Word: concepts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...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...
Brutus.1, a system developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was designed to write short stories on the subject of betrayal--hence the treacherous name. To teach the innocent computer its sinful ways, the computer scientists who designed it set about "mathematizing the concept of betrayal through a series of algorithms and data structures." Most people might assume that betrayal is not easily mathematized, a subject for human emotion and not for symbol manipulators, but the computer seems to have picked up the vice rather well. (A Rensselaer press release states that the programmers also taught Brutus.1 something of deception, evil...