Word: authorization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1980
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Maybe Rifkin, the author of several thought-provoking books like The North Will Rise Again, is right. Maybe the entropy law does determine our fate contrary to our "Newtonian," or progress-oriented inclinations. In essence, the entropy law states that all energy flows inexorably from the orderly to the disorderly and from the usable to the unusable. Thus, when we expend energy under the guise of progress, we are in fact accelerating destructiveness. Presumably, Rifkin awoke early one morning and saw that this second law of thermodynamics could be applied to absolutely everything, and proceeded--with the assistance of disciple...
ACCORDING TO RIFKIN, we should throw off the burdensome pre-occupatino of growth and cast aside notions of economic and technical progress. This strikes a responsive chord with anyone following the present election campaign. But the author is guilty of a personal bias himself. Entropy is clearly pitched at the industrialized Northeast and Trilateral Commission types. Rifkin says frugality no longer exists in our "high-entropy society"; he contends that leisure has o verrun the work ethic; and in our mechanical, materialist value system, we have forsaken the pursuit of spiritual consciousness...
...author's fervor recalls Ronald Reagan's recent pronouncements, and Rifkin completely ignores the reaction to this decadence, this high-entropy--the resurgence of a moral majority and the advent of a strong right in American politics. Reagan's followers seem to prescribe the "low-entropy society Rifkin craves...
Supratik Bose, the University's manager of long range planning and principal author of the 1975 bicycle study, says there are two obstacles to building a network of bicycle paths: the paths would have to cross both public and private property, and Cambridge's streets are too narrow to accommodate separate bicycle lanes. He adds that the planning office has not estimated the cost of such a project, but "it could be very high...
...cereal or using a low-suds shampoo that smells like an avocado. Few actually light out for the wilderness and set up housekeeping, and those who attempt this transit from civilization back to the primeval usually find that they cannot get there from here. That is the upshot of Author Elizabeth Arthur's first book, and it is not exactly startling news. But Island Sojourn offers something much more durable than a scoop; the book is a graceful meditation on survival, both in a harsh external landscape and in the scarier terrain of the self...