On this Day in 1938
Comes word of The 1938 Almanac for New Yorkers, a WPA Federal Writers’ Program publication, which is online in its entirety. What a week it was, and is again!
Launching Today: Quickish
Attention sports fans: Awl pal Dan Shanoff’s Quickish — a real-time news aggregator — launches today. Check it out.
Ross Douthat Needs To Watch More Fox News Channel
“Violence in American politics tends to bubble up from a world that’s far stranger than any Glenn Beck monologue — a murky landscape where worldviews get cobbled together from a host of baroque conspiracy theories, and where the line between ideological extremism and mental illness gets blurry fast.”
— Has Ross Douthat not seen any Glenn Beck monologues?
The End of CES: Hey, But What About Our Shiny Future?
What did we learn from this year’s CES gadget freakout show? Well… people like phones. And pretty pictures. And that we live in a very strange time: what’s recently new is already old and boring, and there’s nothing shocking and new to be had. (This is just because we have a short attention span! I mean the iPad is still pretty new! Remember how excited you were?)
So here’s three things about the future.
The future is extremely confusing.
Witness the Acer Iconia, winner of this year’s “Last Gadget Standing” competition. It’s, oh God, it’s two touchscreens! Which means one episode of putting your hands down for a second and your document is deleted.
The future is only inching its way towards the present.
Yes, sure, we would all like to be able to control machines with our brains. “Thought-controlled computing” is, its enthusiasts say, 10 to 15 years off. And those are its enthusiasts.
And the “smart home”? That’s only slowly coming. (Also, I mean, do we need to be able to control our dishwashers from our iPads? DO WE REALLY? I do not think I do.)
On the way to that, though, what we’ll get is: “Computers, Internet and Browsers in Everything. Each and every piece of technology and consumer electronics is getting hooked to the Internet and doing something with the connectivity.”
Neat. A BROWSER WITH A BLENDER!??? WOULD I EVER.
The future ain’t that green.
Despite the recent invention of a faux palladium alloy, and GE’s new “micro” wind turbines (“they” predict that some day we’ll each have a wind turbine on our roofs! Won’t that be wacky! Gosh I don’t believe it), pretty much not much is changing in how we harvest for gadgets, assemble gadgets and dispose of gadgets. Even CES itself tried to make the case that it was “green.” Yeah, no.
At least we have phone chargers now that can shut off while they’re charging our things that were flown over from China.
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Do-Overs! Our New Year Actually Starts Monday
While you’re remembering your 99th week of unemployment and figuring out what to call yourself and enjoying the best visual work of last year, why not…
• Get yer ’11 computer desktop calendar here!
• Discover how to protect your all-important personal brand.
• Enjoy knowing who is most likely to die*! (*According to like, 51 Internet schlubs.)
• Go back for some End o’ the World reading. Or also you could just go read The Hairpin and Splitsider.
Bless you all for your patience and good humor in this brave and frightening New Year!
Meet Your Next Homeless Star
It’s been a couple of days already, we’re bored: Who Is The Next Top Homeless Person?!
Do You Have Change Blindness?
Watch this video, and then read on to find out what the hell happened.
“At first, the ring of dots is motionless and it’s easy to tell that the dots are changing color. When the ring begins to rotate, however, the dots suddenly appear to stop changing. The faster the ring moves, the less the colours appear to change. But in reality, they were changing the whole time, at the same rate. As the video shows, the illusion also works for brightness, shape and size.”
And that, my friends, is what we call change blindness. All clear? Great!
Another Journalist Bites the Dust
“I will say this about every single one of Tiger’s Golf Digest columns: they were competent and had no typographical errors.”
— For thirteen long years, Tiger Woods has selflessly hammered out a monthly column for Golf Digest
— and now they’re no longer in need of his laboriously penned bon mots and sandtrap tips!
Weather Underachieves
You call that a snowstorm? I’ve seen more white stuff on the ground at, uh… at a masturbation party! (Sorry.) Very disappointing.