Word: slab
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2000
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Arizona astronomer Roger Angel's solution to the sagging-glass problem was to cast huge mirrors that are mostly hollow, with a honeycomb-like structure inside to guarantee stiffness. University of California at Santa Cruz astronomer Jerry Nelson opted instead to create a mirror not from a single huge slab of glass but from 36 smaller sheets that would, under a computer's control, act as one. And in Europe, design teams came up with yet another idea, the exact opposite of Angel's: instead of making the mirror hollow to save weight, let it be thin--about...
...tough to feel affection for a trapezoidal slab of metal and plastic. In fact, when I first laid eyes on Audrey, the new Internet appliance unveiled by 3Com last week, I was underwhelmed. Here we go again, I thought: yet another overpriced, underperforming PC wannabe. Like many of the so-called Net appliances that preceded it (see below), Audrey promises the joys of the Net without the cost or unwieldiness of a full-featured computer. Given the lackluster company it keeps, though, that's not saying much...
...Indian site near Brooklin, Maine, nearly all of them have turned out to be bogus. The Newport (R.I.) Tower, whose supposed Viking origin was central to Longfellow's epic poem The Skeleton in Armor, was built by an early Governor of Rhode Island. The Kensington Stone, a rune-covered slab unearthed on a Minnesota farm in 1898 that purportedly describes a voyage to Vinland in 1362, is today widely believed to be a modern forgery. So is Yale's Vinland Map, a seemingly antique chart with the marking "Vinilanda Insula" that surfaced in the 1950s bound into a medieval book...
Then the ex-President spoke up for his old friend Meijer, likening the "freedom ladder" to the concrete slab from the Berlin Wall that adorns the museum's entrance. "No one knows more than I how humiliating it was," Ford reminded his Secretary of State. "As you recall, I had to sit in the Oval Office and watch our troops get kicked out of Vietnam. But it's part of our history, and we can't forget it." The decision was made to get the ladder. "To some, this staircase will always be seen as an emblem of military defeat...