Word: linearities
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...stern admonition to "stay in line" is another memorable childhood burden. Lunch lines, fire drill lines and assembly lines are only a few of the long list of our youthful linear formations. In "Lineupheaval" Peck takes this geometric concept one step further. She fills the stage with lines of kids wiggling, stamping, walking and hopping-doing practically everything you can do whie still staying in line. It is grammar school teacher's nightmare. Quite naturally, the temptation becomes too much. The lines collapse into chaotic scatterings of high-spirited, giggling, obstreperous kids...
...major flaw of Half Moon Street is that it falls between two genres. The stories possess neither the sophisticated technique that would make them interesting pieces of fiction nor the right amount of tension that goes into a thriller. The narratives of both pieces progress in a linear fashion with few internal monologues or hints at the characters' motivations. As a result, the figures remain two dimensional. Ordinarily, this could be compensated for with exciting plots and suspense, but these ingredients are nowhere to be found. Here, the surprise endings are rushed and flat and do not allow enough time...
...than Paradise feels gritty and honest. Jarmusch's black and white landscapes are bleak, almost neutral: the Florida beach looks like Ohio without snow. As Eddie mumbles. "It's funny. You come to someplace new and everything looks the same." All of Jarmusch's spaces are defined: landscapes are linear and static, interiors bordered by walls and corners (compared to Wenders' romantic and rambling Americana deserts). This "new style of American filmmaking" is so ironic it makes your teeth hurt, but it's also witty and incisive. Paradise is a strange portrait of young Americans and new immigrants, looking...
Like American Airlines, thousands of companies must routinely untangle the myriad variables that complicate the efficient distribution of their resources. Solving such monstrous problems requires the use of an abstruse branch of mathematics known as linear programming. It is the kind of math that has frustrated theoreticians for years, and even the fastest and most powerful computers have had great difficulty juggling the bits and pieces of data. Now Narendra Karmarkar, a 28-year-old Indian-born mathematician at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., after only a year's work has cracked the puzzle of linear programming...
Before the Karmarkar method, linear equations could be solved only in a cumbersome fashion, ironically known as the simplex method, devised by Mathematician George Dantzig in 1947. Problems are conceived of as giant geodesic domes with thousands of sides. Each corner of a facet on the dome represents a possible solution to the equation. Using the simplex method, the computer scours the surface of the dome millions of times to pinpoint the corner with the most likely solution. But the method is slow, and it works only when there are merely a few thousand variables to sort through. Says Karmarkar...