Word: less
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...Starck, whose cheerful whimsy with juicers, bottle openers and hotel rooms did much to spark America's current fling with design. He says he wants good design to be a commodity--but without being wasteful. He points out that every time he designs a chair, it's less expensive than the one he designed before. "I want everybody to have the best products for the price of any bulls___ in the grocery store," he says...
...wires and screen cables coil round cups of stale coffee. A handful of X-shaped boxes in brushed metal, each polished to perfection for a punishing 15 hours, lie on workbenches in varying states of completion. The team of six engineers putting them together has gone four days with less than four hours' sleep each night. There's a maniacal tinge to their humor. Bald-pated Drew Angeloff has taken to teasing his colleagues with the blue flame of his soldering equipment. "Help!" one screams. "A skinhead with a blowtorch...
Whittle has been criticized as a sort of Music Man of Education Inc. Previously, he started an advertiser-sponsored classroom TV news program, Channel One, which was castigated for its mercenary approach. Whittle sold Channel One to Primedia in 1994. The for-profit school idea is less corporately tainted--it's not brought to you by Coke...
...sure, there are computers. But apart from its being terminally onanistic, there is no thrill in beating a machine. You can't feel its pain when it loses. Or to put it slightly less misanthropically, you miss the shared astonishment and delight at a brilliant combination or desperate last-second checkmate. If a king falls in the forest and there is no one there to see it (except you and some stone-dead chess algorithm), did it ever happen? You might as well make a hole-in-one playing alone...
Perhaps my metaphor is wrong. Internet chess is less like a San Francisco bathhouse than the terminal stages of alcoholism. Playing chess first thing Sunday morning, which I confess I did last week, is about as close as you can get to drinking aftershave...