knivesout

I find this whole notion rather ridiculous, but here's a smart music kiosk that cuts out all the 'filler' and gets straight to the catchy bits:
Eh? Anyway the rest of the article is here: http://www.nature.com/nsu/040524/040524-10.html

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Hypes

The chorus is the prime selling point of pop, so I suppose it makes sense.

littlemissattitude

Aaarrrghhhh. That's the ultimate sign that we've become way too much of a hurry-up world. Can't take the time to listen to the whole song, just give me the chorus. Bad enough that people feel obligated to have their cell phones with them all the time so they can be reached 24/7. Bad enough that most of us want everything, and we want it now.

It isn't going to be long until "Max Headroom" looks like a documentary.

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I, Brian

A chorus without the rest of the song body is just a jingle.

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dwndrgn

Oh how cool. Can we now do the same with movies, books and newspapers? Just give us the tiny salient point for everything and skip all the rest. And should we also skim down artworks to their component parts? Just the mouth in Edvard Munch's Scream?

The Daily Gazette - 1 page

War And Peace - One chapter

The Lord of The Rings - One Scene

Good Grief! What a waste of a good scientist's time. I'm wondering if he did this on his own or was given this as an assignment.

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littlemissattitude

Just today I noticed that they've done some redesign of the Fresno Bee. On the second page of the first section they have a half-page summary of headlines, with two or three line blurbs for each headline. They call it "The Five-Minute Bee". Why even publish the paper if they are going to summarize everything they think is important in that half-page? Even more, why subscribe or pay the 50 cents for a daily issue if you're only going to spend five minutes with the thing?

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knivesout

Has anyone read James Gleick's Faster? It is an overview of the increasing emphasis on speed that I'd thought was a bit overblown at the time, but is turning out to be increasingly true. A good seed-bed for SF story ideas too, by the way.

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littlemissattitude

I'll have to look for that book, knivesout. It drives me crazy that so many people seem to keep wanting everything faster and faster and faster. I mean, I consider myself a city girl and all, and I like a certain pace to things. But it is just getting ridiculous. People get upset if they don't have their election results within an hour after the polls close. They get upset if their cell phone battery runs down and they can't call someone immediately, right when they want to. And it goes on and on and on.

We get instant (or nearly so) pictures from anywhere in the world on TV, and feel cheated if a satellite goes down so that we can't get them. But, goodness, I can remember when a TV transmission by satellite was a huge big deal that left everyone just awestruck. I remember when people voted on paper ballots which were counted by hand and sometimes the election results were not available until well into the next day or longer. (But at least there was no problem with "hanging chads" and "pregnant chads". ) Sometimes I think we were better off then.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky.

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dwndrgn

Ellen DeGeneres has a good joke about this..

We live in a Microwave world. You stand in front of the microwave and look at your watch and fume "Come on! I don't have all minute!"

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littlemissattitude

That's just perfect. Then again, I think it's very possible that Ellen DeGeneres is the funniest woman on the planet.

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dwndrgn

She always makes me laugh. I love it when she talks about the peanuts they give you on plane rides...

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littlemissattitude

I love her monologues at the beginning of her show. She just kinds of starts and then meanders around, but there's always a point to them in the end. Which is why the books she wrote is called "My Point...And I Do Have One."

But the thing I really like about her is that she takes up causes and makes money for them. A few months ago a local girl named Angel wrote a letter to the Fresno newspaper, talking about how the Chaffee Zoo in Fresno needs funds to improve its facilities so that it won't lose its accredition (and, in turn, all its large animals). When she wrote the letter, she enclosed one dollar and challenged everyone else who read the letter to give a dollar as well.

Well, Ellen heard about this somehow and invited the girl to appear on her show. She did so, and apparently quite a few donations resulted. In addition, Ellen had a set of dishes made with her picture on them and auctioned them on E-Bay with the proceeds to go to the zoo. I think they ended up raising something like $6,000 just from the plate auction.

I think that's a cool thing, that Ellen would do something like that. Goodness knows she didn't have to. She also gave the little girl something really neat (I can't remember what) as a reward for doing something when she saw the need. I think it was a reward well deserved, as what her letter to the Bee started has resulted in raising, so far, several hundred thousand dollars for the zoo.

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