Some of the Roman writers tried to rationalize the story of Atlas holding up the sky by equating Atlas to mountains — specifically, the Atlas Mountains. They accomplish this using Medusa’s head.
The gist of the tale is that Perseus passed near Atlas’ location — at the far west of the known world (i.e. continental Europe and Northern Africa) — after slaying Medusa and asked for lodging and protection for the night. Atlas was rude and demanded Perseus to leave, prompting Perseus to expose the Titan to Medusa’s head and turn him into the mountain range. At no point, at least in any source that I know of, did Atlas explicitly ask to be turned to stone.
Answer:
The military-industrial-university complex during the cold war was a form of informal alliance between the government, the academic world and the industries (usually privately owned industries). The alliance was supported by the government, that played the major role of financing the production of military hardware and its consumption.
The most beneficial change in engineering practice was that new production methods, and new technologies were discovered in the rush to create the most sophisticated military weapons. One of the areas that benefited from this alliance is the aviation industry; that saw the development of super-fast jets and radar and night vision technologies. Some of these technologies have found their ways into civilian usage.
The least beneficial change was that most government spending was channeled into the development of military technology, suppressing the development of other civilian technologies and production techniques. Some companies that were not related to the military were not able to access the results of some research in the academic world, as they were classified until the cold war tension came to an end.
