13 lines
617 B
Plaintext
13 lines
617 B
Plaintext
waldo
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/woldoh/ , n. [From Robert A. Heinlein's story Waldo ] 1. A mechanical
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agent, such as a gripper arm, controlled by a human limb. When these were
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developed for the nuclear industry in the mid-1940s they were named after
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the invention described by Heinlein in the story, which he wrote in 1942.
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Now known by the more generic term telefactoring , this technology is of
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intense interest to NASA for tasks like space station maintenance. 2. At
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Harvard (particularly by Tom Cheatham and students), this is used instead of
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foobar as a metasyntactic variable and general nonsense word. See foo , bar
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, foobar , quux.
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