Word: exaction
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...incoming blast of radiation, the upper fringe of the atmosphere expanded farther into space. Low-orbiting satellites, encountering that fringe and running into increasing drag, slowed and dropped into still lower orbits. A secret Defense Department satellite began a premature and fatal tumble, and the tracking system that keeps exact tabs on some 19,000 objects in earth orbit briefly lost track of 11,000 of them. Solar Max descended by as much as half a mile in a single day, almost certainly hastening its demise...
...fascinating exchange between dark and light, solidity and translucency, underwritten by the economical logic of its making: a single sheet of steel cut and folded, a single plate of glass. And the cables that hold such pieces together are not mere connectors. They are conceived as drawing: exact lines whose tautness is both visual and structural. The ancestor whom they evoke is the pre-1914 Matisse, whose near abstract views of Notre Dame through the studio window had as much effect on Wilmarth's sculpture as they did on Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Parks...
...walnut logs. He interprets Shaker design in a 10-ft.-long bench made from a single plank of black walnut set with a spidery backrest of hickory spindles. But his genius is essentially Oriental, akin to that of Zen rock gardening and Oriental flower arranging. Nakashima selects the exact natural object needed to serve a particular purpose. For a recent table, he used an 8-ft. cross section of redwood root. The wild energy of the wood, complete with cracks and holes, strains outward, as if it were trying to dissolve back into the ground. But the wood is held...
...surface, is intact, upright and "in an excellent state of preservation" -- a remarkable fact considering that more than 300 shells and torpedoes were fired into the Bismarck by its Royal Navy attackers. Ballard says he does not plan to salvage the Bismarck. Last week he refused to provide the exact coordinates of the wreck's location, declaring that he wishes the sunken vessel to remain inviolate...
...truth was different, and Beijing knew it. An estimated 5,000 citizens died in only a few hours between Saturday night and Sunday morning after units of the P.L.A.'s 27th Army launched their brutal assault to oust pro-democracy students from Tiananmen; the exact number of victims may never be known...