Word: pellet
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...houses that rise up from the Pacific Ocean south of the Golden Gate Bridge. In April 1960, the terror began. The windows were shot out of their living room with a BB gun, and next day the windshield of their car was smashed with a volley from a pellet gun. Between April 15 and July 30, the living room windows were shot out four times and the car's windows were blasted seven times. On July 18, white paint was poured over the car and caked overnight. Then a steady stream of telephone calls began: obscenely antiSemitic, they came...
Most interesting improvement on Transit IVA is its nuclear power supply, built for the Atomic Energy Commission by the Martin Co. Tucked under Transit's big drum is a 5-in. white metal ball surrounding a pellet of plutonium 238*, a rare isotope of plutonium that gives off enough alpha radiation to heat itself as it decays. Thermocouples transform this ever-renewed heat into 2.7 watts of electricity for two of Transit's four transmitters. The little generator weighs only 4.6 lbs., but its plutonium fuel, with a half life of 90 years, is expected to supply power...
Defeated VIP. A typical task taught to chimponauts requires them to watch three shapes flashed on a screen and decide by pushing the proper lever which shape is not like either of the others. By doing this correctly 18 times, a chimp earns a banana-flavored food pellet. Some of them become amazingly skillful. The champion so far is a chimp that worked the levers 7,000 times in 70 minutes with only 32 errors. A human VIP visiting the lab rashly tried the same task and made a much lower score...
More elaborate psychological devices will deliver only one food pellet per minute. Bright chimponauts soon learn this limitation. They work the levers only enough to collect one pellet. Then they goof off for 45 seconds until the machine is ready to start another cycle. "Two years ago," says Psychologist Rohles, "I wouldn't have given a nickel for a carload of chimps, but I can't praise them too highly now." Some of the Air Force psychologists even claim they are afraid to teach the chimps to play poker, for fear they would win all the loose cash...
Crazing Crazes. Sahl works out every line himself, although he rarely writes anything down, and in collecting material buys newspapers and magazines by the long ton. Skimming, dipping, darting from headline to picture caption, he reacts like a pellet of pure sodium dropped in a glass of water, always has some fresh material for each new audience. There is usually some wild variation of the news, and a routine remark at a presidential press conference might come out as a caricature of the sort of bromide Sahl thinks the Administration is forever administering: ''The President says the Russians...