Listening in on Stalin, what's bigger than the gender gap, seven powerful professors, and other matters. MODEM MAGIC
(FORTUNE Magazine) – That these are wonderful times for aging neoconservative hypochondriacs with modems was borne out yet again on a recent Sunday morning around 6 A.M. This was when your servant awoke with a swollen, aching big toe -- obviously a gout attack. Dimly remembering that he owned some kind of anti-gout pills, he hobbled into the bathroom, explored the medicine cabinet's abundant contents, and finally decided one possibility was a long-expired prescription for some bright green capsules called indomethacin. The instructions said to take them four times a day but did not confirm they were for gout. What to do? Obvious answer: Dial in to the Medical/Drug database in Nexis and search for articles mentioning indomethacin within 30 words of ''gout.'' This query turned up ten hits, beginning with a 1991 article from the Archives of Internal Medicine making clear that the drug was indeed a specific for inflamed big toes. Brushing aside the authors' observation that side effects in elderly patients include paranoia, we went for the greenies and were cured in a trice (and no more suspicious than usual). Our mission here is to rhapsodize about the magical combination of personal computer and modem. At the well-advertised level of mere convenience, it has got millions of folks using instantaneous MCI mail as an alternative to sluggish USPS mail, checking flight schedules on the Official Airline Guide (now in scores of databases), and buying cases of tennis balls via Prodigy (for about $2.70 per can, including home delivery). The real marvels, though, are now surfacing at the information level. We recently learned how to range all over the world of print by dialing into the New York Public Library card-catalogue system and (a splendid alternative) the Elmer Bobst library at New York University, both available for the price of the phone call. Care to accumulate evidence of bias in TV news? You can now get ABC news transcripts from Nexis, CBS transcripts from Burrelle's Broadcast Database; alternatively, you can dial into the Accuracy in Media database and browse through many highly particularized complaints about liberal journalism. And now a service called America Online has begun to offer English-language translations of documents lately culled from Soviet archives. Recently, for example, you could have retrieved the text of a 1979 KGB report on construction screwups at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, also transcripts of conversations between Stalin and his pals -- presumably not doctored by the KGB. Or does that sound a bit paranoid? |
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