button it up as well as you can and hope for the best, and remember basically the damn business is unfortunately trying to cut our losses...