The benefit of a hackathon, Sterne says, is that it compresses months of work into a sleepless, caffeine-fueled 36 hours.
But the pace of change in Myanmar, where army generals introduced a form of democracy two years ago, has been compressed into months, not decades.
He compressed into months a trajectory that most leaders take years to complete, from trusted herald of a better kind of politics to reviled emblem of everything rotten in the system.
Producers compressed seven months of tedium and turmoil (including the corrosion of Bill and Pat's marriage) into twelve one-hour episodes, which constituted, in Mead's view, "a new kind of art form" — an innovation "as significant as the invention of drama or the novel".
But even after writing the 671-page guide –– he compressed six months worth of culinary school into 48 hours and admits to having cut 250 pages before the book went into print –– Ferriss is still not completely at ease with the food world, so to speak.
Seeing Harrison in that corner was like compressing two months of cutaways of Avram Grant or Roy Hodgson – if either lasts that long – looking glum and defeated on the sidelines into one three-minute interview.
"Red" necessarily speeds up time, compressing several months, if not years, of artist-assistant exchanges into 90 minutes of almost nonstop debate, and sometimes heated argument, about aesthetics, literature and the Oedipal kill-the-king dynamic of artistic progression.
Hebden hasn't done an interview for over a year, but he's hardly guarded: on the contrary, our two-hour conversation feels as if he's trying to compress 18 months of thoughts about music, life and the universe into my recorder.
It involves your agent compressing multiple months of effort into the first 30 days.
And now they're also forced to keep their artists relevant – increasingly difficult in an era when, thanks to the X Factor effect, a pop star's life-cycle is often compressed into six months of ubiquity, followed by what Smash Hits used to call "the dumper".
Although most Pixar features take years to develop, the established release date could not be moved and the production schedule for Toy Story 2 was compressed into nine months.
