Word: far-out
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More Hits. Then came World War II, and Wiener went to work designing aiming, devices for antiaircraft guns. He demonstrated that gun sights are basically mathematical. Controlled by mechanisms based on far-out mathematical theorems, guns made more hits, radars tracked more targets. Wiener's work was invaluable, but he declared that he would never again touch military weapons. He stuck to his resolution despite bitter criticism...
...airplanes now flying have provoked such far-out speculation as Lockheed's long-secret All. Since President Johnson gave the plane a sort of partial unveiling, it has been called "quasi-ballistic" and "suborbital"; it has been classed just below a Mercury capsule. Dopesters have fitted it with a rocket engine to boost it out of the atmosphere like the X-15 research plane...
Many of the far-out theories seem far from fact, but the All is nevertheless an extraordinary airplane, a technical generation ahead of any of its competitors. Lockheed's famed designer Clarence L. ("Kelly") Johnson started building the ship in 1959 as a successor to the U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance plane. Though it was the altitude champ of its day, the U-2 flew so slowly (500 m.p.h. at 70,000 ft.) that the Russians were eventually able to shoot one down. The All was specifically designed to fly high enough and fast enough to avoid trouble...
...abstraction but a troubling glimpse of the individual caught up in what she calls "a singular, momentary event." Her figures (see opposite page) seemingly wear the tatterdemalion costumes of burlesque or the circus. Some seem to be mimes from a private dream world; others, characters in a far-out fairy tale...
...most sequels. But it is filmed with taste and acted in crisp style, particularly by Alan Badel as a witty geneticist who strikes just that note of detachment that makes the whole thing seem lightly plausible. The movie's spell holds nearly to the end, when all the far-out fun of pseudoscience suddenly shapes up as a message. Too bad that those sinister boys and girls have nothing more menacing to offer, at long last, than a muckleheaded morality play. In the sci-fi world of monsters, who wants to think about man's inhumanity...