Word: fragment
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...outraged scientists; in Princeton, N.J. Combining a vast knowledge of biblical and mythological lore with his study of Freud's analysis of the subconscious mind of Moses, Velikovsky developed a controversial theory of colliding planets. He contended-in total violation of the laws of celestial mechanics-that a fragment from the planet Jupiter brushed by earth in 1500 B.C. before settling into orbit as the planet Venus. The cataclysmic encounter, he claimed, caused hurricanes and floods and an interruption in the earth's rotation, thus explaining such seemingly miraculous events described in the Old Testament as the parting...
Califano also criticized President Carter's newly established Department of Education, saying "there are too many constituency-oriented departments in Washington now. It will further fragment government." He added that the Department of Education will not serve students, but teachers' unions instead...
...dangerous and unreliable, while solar energy and conservation are good and can provide the necessary energy. Yet the authors take pains to distance themselves from the small but vocal faction of extremists who hope that energy shortages will hold back technology, slow industrial growth, break up large industry and fragment society into smaller groups of people, tending their own gardens and building their own windmills. As the Harvard experts stress in Chapter One: "We do not side with those romanticists who have a vision of the national life decentralized in many spheres through the mechanism of the energy crisis...
Take, Thomas suggests, the case of the nudibranch (a sea slug) and the medusa (a jellyfish) that live in the Bay of Naples. The slug lives with a tiny fragment of the medusa permanently and parasitically attached near its mouth. The vestigial jellyfish apparently is still able to reproduce; its offspring swim off and become normal adult jellyfish. The slug also produces larvae, but these are rather quickly trapped and subsumed by the new jellyfish. Aha, one would think, the jellyfish are getting back at the slugs for prior mutilations. No such thing. "Soon the snails," Thomas writes, "undigested...
...Aegean, and its rolling, antique contours of moorland and coast, recur in hundreds of drawings and dozens of still-life and land scape paintings. Nicholson's favorite motif was that of the cubist Juan Gris: a view of objects on a table, vases, mugs, jugs, bowls, with a fragment of landscape seen through an open window behind, the two worlds - exterior and interior - compressed into a single overlapping image. Nothing is gratuitous, nothing fudged. The sharp pencil line - Blake's "hard and wirey line of rectitude" - engraves the surface with a kind of moral certainty. A work like...