Word: g
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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With other self-conscious youngsters whose names begin with G, 16-year-old Ernest Green, Negro, filed across the speakers' platform set up last week in the stadium of Little Rock's Central High School, got a handshake and a diploma from Principal Jess W. Matthews. Watching intently were Ernest's mother and brother, his classmates, part of a detail of 200 federalized National Guardsmen and 137 cops. Two days before, as Central High seniors marched away from their baccalaureate service, a white youth was arrested for spitting in the face of a Negro girl. But from...
...knots the F-100F Super Sabre pulled out of its dive and rocketed upward. Up went the needle on the accelerometer or "g meter," which gauges the piling up of gravity forces. In a "g suit" hooked up to an automatic air-compressor system, I felt a giant's fist pressing into my belly, two pairs of giant hands around my thighs and calves, to retard the flow of blood to the feet and reduce the risk of blackout. Belatedly I remembered to try the "M1 maneuver"-tensing the abdominal muscles to reduce the blood drainage still more...
...approached the peak of our climb, the relentless 4-g pressure was lifted and suddenly we slipped through a man-made loophole in the law of gravity: we weighed nothing...
...kind used by bottom fishermen. Though it cost only 7? at the base PX, it made a far more vivid indicator of the zero-gravity state than the electronic accelerometer in which the Air Force has invested millions. As my bottom, squeezed to insensible bloodlessness during the 4-g pullout, rose from the seat cushion, I felt the exhilaration of restored circulation (and noted the lasting aptness of the old barnstormer's motto: you fly by the seat of your pants). I "dropped" the sinker in front of my masked face. It stayed there, floating. The merest delicate touch...
...been too bemused by the otherworldliness of the phenomenon, to time our first excursion into weightlessness. Colonel Brett pulled up the nose again, regained altitude, and within a minute or so was asking: "Ready to try it again?" Down we dived and up into another pullout. Up went the g needle. I felt a crushing force, and then the ineffable relief of subgravity and the euphoria of zero gravity. This time it lasted longer. Again I toyed with the stringless yoyo, so delightedly that I did not notice when we began to slow down. By inertial force, the sinker glided...