Word: conceptive
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...number by zero and all hell breaks loose; indeed, zero was once scorned as the devil's work. It is such a familiar number today that it may be hard to believe there was a time--hundreds of years, actually--when our species counted and spoke but had no concept of zero. Seife and Kaplan both trace the history of naught, from its inception in Babylon around 300 B.C. through Athens, India and Europe later in the Middle Ages. It took Western mathematicians so long to accept zero because of their reluctance to treat nothing as something. Zero was equated...
...meaning. What could be more transparent (even to the mathematically challenged) than the fact that 4-4=0? Zero is the definite answer to countless other such equations. Zero, though, can also be a tease, something that is sought after but always just beyond reach. Take the physicist's concept of absolute zero, the absurdly chilly -459.67[degrees]F. This would be the temperature of an object so still that even its subatomic particles ceased to jiggle. But modern physics teaches that the subatomic jiggling never stops, and so absolute zero can never be attained...
Sound ludicrous? That's what her friends said. So Clemmons did some research and conferred with Mory Gharib, an aeronautics engineer at the California Institute of Technology, who surprised everyone by endorsing her concept. According to Gharib, two 6-ft. by 15-ft. kites, used in conjunction with three pulleys, will easily lift the average pyramid stone in a 25-m.p.h. wind. "It needs more study," Gharib says, "but all of the math works." Others were persuaded by what they witnessed. "I thought it was bull," admits Lynn Velazquez, an administrator at Pepperdine University who assists with the field tests...
...perfect, unintentional mimicking of the audience--two diehard music lovers grooving to their own creations. At one point, the two leaders simply turned and stared at the projections behind them, hypnotized by the dazzling "Neptune City." It was a perfect, wordless moment, and crystallized the unspoken key concept behind Death In Vegas: the music is the message...
...Ultimately, however, Hoffman and De Niro are stymied by the limitations of the film's concept. Flawless just doesn't have enough to say. Because it never ventures beyond the audiences expectations, it fails to challenge. And so it fails to truly entertain. Flawless preaches that we should look beneath the surface. Too bad the film didn't take its own advice...