Word: blip
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Goose & Carrot. Life on America's radar line-the loo-odd Aircraft Control and Warning stations-is an unsettling mixture of utter monotony and utmost intensity. Although every operator knows that the next blip on his radarscope could be the herald of death, staring steadily into the electronic eye can be endlessly boring. Radar sites are usually remote and lonely. Permanent stations, costing $5,000,000 each to build and $500,000 yearly to run, are surprisingly elaborate. Example: "Mother Goose," a warning site about 65 miles east of Albuquerque, N. Mex., is set up to protect...
...Heron's purpose is to find out by experiment how the brain behaves when deprived of fresh and varying stimulation from the senses. The problem is a practical one. Men watching radar screens on which nothing changes for hours often fail to see a strange blip when one appears. Many auto drivers are "hypnotized" into crackups by long hours behind the wheel on monotonous highways...
...William S. Richardson of the Oceanographic Institution will fly the new instrument over the iceberg infested Grand Banks in a Navy amphibian. When the radar looks down through the fog and picks up a blip that might be either ice or a boat, he will take its temperature. If it is too cold for a boat, he will report it to the Coast Guard...
...give a continuous radar-eye view of the air around the airport. Instead it shoots out only a single narrow beam of radar pulses. Guided by a direction finder, the operator swings the beam with a pair of "handle bars" until it picks up an approaching plane. A "blip" on the radar's scope tells him that he has found it. Then, keeping the plane in the scope, he "talks" it down just as operators do with more complicated radars...
...Saucer Flies Again. Down from Delaware roared another flight of night fighters. This time the blips did not vanish. They stayed on the ground scopes while the jets screamed among them. But only one pilot saw a light; another saw a doubtful blip on his scope. It vanished before he could shoot...