His cartoons were not about politics, but they were protests: against formulas, conventions, and systems of all kinds.
"It was a script that worked within certain formulas and genre conventions," Mr. Green recalled.
Then there are codes, which are high-level conventions, formulas that invoke sometimes recondite procedural rules and categories.
The world is moving fast to the left, and here and there, a little group of men quarrel over the formulas and the conventions of an age that feels already distant and remote.
Students at this level can employ basic algorithms, formulae, procedures, or conventions.
Even when talk does not lead to agreement -- even when it degenerates into received wisdom, time-honored conventions, tired formulas and, perhaps worst of all, insider jargon -- it still helps change perceptions and establish new levels of acceptability for both familiar and unfamiliar ideas.
Still, it's worth remembering that the essay has its own inescapable conventions, its own formulas, too.
But as a writer, he leaves the conventions and the formulas far behind, and his book succeeds -- indeed, triumphs -- as so many racers do, on heart as much as talent.
The director, Sam Mendes, is a British stage veteran whose understanding of America seems based entirely on our exported sitcoms and soap operas; in trying to turn those abstracted, idealized images on their heads, he produces only an equally abstract cynicism: an attack on institutions that no one really believes in, institutions that exist only as conventions in entertainment formulas.
Certain conventions for drawing projection formulas have been adopted so that stereoisomers can be distinguished from one another by means of appropriate differences in their formulas.
