Word: tedium
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...Journal also noted that computers like Deep Blue can invent new drugs by "sorting quickly through hundreds of chemical combinations that once required months of human tedium." Well, as some toll takers might observe, one human's tedium is another human's job. And although automating the tedious does raise average wages over time, it can lower wages for people with obsolete skills...
...result is a remarkable 137-page account of the tedium, trials and travails--and sometimes even joys--of the locked-in life. Bemoaning his fruitless "physical rehabilitation" sessions, for example, Bauby writes, "I would be the happiest man in the world if I could just properly swallow the saliva that permanently invades my mouth." He lets his readers know that his celebrated wit survived the stroke by pointing up the ironic aspects of his condition. Bauby recalls a contract he signed before his illness to write an updated version of the Alexandre Dumas classic The Count of Monte Cristo...
Cavanaugh says she and her husband, Philip Gschwend, a professor of environmental organic chemistry at MIT, joke about winning the lottery so they could avoid the tedium of writing research grant proposals...
...evil, of course, and not even a necessary one--a hideous succubus sucking away at the American spirit. (The unmentioned exceptions being those parts that involve prisons and the Pentagon, i.e., the ever colorful and entertaining use of armed force.) So in some ways, the soul-numbing tedium of '96 was the inevitable product of the venerable practice of government bashing. If these fellows were competing over something useful and productive--like the opportunity to write a season of Seinfeld scripts or be the host of the Academy Awards--there might be some reason to pay attention...
DIED. RAYMOND W. HOECKER, 82, onetime U.S. agriculture official; in Springfield, Missouri. In 1968 Hoecker came up with the idea of encoding product information in a scannable symbol. Today the familiar stripes of the Universal Price Code have helped abolish the tedium of waiting for slow cashiers to ring up purchases, replacing it with the more modern tedium of waiting for balky scanners to read...