Word: mumford
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...Political Arena, two academic scientists, Physics Teacher Joel Primack of the University of California and Environmentalist Frank von Hippel of Princeton, present case histories documenting the tendency of many scientists to "look the other way" when the Government wants to lie about technical matters. A scholarly polemic by Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power, scathes not the scientists but their intimacy with governmental powers. The identification is so complete that scientists, Mumford charges, have until lately "been criminally negligent in anticipating or even reporting what has actually been taking place...
...colonies. It runs 48 pages, featuring 76 famous people or friends of Stewart Brand (guiding light of The Catalog and editor of The Quarterly) writing on what they think about the possibilities of building cities in space. The article includes not only such popular scientists as Carl Sagan, Lewis Mumford, and Buckminister Fuller, but also Richard Brautigan and poet Gary Snyder...
...seems rather pointless and maybe just a little silly to discuss cities in space when New York is in such a predicament, and to Brand's credit, he publishes viewpoints radically dissimilar from his own, which is that these cities can't come soon enough. Mumford states that, "I regard space colonies as another pathological manifestation of the culture that has spent all its resources expanding the nuclear means of exterminating the human race. Such proposals are only technological disguises for infantile fantasies...
...obvious: that Americans are now suffering from a "failure of nerve," a "sense of collective impotence," and a doubt as to whether the "future holds anything worth striving for"--a condition which shows at least some parallel to that of Rome in decline. Many acute social critics--notably Lewis Mumford in America and F.R. Leavis in England--have been saying similar things, not out of despair but in the hope that if we face the situation we can make room for the shoots of new life trying to struggle through the concrete...
...injunction against idleness; second, it was a view of time as something methodical, a set of divisions into hours and minutes whose very measure could regulate a calculus of utility and the allocation of energies. It was a view that, in its own way, was radically new. As Lewis Mumford observed, "The clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age." After consulting Gulliver on the function of his watch, the Lilliputians came to the conclusion that...