Naturally, you've noticed. We're having sex for an average of four minutes a day. Seven minutes are lavished on the care of plants and pets. Internet users wait nine minutes daily for their Web sites to materialize. Sixteen minutes drop into the black hole of looking for lost objects.
Television sucks up three hours a day.
Fine, if you order them on the Web and ship them overnight. I tried to think of things no one could make faster. There is still the three-minute egg. Gleick offers compost and souffl s, but I bet you could do something with a microwave. In years to come Faster will tell people what we were like as clearly as Dickens or Tom Wolfe.