Word: thumbnails
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...high price, I'm tempted by the cameras' handy, lightweight designs. Because the cartridge is smaller than 35 mm and the film requires no threading, the cameras can be very compact. They take pictures in three sizes and replace negatives with a single contact sheet that displays thumbnail images of an entire roll at a glance. So I decided to put three brand-new models from Canon, Konica and Minolta to the test. My bar: they had to be sleek and light and come with a 2X zoom...
...authentic-sounding information on such arcana as weapons ("Yes, I'll have that Harpy, please, and a straight serrated Spyderco with a four-inch blade, and that drop-point skinner at the back") and Swiss bank accounts ("Article 47 of the Bundesgesetz uber Banken und Sparkassen"), plus sharp thumbnail portraits of the major players and malefactors and incessant plot surprises...
Even more genetic gee-wizardry lies just down the road. Using biochips--thumbnail-size pieces of material imprinted with hundreds of different DNA probes--scientists should be able to identify genetic errors almost as quickly as a supermarket scanner prices a load of groceries. In some systems, the probes use different fluorescent dyes that glow under laser light when they hook up with target genes, allowing sensors to tabulate the results automatically. Genetic researchers are already talking about using "FISH [for fluorescent in-situ hybridization] and chips," as they whimsically call these new tools, to look for any number...
...great statistical zingers of our age: every month, 4 quadrillion transistors are produced, more than half a million for every human on the planet. Intel's space-suited workers etch more than 7 million, in lines one four-hundredth the thickness of a human hair, on each of its thumbnail-size Pentium II chips, which sell for about $500 and can make 588 million calculations a second...
...short-term ententes formed among the characters. Screenwriter Laura Jones, who so bravely and audaciously recontextualized last winter's Portrait of a Lady, shows a disappointing, almost slavish devotion to Smiley's prose. In fact, the movie's first half-hour plays like a book on tape, with transparent thumbnail characterizations ("I guess you remember that Rose always says what she thinks") and redundant observations ("We all understood that something important had just happened...