“The first 100 days of the new Labour government have been underwhelming in the extreme,” San Knight writes. “As Prime Minister, Kier Starmer has delivered a minor scandal over alleged corruption, a lot of office gossip, and a depressing atmosphere of economic constraint.” Read about the United Kingdom’s new administration’s bafflingly bad start: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jAIj7l
overwhelm verb 1[T]to defeat someone or something by using a lot of force: Government troops have overwhelmed the rebels and seized control of the capital.
2[T usually passive]to cause someone to feel sudden strong emotion: They were overwhelmed with/by grief when their baby died. I was quite overwhelmed by all the flowers and letters of support I received.
3[T]LITERARYIf water overwhelms a place, it covers it suddenly and completely. overwhelming adjective━━ a. 圧倒的な; 抵抗しがたい. 1difficult to fight against: She felt an overwhelming urge/desire/need to tell someone about what had happened.
2very great or very large: She said how much she appreciated the overwhelming generosity of the public in responding to the appeal. An overwhelming majority have voted in favour of the proposal.
overwhelmingly adverb The team were overwhelmingly (= strongly or completely) defeated in yesterday's game.
underwhelmed adjectiveHUMOROUS feeling no excitement about or admiration for something or someone: I get the feeling that the staff are distinctly underwhelmed by John's latest proposal.
un・der・whelm
()
━━ v. 失望[がっかり]させる; 〔戯言〕 印象[存在]が薄い, 何の効果もきたさない. un・der・whelmed ━━ a. がっかりした[させられた]. un・der・whelm・ing ━━ a. がっかりさせるような, 期待はずれの.
From Breakingviews - Alibaba , is delivering a wake up call for owners of unlisted Chinese assets. The e-commerce giant ditched plans to float its logistics unit in Hong Kong and offered to buy out minority shareholders including Singapore's Temasek. It's an underwhelming better-than-nothing deal.
Once in the water, semi-submersible submarines are tough to detect without any prior intelligence or aircraft that spot them from above, says a Coast Guard Lt. Commander.
Dockwise operates the largest fleet of specialized vessels in the world: a versatile fleet of 25 semi-submersible, heavy transport vessels of different concepts and ...
Apple’s hyped unveiling yesterday of two new iPhones and a smartwatch was underwhelming. The watch has a full-color screen featuring multiple sensors that permit notifications, track credit cards and fitness, and can be used to dictate messages or chat with another Apple Watch wearer. But smart phones do many of these same things, so why should people want to do them on a wristwatch? I have some of the same doubts about Google glass. (And Amazon’s Fire is a complete disaster.) A more basic question: With so many large and growing problems in the world – hunger, disease, climate change, homelessness, chronic unemployment – why are America’s leading tech companies, each overflowing with talent and creativity and with hundreds of billions of dollars to spare, coming up with such trivial solutions to non-problems?
"Superbly premature as the flowering of his genius was, still he had immense development, and had not sounded his last stop. There were great possibilities in the cavern of his soul, and there is something macabre and tragic in the fact that one who added another terror to life should have died at the age of a flower."
-- Oscar Wilde as quoted in Aubrey Beardsley by Stephen Calloway
Aubrey Beardsley was born in Brighton, England on this day in 1872.
The signals will eventually allow them to determine an exact resting place for the downed Boeing 777.
They will then send down a submersible vehicle to plumb the depths of the ocean for the black box.
The department store tycoon Luciano Hang is expanding his reach in
Brazil, with each new cavernous store an homage to American capitalism.
Global Economic Challenges
The members of the Group of 20 should share the credit for avoiding the economic abyss, but now they must confront the causes and cures of the financial crisis.
The NYT notes that stock prices were up yesterday as a result, and the LAT points out that consumer spending and pending home sales were on the uptick for the second month in a row. However, economists expect unemployment will surpass 10 percent before the recession ends. If discouraged workers, who have stopped looking for jobs, were included, the current unemployment rate would rise to 15.8 percent. The prevailing attitude in the papers is that utter doom and despair have given way to more tempered feelings: the NYT calls the present job market "dreadful," but less so than "the stomach-churning events of recent months," while the WP says the recession is "pulling away from an economic abyss into a period of steep, but orderly, decline."
KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN, a 20th-century German composer who died in 2007,
rejected traditional musical forms and often refused commissions,
preferring to create his own avant-garde spatial works, which
incorporate the physical space as a prime element. One of his more
outlandish works is the “Helicopter String Quartet”, an ensemble piece,
performed by musicians on four separate helicopters, transmitted via
video to listeners on the ground. Its premiere, and sole performance,
was in 1995 at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam. Stockhausen’s
other logistically challenging works are also seldom performed. But the
New York Philharmonic recently staged “Gruppen” (1957) as the
centrepiece of its “Philharmonic 360” programme for its season finale. The piece requires three orchestras, each with its own conductor.
Alan
Gilbert, music director of the Philharmonic, found the ideal space for
the concert: Park Avenue Armory. Its vast and cavernous drill hall is
the size of a football pitch with a soaring barrel-vaulted roof. Since becoming
an arts venue in 2007 it has hosted exhibitions and installations,
dance, fashion shows and concerts. It is a worthy choice for
unconventional classical music—Georg Friedrich
Haas’s “In Vain” (2000), an orchestral work played mostly in darkness,
was performed there in February 2011, for example—and it is especially suitable for staging the five spatial works that made up the “Philharmonic 360” programme.
The
hall was cleverly configured. Several hundred people were seated in a
circular area in the centre, surrounding them were three orchestras on
separate stages with other listeners seated on rows of rising seats
nestled in between. The rich layers of Stockhausen’s “Gruppen” are
captivating. Conductors Magnus Lindberg and Matthias Pintscher joined Mr
Gilbert, leading one orchestra each. They neatly accomplished the
tricky feat of co-ordinating the different tempos and metres—the
soundscape was at once cacophonous and beautiful. Stockhausen wrote
about the piece: “Whole envelopes of rhythmic blocks are exact lines of
mountains that I saw in Paspels, in Switzerland, right in front of my
little window.”
For Giovanni Gabrieli's "Canzon XVI" (1610), the
hall worked like an acoustic replica of a baroque cathedral. The
glorious fanfares echoed through the cavernous space from the brass
players stationed in clusters across the three stages. Polyphony (music
with multiple melodies) is also a major component of Pierre Boulez’s
“Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna” (1974), for which the orchestra was
divided into eight groups, each with colourful percussion elements such
as tabla (Indian hand drums) and Japanese wood blocks. Mr Gilbert,
standing on a podium in the middle of the circular seating area,
conducted the kaleidoscopic work, a collage of luxuriantly textured
sounds. A serene rendition of Charles Ives’ “Unanswered Question” (1906)
also charmed listeners with the reverberant acoustics of the hall.
A piece from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” (1787) fared less well. The first act finale fit the bill because of its spatial elements—the scene takes place at a ball with three different dance bands—but
despite the talented singers wandering through the audience as they
performed, wearing white dresses and extravagant white wigs, the effect
was underwhelming. Their voices were swallowed by the huge space and
co-ordination problems between soloists and the ensemble resulted in an
un-Mozartian mess.
Mozart aside, the imaginative programme worked
brilliantly. Listeners have long complained about the drab acoustics of
Avery Fisher Hall, the Philharmonic's permanent home. On this occasion,
the Park Avenue Armory proved an acoustically fertile space for Mr
Gilbert's vision.
Advanced Imaging and Visualization Laboratory, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
SEAWORTHY Workers at Ladish Forging drove a press onto hot titanium, transforming it into a cup, part of the personnel sphere for the submersible.
Scientists are hard at work on the tiny submarine that will replace the legendary Alvin.
CUDAHY, Wis. — The deep is legendary for inky darkness. William Beebe, the first person to eye the abyss, called it perpetual night.
The darkness is matched by the intense pressure. Four miles down, it amounts to nearly five tons per square inch. That is too much even for Alvin, the most famous of the world’s tiny submersibles, which can take a pilot and two scientists down to a maximum depth of 2.8 miles.
But a new submersible is being built here, and even the process of construction seems a rebuke to the darkness. The work lighted up a cavernous factory with fireworks on a recent visit. Hot reds and oranges burst into showers of spark and flame as blistering metal began to yield to the demands of the submersible’s design.
The German state of Baden Wuerttemberg has observed a minute's silence to mark last week's deadly school shooting.
Agrium stepped up its hostile bid for CF Industries on Monday by unveiling an exchange offer, marking an escalation in an unusual three-way battle in the fertilizer-maker industry.
The surveillance mission, focused on undersea warfare, may be of particular interest to the Chinese military, which has invested heavily in a new fleet of diesel-powered attack submarines. Pentagon officials say that while the diesel variety is not as potent as the Navy’s nuclear fast-attack submarines, the submarines are cheaper and can be purchased in greater numbers, giving the Chinese the potential to overwhelm American defenses at sea.
It was a gritty, hands-on effort, unfolding under the clear view of the public and the news media, and it offered analysts the best chance to assess the performance of the People’s Liberation Army in a crisis since the nation’s rising economy started pumping tens of billions of dollars into the military. It got good marks for public relations domestically, but the effort left some veteran P.L.A.-watchers underwhelmed.
overwhelm verb 1[T]to defeat someone or something by using a lot of force: Government troops have overwhelmed the rebels and seized control of the capital.
2[T usually passive]to cause someone to feel sudden strong emotion: They were overwhelmed with/by grief when their baby died. I was quite overwhelmed by all the flowers and letters of support I received.
3[T]LITERARYIf water overwhelms a place, it covers it suddenly and completely. overwhelming adjective━━ a. 圧倒的な; 抵抗しがたい. 1difficult to fight against: She felt an overwhelming urge/desire/need to tell someone about what had happened.
2very great or very large: She said how much she appreciated the overwhelming generosity of the public in responding to the appeal. An overwhelming majority have voted in favour of the proposal.
overwhelmingly adverb The team were overwhelmingly (= strongly or completely) defeated in yesterday's game.
underwhelmed adjectiveHUMOROUS feeling no excitement about or admiration for something or someone: I get the feeling that the staff are distinctly underwhelmed by John's latest proposal.
un・der・whelm
()
━━ v. 失望[がっかり]させる; 〔戯言〕 印象[存在]が薄い, 何の効果もきたさない. un・der・whelmed ━━ a. がっかりした[させられた]. un・der・whelm・ing ━━ a. がっかりさせるような, 期待はずれの.
ùnderwhélm[ùnder・whélm]
[動](他)〈人を〉無関心にする, …の興味をそそらない[奪ってしまう], …を失望させる.
mark(REPRESENTATION) noun[C] an action which is understood to represent or show a characteristic of a person or thing or feeling: He took off his hat as a mark of respect for her dead husband. It's the mark of a gentleman to stand up when someone enters the room. I'd like to give this bottle of wine as a mark of appreciation for all the work you've done for us.
mark verb[T] 1to represent or show a characteristic of a person or thing or feeling: The band's songs have always been marked by controversial lyrics. The signing of the treaty marked a major milestone on the road to European union.
2to show respect for or commemorate: Tomorrow's parade will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the battle.
mark(JUDGMENT) noun[C]MAINLY UK a judgment, expressed as a number or letter, about the quality of a piece of work done at school, college or university: What mark did you get in the biology exam? Matilda's had very good marks in/for English throughout the year. UK You scored full marks in the test - ten out of ten!
markverb[T] to correct mistakes in and give points for a piece of work: I was up half the night marking exam papers. UK You'll be marked down(= given a lower mark) for poor spelling and punctuation.mark(SYMBOL)Show phonetics noun[C] 1a symbol which is used for giving information: I've put a mark on the map where I think we should go for a picnic. What do those marks in the middle of the road mean?
2a written or printed symbol: a question mark an exclamation mark punctuation marks
mark verb[T] to show where something is by drawing or putting something somewhere: I've marked the route around the one-way system on the town plan. I'd like everyone to mark their progress on the chart every week. X marks the spot where the treasure is buried. See picture .
marker noun[C] a sign which shows where something is: I've put in some markers where I planted the seeds. She reached the 500-metre marker in record time.
A semisubmersible is a MODU designed with a platform-type deck that contains drilling equipment and other machinery supported by pontoon-type columns that are submerged into the water. Another type of drilling rig that can drill in ...
All extra fittings were bought in Arusha, a hundred kilometres away, including cable and piping - a lot of which was needed to operate the submersible pumps, because of the great depth.
The system has two sonars fitted in a small pod-shaped submersible vessel which is towed by the ship.
Minesniper is a remotely controlled submersible vehicle which is 2m long and weighs about 30 kg.
NOUN
A small submersible boat or other craft, especially one designed for research and exploration.