Word: wind
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Fountain makers have found that unlike many Europeans who do not seem to mind getting slightly wet in the vicinity of fountains, American passers-by are not amused by an errant drenching from a wind-blown water jet. Some are even inclined to call the police. Many new fountains, therefore, are designed to be windproof...
...answers will come from 1,200 U.S. households, the chosen few whose daily tube-watching translates into Nielsen ratings. In combining new inspirations with hardy old shows, the networks have mildly varying prime-time profiles. NBC, which brought Gone with the Wind to the small screen last year, hopes to fight its way out of the cellar with a barrage of costly, elaborate specials, or "events," as the press releases call them. CBS is still counting on comedy, though not as heavily as in the old days. Up at the top, ABC is the most eclectic network...
...occasional fire of the burners, the rest is silence. The land shrinks to lilliputian dimensions; horses run from this spectacle in the sky, and people on their porches, retrieving their Sunday papers, look up and wave. There is no sensation of movement-our balloon is moving with the wind, in the wind. As one balloonist puts it, "In a plane you're strapped down looking out; in a balloon it's like you're standing on your front porch, watching the world...
Unfortunately, to quiet their alarm, the all-powerful majority will reject the discipline's predictions. Like economics, linguistics and psychology before it, sociobiology will wind up as just one more haven for professional "explainers," for those soothsayers whom we honor as scientists as long as their findings turn out to be soothing...
...speculators would bet their Nobels on such musings. But Berry tosses aution to the solar wind. In two or threem centuries, he believes, a future NASA could launch a great fleet of robot spaceships to attract bits of free-floating iron in near by interstellar space, like children herding filings with magnets. Eventually so much matter would be gathered up that ,he particles would begin attracting one another by their mutual gravity and compress themselves into a black hole of some ten solar masses. The purpose of this iron sun? To provide instantaneous transportation across the heavens for anyone brave...