Word: millisecond
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...MILLENNIUM IS THE COMET that crosses the calendar every thousand years. It throws off metaphysical sparks. It promises a new age, or an apocalypse. It is a magic trick that time performs, extracting a millisecond from its eternal flatness and then, poised on that transitional instant, projecting a sort of hologram that teems with the summarized life of the thousand years just passed and with visions of the thousand now to come...
Instead, Satan bends her knees ever so slightly to the music. One millisecond later, she shouts out instructions for maneuvers developed for 1970s martial arts movies...
...reveals a package of lo-cal Pop-Tarts; the movie is a hi-cal Pop-Tart to go. At the Deca Dance disco, a teenybopper flashes past wearing earrings cut from American Express cards. "They're my dad's," she confides in a gag that doesn't waste a millisecond of screen time...
Scientists have been able only to theorize about the origin of pulsars, those superdense, fast-spinning celestial objects that appear to blink on and off as % often as every millisecond. Now the mystery seems to be solved. Last week an international team of astronomers announced that they had detected a pulsar emerging from the murky dust clouds left over from Supernova 1987A, a giant star that exploded about 170,000 light-years from earth and was first seen two years...
Rhodes, a novelist and social chronicler (Looking for America), has a firm hold on the fundamentals of nuclear physics. He describes the first millisecond of the atomic age in New Mexico with eerie precision: "The firing circuit closed; the X-unit discharged; the detonators at 32 detonation points simultaneously fired; they ignited the outer lens shells of Composition B; the detonation waves separately bulged, encountered inclusions of Baratol, slowed, curved, turned inside out, merged to a common inward-driving sphere; the spherical detonation wave crossed into the second shell of solid fast Composition B and accelerated; hit the wall...