Word: functioning
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...anyone aboard has seen, the other is a large, rather charmingly antique-looking space vehicle parked near it with its lights out. The men of the former craft are absolutely basic: one stalwart captain, one joky copilot, one overdedicated scientist, one slightly shifty civilian and one pretty lady whose function is to be placed in jeopardy. The sole proprietor of the ship they run into is Maximilian Schell, a great long-lost scientist whose ego trips are as monumental as his space voyages and who is, indeed, quite round the bend. His crew are all robots, though some of them...
...collectors, dealers, auction houses and their willing accomplices, journalists, have been moved to pleasure, then wonder, and now to a sort of popeyed awe at the upward movement of art prices. If art was once expected to provoke un nouveau frisson, a new kind of shudder, its present function is to become a new type of bullion. Thus, we are told by art industry flacks, people now respect art. They flock to museums to see it; its spiritual value has been confirmed, for millions, by its wondrous convertibility into cash. You can't argue with it. It means something...
...Tulip Mania. The tulip was then a comparatively new import from the Near East, and mutant specimens, with irregular stripes, were prized as rarities-so prized that men would mortgage their villas and their fields. The tulips had little intrinsic value. Their worth as commodities was a function of pure, irrational desire, and their economic fate proved that nothing is more manipulable than desire. When the mania fell away, the flowers were as pretty as they had been before. It was just that now few people wanted them very much, whereas before they had been invested with a kind...
...some minor announcement. Instead, he intoned that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith "is constrained to declare that Professor Hans Kung, in his writings, has departed from the integral truth of Roman Catholic faith, and therefore he can no longer be considered a Catholic theologian or function as such in a teaching role...
...ions. Expelled at high speeds in a focused beam, the charged particles act like a rocket exhaust, propelling the craft forward. Though its thrust is minuscule and far too feeble to lift payloads from the earth, the ion engine performs efficiently in the vacuum of space. It can function for years because it draws on solar energy and uses fuel sparingly. It can be stopped and restarted countless times and accelerate spacecraft to extremely high speeds...