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waldo

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