Yearly Archives: 2008

General Motors: Laissez Mourir

By devan | Published: November 8, 2008

I’m with Philip Greenspun on the question of whether to bail out the auto industry: The government has already done everything that it needs to in order to help G.M. […] Chapter 11 was designed specifically so that employees can keep their jobs, albeit possibly at lower salaries, while shareholders and creditors suffer and/or are [...]

Posted in Business, News | 2 Comments

Election Coverage Special Effects

By devan | Published: November 4, 2008

NBC just showed Ann Curry’s green room, as though we though all those graphics she was throwing around were real, solid objects. CNN pseudo-hologrammically projected Jessica Yellin into the Situation Room on CNN. Now Yellin is explaining that there are 35 HD cameras shooting her in Chicago, and those cameras are somehow tied to cameras [...]

Posted in Movies & TV, News, Technology | 2 Comments

Disgust Science, Disgusting Journalism

By devan | Published: August 22, 2008

I’ve just read on LiveScience.com that “[b]ooks are just as powerful as movies” at triggering “delight, pain, or disgust” reactions in the brain. As is so often the case on LiveScience, this gripping opening represents a kind of yellow science journalism that has intensified its hold on the popular imagination in the last few years. [...]

Posted in Culture, Science, Writing | 2 Comments

Hour Zero with Office 2008

By devan | Published: August 21, 2008

I’m 30 minutes past my late-adopting install of Office 2008 and its three updates, and already there are problems. I’ll skip the major issues that have already been covered, and commence griping about the user experience: Office applications don’t respect my heretofore system-wide preferences for how fast the cursor blinks, and mine is way faster [...]

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments

Smell: Blessing, Curse

By devan | Published: August 20, 2008

From SciAm’s “The Hidden Power of Scent: Scientific American“: [P]eople who lose their sense of smell often gain a new appreciation for its importance. The article goes on to discuss mostly those functions of the olfactory system to which our conscious experience does not have direct access, the murky underworld of pheromones and adrenaline-detection—great stuff, [...]

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