They really didn’t think these things out too well, did they?
Light Beam Stands Guard on Prison to Quell Jailbreak
A LIGHT beam as a prison deadline—a beam that when interrupted by a felon bent upon making his get-away operates a machine gun pointed directly at the victim —is the latest addition to prison jailbreak safeguards. The apparatus, consisting of a beam transmitter which shoots a small invisible ray along the prison wall, and a beam receiver which picks up and records any breaks in the light, and at the same time fires a machine gun, is being installed in many prisons housing intractable criminals. Read the rest of this entry »
Undoubtedly someone will accuse me of wanting to nuke dogs now.
These Dogs Are Really “Hot”
Radioactive beagles are pointing the way to better safety devices for workers in atomic energy plants.
A PACK of 300 sad-eyed, floppy eared beagles are serving as canine guinea pigs in an unusual University of Utah project designed to investigate the hazards of industrial radioactivity. Financed by the Atomic Energy Commission and directed by Dr. John Bowers, the studies will show what happens to bone and tissue when radioactive substances are injected into the dogs. Read the rest of this entry »
This is pretty horrifying. If they actually kept that kid in there all the time, I’m guessing he’s pretty screwed up. Which does make me wonder…
showcase baby
LITTLE John Gray Jr., three months old when these pictures were taken, has seldom been outside of this glass house in which he lives. His showcase home is temperature and humidity controlled, dirt-free and has a built-in air filter. It is partially sound-proof-he can bellow without straining the family nerves. He doesn’t catch cold;
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Strapping your kid into the bathtub just seems like a bad idea. How about they just change the first sentence to: “It’s dangerous to leave a small baby unattended in the bathtub, so don’t do it.”
Safety Belt Moors Baby in the Bathtub
It’s dangerous to leave a small baby unattended in the bathtub, and yet, when the telephone rings or the doorbell must be answered, it is sometimes inconvenient not to be able to do so. Carl H. Fischer, a Council Bluffs, Iowa, engineer and father of three youngsters, solved this problem with the ingenious device pictured at the left. The baby is strapped in a harness that is attached to a metal bar. When the bar is turned, rubber pads threaded to the ends press tightly against the sides of the tub and hold the safety bar firmly in place.
Not much room for error there…
One-Man Bulldozer Builds Mountain Roads
Roads are being dug and gouged out of the sides of mountains by a one-man machine consisting of an adjustable and angle-blade bulldozer operated by a tractor. Such an outfit can build a road ten to twelve feet wide by digging off the upside of the mountain and filling in the lower side. The bulldozer can handle bowlders, undermine small trees and move seemingly impossible masses of material.
We also have a similar 1967 article by Arthur R. Miller, one of the people quoted in this article:
THE NATIONAL DATA CENTER AND PERSONAL PRIVACY (Nov, 1967)
THE COMPUTER DATA BANK: WILL IT KILL YOUR FREEDOM?
All around the U.S., computer centers may be talking too much about everybody and everything
BY JACK STAR
LOOK SENIOR EDITOR Did your sister have an illegitimate baby when she was 15? Did you fail math in junior high? Are you divorced or living in a common-law relationship? Do you pay your bills promptly? Are you willing to talk to salesmen? Have you been treated for a venereal disease? Are you visiting a psychiatrist? Were you ever arrested? Have you taken an airplane trip in the past 90 days; with whom: and in which hotels did you stay?
The answers to these intimate questions and hundreds more like them have always been available to a persistent investigator with enough time and money to sift the paper trail we leave behind in file cabinets around the country. But now, for the first time, in this age of computers, it is becoming possible for any snooper to get such information quickly and cheaply, without leaving his office chair.
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I think that this was one of the first really critical articles about Scientology.
Scientology: A growing cult reaches dangerously into the mind
The lights in the hall go dim, leaving the bronzed bust of the Founder (spotlighted) at center stage. From the loudspeakers comes L. Ron Hubbard’s voice, deep and professorial. It is a tape called “Some Aspects of Help, Part I,” a basic lecture in Scientology that Hubbard recorded nearly 10 years ago.
No one in the intensely respectful Los Angeles audience of 500—some of whom paid as much as $16 to get in—thought it odd to be sitting there listening to the disembodied voice. Among believers, Scientology and its Founder are beyond frivolous question: Scientology is the Truth, it is the path to “a civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war . . .” and “for the first time in all ages there is something that . . . delivers the answers to the eternal questions and delivers immortality as well.”
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Sure, why wouldn’t everybody want the government to have their fingerprints?
Fingerprinting All Safeguards Each Citizen
Fingerprints of citizens are being made by state and federal agencies at the rate of tens of thousands per month, as a result of the Department of Justice plea that every law-abiding person in the United States volunteer for the work. A complete file would contain 125,000,000 sets of fingerprints. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the federal bureau of investigation, points out that fingerprint records help authorities in making speedy identification of persons rendered unconscious in accidents, persons suffering from loss of memory and persons who die with no identifying papers or marks in their clothing. Read the rest of this entry »
Effective in the “reducing process”? I didn’t know that bubble baths helped you lose weight. Maybe they are talking about all the calories you’ll burn convulsing when your bath water shorts out the bubbler and electrocutes you.
Bath in Ocean of Soapsuds Is Latest Reducing Method
SLEEPING in the clouds has nothing on the “bubble bath,” the latest novelty in the way of health gadgets. This device consists of a waterproof electric motor and pump, which connects with a series of long perforated metal tubes placed in the bottom of the bathtub. Air emitted from these tubes causes the water in the tub to bubble and splash like a miniature surf.
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