Machinery

As the last of the baby boomers scale the half-century mountain and settle into middle age, they are reminiscing about the good old days: the days when they could hear the birds chirp, buses roar, televisions blare.The generation that partied at Rolling Stones concerts and listened to transistor radios is gradually losing its hearing, joining 28 million Americans who suffer from some form of hearing loss. Even President Clinton admitted last year that his hearing had grown rusty."Gradual hearing loss comes from noisy lifestyles ` from rock concerts to personal stereos," says Glenn Peacock, marketing director of the International Hearing Society, a trade organization based in Livonia, Mich.

The sales force for the port of Baltimore travels the country and the world, looking for business. It could be farm equipment manufactured in the Midwest on its way to Australia or furniture coming from South America or Alabama-built Hondas headed for Russian dealerships or outdoors gear ordered by U.S. retailers. "We want it," said Richard Powers, director of trade development. Baltimore's sales plan, formed several years ago, targets autos, containers, farm and construction equipment, forest products and passenger cruises.

Sean O'Harra's furniture might be newly constructed, but there's nothing "new" about it. Walking through his workshop, a cavernous warehouse space on Reisterstown Road, O'Harra points to an enormous piece of wood, a cross-section of a maple tree trunk. "That is a tabletop," he explains. "It came out of a yard in Mount Washington and migrated to me. " The wood is rich brown, with prominent grain and an intricate, almost lacy, edge. It made its way to O'Harra via friends and friends of friends who knew he would appreciate it. He'll pair the wood with a metal base, balancing the maple's organic beauty with the cool modernity of metal.

For over two decades the Supreme Court has wrestled term after term after term to fashion a jurisprudence of capital punishment. That it has failed is obvious. This week, two justices agreed that what has been fashioned doesn't work, though they disagreed on what must be done about it. The problem, as restated by Justices Harry Blackmun and Antonin Scalia is as follows:A majority of the justices agreed in 1972 that the death penalty must not be imposed in an arbitrary way. But it was being so imposed.

Maryland's chief elections administrator says she's confident that a computerized voter check-in system that caused problems for some primary voters last month will work properly in the Nov. 7 general election. That's good news. Two days of independently supervised tests - and fixes by Diebold Election Systems Inc. - have proved a success. Now it's up to the state and local officials to make sure election judges are adequately trained for the task. The fuss over the $18 million electronic poll books has always been somewhat disproportionate to the severity of the problem.

I have never owned a piece of electrical equipment that couldn't outsmart me.A friend put me in my place this week. She has a daughter in the local Catholic school in Canton and wanted her fifth grader to have a thorough knowledge of computers.My friend spent nearly $2,000 on a new system, with color monitor and printer, CD rom and plenty of software. She has a spreadsheet and is planning to balance all her household accounts with it.Her husband didn't show to much interest at first. She let him carry the heavy boxes into the house.

What's all the excitement about biotechnology? It is about being able to manipulate the cellular machinery of life to create products of value: pharmaceuticals and diagnostics.Until the mid-1970s, this cellular machinery, which works the same way for all living things, was really a black box. It didn't lend itself to manipulation.If you think of the human being as a computer, the extremely long molecule called DNA that is contained in every one of our cells is like the software system. It works like a hard disk on a computer, and it contains all the information that your body will ever use in its lifetime.

Imagine the job announcement: "State of Maryland seeks temporary employees to safeguard democracy. Candidates must be willing to work for below the minimum wage without benefits or gratitude, enjoy inflexible and long workdays, attend multiple training sessions, and be prepared to deal with angry voters. Interested? We want you to be a Maryland election judge." As the General Assembly considers how to regain the trust of Marylanders in the way elections are conducted, it would do well to look beyond early voting, paper trails and Diebold machine flaws.