Word: compression
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Where's Poppa?. Carl Reiner's manic and excruciatingly funny film about what a son is to do when his aged mother just won't leave him alone. The whole movie operates at a hyped-up level that does not so much ignore reality as compress it. Reiner has also succeeded in finding a visual equation for his primarily verbal humor on occasion. George Segal is the son, Ruth Gordon is Mom, and there are awfully nice bits by character actor Ron Leibman and an ingenue named Trish Van Devere...
...present form, STAR occupies more than 100 cubic feet of space. For the "grand tours," Avižienis hopes to compress it into two cubic feet and reduce its power needs to 50 watts-less than most ordinary light bulbs. Avižienis thinks that such a tiny, trusty brain also might be useful closer to earth: monitoring the guidance systems of supersonic aircraft, controlling high-speed trains, and even standing watch over the vital functions of seriously ill patients in hospital wards...
...first, you've got to start thinking about the second. And the third. And the fourth. It's like an obstacle course. You're evading all the time. The whole thing is over in about two minutes. But into those two minutes you seem to compress your whole life...
...brains and extraordinary hearing. According to Cetologist Roger S. Payne of the New York Zoological Society, whales communicate with one another by "singing" at deep submarine frequencies, sounding like sitar concertos. Other scientists are trying to discover how whales can dive to 7,000 ft., where the pressure would compress a human lungful of air to a thin fluid, and then resurface with no ill effects. But for all their mystery, whales have interested men mainly because they have oil within their hulks. In the past decade alone, 607,000 have been slaughtered, mostly by the Japanese and Russians...
...house does not. "Well," says a neighbor, "you didn't change the world, did you?" "No," Leo replies with wistful optimism, "but we changed our street.' That single exchange is a pretty good indication of Leo the Last's shortcomings. The movie does not so much compress serious social problems as belittle them, then finally resolve them with a whimsical and faintly maudlin flourish...