Word: amateurism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When Finnish filmmaker Timo Vuorensola came up with the idea for his movie Star Wreck, a parody of Star Trek, he knew that looking for conventional distribution would be futile. An amateur, science-fiction comedy with a miniscule budget - and in Finnish, to boot - would hardly be attractive to mainstream studios. So Vuorensola took matters into his own hands: he used a Finnish social networking site to build up an online fan base who contributed to the storyline, made props and even offered their acting skills. In return for the help, Vuorensola released Star Wreck in 2005 online for free...
...English grandmaster Nigel Short says that chess computers, which now regularly beat the top human players, are taking away some of the mystery of the game. He likens them to "chainsaws chopping down the Amazon." What do you make of that? I can see his point. Any amateur can look at top-level games, and instead of appreciating the mystery behind the moves they will simply look at the evaluation of the computer. I'm not afraid the computer will find all the ideas and leave no room for imagination...
Harvard researchers have discovered a "super-Earth" orbiting a red dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth with telescopes no larger than those used by amateur stargazers...
Zachory K. Berta, a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who first spotted the hint of the planet among the data, said that the telescopes used in the project are "no more advanced than what a sophisticated amateur would have...
...Party-shot isn't going to send the amateur photographer the way of the switchboard operator. Still, for version 1.0, it is an adequate stand-in at large gatherings, and can come in really handy at small ones, like a family birthday, when nobody wants to be on camera duty. It guarantees that there will be some sort of photo documentation, making it a fairly cheap form of insurance against a lazy or distracted human photographer. It also guarantees, I suspect, a proliferation of even more mediocre photos on Facebook...