Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 29, 1994 TAG: 9409290038
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOEL ACHENBACH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A: What has made the ray-gun so magical a concept in science fiction is that it allows violence to be perpetrated cleanly, at a distance, and impermanently. No body parts fly. The enemy is just sort of ... zapped. This is what we all want in a weapon, something that dispatches the enemy with efficiency, yet leaves our conscience clear. Unlike those messy, messy grenades.
Well, here's the headline: There are, in fact, ray-guns of sorts. The Pentagon has for years been developing laser weapons, though nothing is yet deployed. The main problem is that you can't create a powerful beam of light (or a beam of particles) unless you have a huge, bulky energy source.
``Right now the problem is in getting powerful enough ones that are portable enough to be useful,'' says Leland Atkinson, vice president of Gradient Lens Corp. of Rochester, N.Y.
``To do something like they do on `Star Trek' with their phasers, today you'd need a minivan.''
The Pentagon is undeterred. A laser weapon called the Stingray, developed by Martin Marietta Corp., is being tested by the military for possible use on Bradley fighting vehicles. The Stingray can't actually kill anyone, but it can do something diabolical: It can blind the enemy.
In modern warfare a lot of fighting is done at night. A jet fighter pilot or tank commander staring through night-vision instruments is extremely vulnerable to a blast of laser light. In a fraction of second he can be permanently blinded.
Obviously there is an ethical question here. Some critics within the Pentagon think the use of such a weapon would be against international law governing combat. But one Army colonel in charge of the program has said, ``Laser weapons are as moral, if not more moral, than systems which blow someone to bits.''
(It's easy to be moral if the moral standard is placed somewhere on the far side of dismemberment by shrapnel.)
As for putting a ray-gun on a ``Stun'' setting, there's no such thing. A laser works by burning. If you turned down the volume, so to speak, you'd just end up making the enemy warm. Atkinson compared it to the use of a magnifying glass to aim sunlight at ants. ``You either fry the ant or you don't. In between I don't think the ant gets very stunned.''
It's a vicious world. All we know is that we plan to keep our phasers set on Warm.
Q: Why do prisoners make license plates?
A: They don't. The days of prison-made license plates are pretty much over, partly because license plates are fancier now and some private companies have a piece of the business, but also because prisoners have better things to make.
Across the country, prisoners make mattresses, draperies and sandbags, take airline reservations, and sell hunting and fishing videos over the phone. Federal inmates make many of the desks used in federal office buildings. One Las Vegas prison takes Lincoln Town Cars and Cadillacs, saws them in half, inserts 62 inches of steel and turns them into limousines.
Prison labor is a dicey game. In the 19th century prisoners were used essentially as slave labor. What put a stop to that wasn't morality so much as the labor movement. Unions didn't want to compete against prisoners for precious jobs.
By law, prisoners can't be forced to work, but prison industry jobs are highly sought. Right now about 60,000 of the 825,000 inmates in America have a prison industry job, and the number is rising. A 1979 law says prisoners cannot do work that would take away jobs from free citizens in the same area.
``We're trying to bring back work that has been lost to Third World countries,'' says Robert Verdeyen of the American Correctional Association.
Some inmates get paid the federal minimum wage. They have to pay at least 5 percent to a state victim's fund. They have to pay income taxes. And yes, they are docked for room and board.
Q: Why are cardboard boxes almost always brown?
A: There is a color of brown that you might call ``box brown.'' Others would call it ``tan.'' The paper pulp industry calls it, inexplicably, ``Natural Kraft.''
It does sound like a brand of cheese, but we can't change the facts, we just report them. Natural Kraft is the color of pulp that has been immersed in a caustic solution to remove the lignon, the glue-like substance that holds wood fibers together. Before the lignon is removed the pulp is a bit more blonde.
The bottom line is that boxes are basically a slightly darker version of the color of the inside of a tree.
Some boxes are white, because the pulp has been bleached. Some have been painted. The big question is: Why, if all treated paper pulp comes out with the same ``Natural Kraft'' color, are some boxes very slightly browner than others?
``The variations you see are because of the wood that is used,'' says Dana Salkeld, general manager of Willard Packaging Corp. of Gaithersburg, Md., which makes boxes. ``An all-pine mixture is a very light color. You put some hardwoods in there you get a dark color.''
Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB