Word: stringing
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...better times, college life was filled with endearing letters home for doting Mrs. Smiths to stow away for posterity. And even the most brutish dolt could string together a few paragraphs of mannerly prose. Now, the FAS server crashes and chaos ensues. The inconvenience caused by these infrequent lapses is not the most serious consequence of Harvard's electronic fetish--students' writing, manners, and thinking suffer as well. Would that every day were like last Friday...
Kennedy's charge is the latest in a string of sexual-harassment episodes that have plagued the Army. In 1996 male drill sergeants at the Army's training base at Aberdeen, Md., were charged and later convicted of sexually assaulting female recruits. A year later the Army's top enlisted man, Sergeant Major Gene McKinney, was charged with--but later acquitted of--sexual assault. In the past year the service has punished two generals for adultery...
...constrain our predictive abilities. Science's limits are glaringly obvious in particle physics, which, as Steven Weinberg describes [in the Visions issue], seeks a "theory of everything" that will explain the origin of matter, energy and even space and time. The leading theory postulates that reality arises from infinitesimal "strings" wriggling in a hyperspace of 10 (or more) dimensions. Unfortunately, these hypothetical strings are so small that it would take a particle accelerator the size of the Milky Way to detect them! I am not alone in fearing that string theorists are not really practicing science anymore; one leading physicist...
...found another possible mechanism for time travel using cosmic strings, thin strands of energy millions of light-years long, predicted by some theories of particle physics (but not yet observed in the universe). You could try to construct a cosmic-string time machine by finding a large loop of cosmic string and somehow manipulating it so it would contract rapidly under its own tension, like a rubber band. The extraordinary energy density of the string curves space-time sharply, and by flying a spaceship around the two sides of the loop as they pass each other at nearly the speed...
...back in time by one year, unfortunately, you'd need a loop containing about half the mass-energy of an entire galaxy. Worse yet, the contracting cosmic-string loop would probably trigger the formation of a rotating black hole, trapping any time-travel regions inside. You would almost certainly be torn apart by near infinite space curvature before you could travel anywhere...