For a physicist or an engineer, such a wave has a more precise definition: A rogue or freak wave is one that rises more than 2.2 times as high, from trough to crest, as the average of the largest one-third of nearby waves.
Their conversion from "green" sceptics to supporters came when their grandson, an unemployed engineer, was recruited by a wave energy company in Cornwall.
"Oh, I just put that one aside," said Mr. Miller, a 36-year-old engineer, waving a hand in the air, as if to dismiss a troublesome topic.
"We're Gore supporters," said Ding Zhao, an 86-year-old retired engineer waving a Gore-Lieberman balloon, whose wife nonetheless sported a Bush-Cheney badge.
This provides an opportunity to engineer desired wave characteristics through a geometric and topological design of the unit cell, and results in the ability to activate complementary functionalities, typical of high frequency regimes, while operating at low frequencies of excitation - an effect seldom observed in linear periodic structures.
Israel's high-tech boom was taking off, fuelled by grants to scientists, military-research projects, a wave of engineers and scientists immigrating from the collapsed Soviet Union, and the growth of foreign semiconductor factories.
In the 1990s a heady mix of military communications technology, policies that encouraged entrepreneurship, a wave of immigrant engineers and technicians from the former Soviet Union and the then-promising peace process allowed Israel to hitch its fortunes to the global technology boom.
A wave of new engineers will take time to get up to speed.
Based on the examination of other documents, Chilean officials said in interviews that General Pinochet, now 89, participated in lucrative real estate deals and may have received some of his biggest riches as a result of a wave of industrial privatizations engineered by his administration.
The proposed substructuring concept is expected to provide a new principle for the design of general elastic metasurfaces that can be used to efficiently engineer arbitrary wave profiles.
The simultaneous knowledge of these parameters is necessary to engineer the wave functions and to exploit the dot properties in functional devices.
