Word: linearities
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...FILM about progress--physical, social, and technological--Stanley Kubrick's huge and provocative 2001: A Space Odyssey remains essentially linear until its extraordinary ending. In the final transfiguration, director Kubrick and co-author Arthur Clarke (Childhood's End) suggest that evolutionary progress may in face be cyclical, perhaps in the shape of a helix formation. Man progresses to a certain point in evolution, then begins again from scratch on a higher level. Much of 2001's conceptual originality derives from its being both anti-Christian and anti-evolutionary in its theme of man's progress controlled by an ambiguous extra...
...only human in the film is HAL 9000, the super-computer that runs the ship and exhibits all the emotional traits lacking in Bowman and Poole. The script development is, again, linear: the accepted relationship of man using machine is presented initially, then discarded in favor of an equal balance between the two (HAL, for example, asks Bowman to show him some sketches, then comments on them). This equilibrium where men and machine perversely share characteristics shatters only when HAL mistakenly detects a fault in the communications system. The HAL computers cannot make mistakes and a confirmation of the error...
...improvements and prospects of further gains, said Dr. Myron P. Nobler, result from the use of modern radiation at supervoltage levels. This may come from a linear accelerator, a large cobalt-60 source, or a generator that puts out 2,000,000 electron volts. To protect the patient from radiation sickness and to spare normal tissue, healthy parts of his body must be shielded. At Memorial Hospital, said Dr. Nobler, an X ray with a grid background is made of the body area involved. On this X ray the radiologists mark the vital organs, such as lungs, which must...
...minute symphony, somewhat more linear and contrapuntal in texture than Hanson's earlier compositions, is based almost entirely on a short motif that is stated at the outset like a question. In the first movement, the probing woodwinds turn it over and over with melancholy reflectiveness, then pass it on in the following five movements to mocking, impatient percussion, urgently flowing strings and declamatory brass. In the end, after it has been explored, expanded, inverted and torn apart, the motif is reassembled not as a question but as an answer, and all the various strands of Hanson...
...Pans," a consumer's guide to household equipment, and "Piggy Bank," budget-centered instruction in personal finance. At Cornell, publicity in the Daily Sun ruined a freshman geology course known as "Rocks for Jocks," which is now unusually tough; but Mathematician Leonard Silver, who marks exams in a linear algebra course vaguely as either "swell" or "lousy," still gives nothing but A's. "I'm trying to help the student avoid ulcers," he explains...