Word: patterns
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fact, it began to collapse almost immediately. The unarmed monitors sat by helplessly as the killings in Kosovo continued. And overseas Albanians poured millions of dollars into the province to help arm the growing K.L.A. The K.L.A. was anything but an efficient killing machine, yet its consistent pattern of knocking off one or two Serbian cops a week was enough to infuriate Milosevic and to increase Serb pressure for a reprisal. On Jan. 15 it came: a massacre of 45 ethnic Albanian civilians by Serb security police outside the town of Racak. Furious, Albright engineered an ultimatum that NATO delivered...
...chess game, the machines have until now been flummoxed by crude recognition tasks that even a baby can perform, often failing to distinguish between a beach ball and a cabbage, to say nothing of picking out a familiar face in a photo album filled with strangers. Such a pattern-recognition talent, says Salk Institute neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski, in whose lab the work was done: "is a survival skill humans probably had even before they acquired language. For computers, it's a major challenge...
...urban carpet": the street becomes the lobby floor, which slopes gently up and becomes the wall. It's also evident in the long, shallow staircase that slices through the building like a rapier. From this staircase visitors can get fleeting glimpses of the art from unusual perspectives, a pattern that's repeated throughout the gallery, which is punctuated with jagged openings (some bringing in light from the skylights on the top floor) and unexpected views. "Instead of seeing the sanctified object fixed in its niche," Hadid says about viewing the art, she wanted to "create a richer, more perplexing experience...
...pilots headed toward Morocco, over Mauritania and then turned northeast to catch a jet stream blowing toward India. In theory, balloons can't be steered, but pilots improvise by dropping up and down between different altitudes in search of the right wind pattern. Like surfers trying to catch a wave, balloonists try to ride jet streams, high-altitude currents that usually move from west to east. "It's magical what pilots can achieve," says balloonmaker Don Cameron. "In competitions with hot-air balloons, they'll set a target 10 miles away and ask pilots to drop a marker...
Soon it dawned on a few insightful souls, Godel foremost among them, that this way of looking at things opened up a brand-new branch of mathematics--namely, metamathematics. The familiar methods of mathematical analysis could be brought to bear on the very pattern-sprouting processes that formed the essence of formal systems--of which mathematics itself was supposed to be the primary example. Thus mathematics twists back on itself, like a self-eating snake...