Word: plasticity
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...cities, the "urban guerrillas," of whom Mallin estimates there are at least 500 professionals in Saigon alone, seldom dare to attack an American or Vietnamese official on the streets, prefer to roll a grenade into a crowded bar or toss a plastic bomb into a teeming marketplace. The purpose is to erode confidence in the government's ability to provide protection and to try to "discourage business activity, cause investment capital to flee and, in general, to undermine the economy...
Second only to taxes, credit is seen as an area of everyday fraud. Initially, America's burgeoning credit-card business suffered considerable damage from high livers who could buy now but not pay later. The magic inherent in those little plastic rectangles hypnotized many into becoming adventurers-such as the man whose idea of the good life was to bed down in a variety of hospitals on stolen Blue Cross cards. But such abuses are now insignificant-thanks to more responsible screening of applicants and automated accounting techniques-even though credit keeps expanding. In department-store charge accounts...
...years ago, Drs. James Weinstein and Barry Davidson, young doctors at Tufts-New England Medical Center, started experimenting with water beds made from sheets of plastic stretched over tubs. The basic idea came from 19th century doctors who tried water mattresses constructed on the same principle. But like its predecessors, the Weinstein-Davidson product weighed in at an impractical, beam-breaking 3,000 Ibs. The doctors did not give up, though, and lightweight improvements on their design, manufactured by the Scott Paper Co., now fit standard hospital beds. The hollowed-out, foam-rubber mattresses have inserted plastic sacs that...
...from two to one, or because three brewery workers were fired for guzzling more than their traditional two free pints of beer on the job. A Bristol shipyard was struck for three weeks when boilermakers and shipwrights clashed over who should trace a pencil line around a plastic pattern. Almost every skilled craft worker in Britain still demands and gets a "mate" to carry his tools and do his lifting and fetching for him-a medieval hangover from the guild apprentice system. A Vickers' shipyard, for example, has an electrician who earns $56 a week chiefly for replacing about...
...gusty wind snapped in at 20 knots across Ohio's Clinton County Air Force Base, but all systems were Go. "T minus seven and counting," boomed the range officer's bullhorn. ". . . Five, four, three, two, one-ignition!" And with that, a 12-in. plastic, balsa and paper rocket zoomed aloft bearing a one-ounce payload of lead to the somewhat suborbital altitude of 800 ft. "Good shot," cheered the range officer. "A good bird...