Word: gem
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...clarity, carat and color-provide only the roughest means of identification. In fact, identification is sometimes so difficult that police have occasionally been forced to return diamonds to a known thief because there was no proof that they were stolen goods. Now, Israeli scientists think they have solved the gem identity crisis with a system that they claim is as infallible as fingerprinting...
...developed a simple diamond-identifying device. It consists of a small helium-neon laser that directs a beam of light through a pinhole in a sheet of Polaroid film and onto a diamond. As the laser's uniform light waves hit the "table" (or top facet) of the gem, some of them are reflected. Others enter the diamond, circle around inside it and are refracted at varying angles. The result is a unique pattern of spots on the film that looks like a bright, star-cluttered sky; in more advanced versions of the system, the spots turn into...
...machine (cost: about $3,500) can produce an identifying print in two minutes. Shtrikman believes that the patterns, which show brilliancy and quality of a cut stone as well, can also be used to assess a diamond's value. That innovation could have even greater impact on gem transactions. Until now, the only real assurance diamond traders have had when they concluded a deal was the traditional act of faith between them: a handshake and the exchange of the Hebrew words "mazal u-brocha" (luck and a blessing...
...rest of the cast is uneven. John Cazale does well as a funereally unctuous Goebbels, while Jaime Sanchez simply rants as Goring. The most dis concerting performance is that of Sully Boyar, who plays Hindenburg as a gemütlicher grandpapa with a Jewish inflection. The ultimate failure rests with Pacino, who leaves a final impression of Hitler as a poor immigrant boy who made it very very...
...maybe Shampoo could have better used as its mood-setting phrase a riddle I spotted on a bathroom wall a few years back: "Why was Nixon never circumcised?" "Because there's no end to that prick." Much more accurately than the portentous statement, "Election Day: November 1968," such a gem of grafitti would have reflected the end of Shampoo's analysis of human behavior. It would have prepared us for what follows, a farce in which the wanton insatiable cocks and cunts of Los Angeles suburbanites become an overextended, tiresome metaphor for the political machinations of the pricks in Washington...