During the Gulf War, a great deal was made of the Patriot missiles' ability to knock out the incoming Scuds. The Patriots were declared a huge success because out of 22 Scuds fired, 21 were intercepted. But this is where the US military use a different language to the rest of us, because as everyone remembers lots of Scuds got through and caused enormous damage. So a Pentagon spokesman was eventually forced to explain (as if we were all realy slow and stupid) that when they said "intercepted" they meant that the path of the Patriot crossed the path of the Scud, though not necessarily at the same time. So "intercepted" means "missed". He was later heard on the phone saying "Darling, I'm going to be late home tonight because I've intercepted my train."
- John O'Farrell, in Global Village Idiot

warp factor (in science fiction): the degree to which the velocity of a spaceship etc exceeds the speed of light; usu. with numeral, as warp factor 8 etc.
- entry in the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, published September 2002.

"This is the beginning," intones the narrator. "This is the day. You are watching the unfolding of one of history's great adventures." It's the unfolding of the first episode of the television series Lost in Space, as it aired on CBS in 1965, in the salad days of the American space program. One of your channels, the Sci-Fi Channel, is rerunning all of Lost in Space in its original black-and-white splendour.
So there, on screen, photographers are milling about in Alpha Control to capture this historic 1997 moment, and flash bulbs pop. Yes, flash bulbs. Remember them? Actual bulbs that fired once, smelled of burnt metal, and had to be replaced for the next shot? Now the view pans back from an image of the galaxy displayed on a giant mock-up of a vintage 1965 television set - the round corners are the giveaway. The control-room walls are lined with vintage 1965 computers: refrigerator-sized cabinets with flashing lights and large reels of tape. Sitting on one desk is an overhead projector, the kind last seen in your high school's audio-visual closet. It seems absurdly bulky. In fact everything looks bulky and somehow slow - the big old-fashioned television cameras rolling about with their cables trailing behind; even the lights (no miniature LED's). The mission engineers work at desks that seem to be equipped with big switches and bulky knobs and flashing lights of their own - but, you can't help but notice, no keyboards, no mice, and no display screens.
And what are those round shiny disks resting on the desks of this advanced, high-tech, space-mission control room? Ashtrays.
It's a tough job, predicting the evolution of technology, but somebody's got to do it.
- James Gleick, in Faster

(Apparently genuine) projects in the European Transport Telematics Applications Program include :
* Hannibal - High Altitude Network for the Needs of Integrated Border-crossing Applications and Links
* Tabasco - Telematics Applications, in Bavaria, Scotland and Others
* Vade Mecum - Vehicle ATT Demonstrations, Evaluation and Monitoring on a European Corridor Uniting Member States
* Cleopatra - City Laboratories Enabling Organisation of Particularly Advanced Telematics Research and Assessment
* Move-It - Motorway Operators Validate Electronic fee collection for Interoperable Transport
* D'accord - Development and Application of Coordinated Control of Corridors
- and lots more in the same vein, from ITS International Sept/Oct 1997

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