Is it the future yet?
Posted: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 5:36 PM by Will Femia
Filed Under:
Games
Clothing in the year 2000 - Funny how they expected everything to be modular for quick change-overs from day to evening wear. The last one did a pretty good job anticipating being "fitted" with gadgets.
Also, 2008
envisioned 40 years ago.
Meet the laptop you'll use in 2015.
Search fields
instead of URLs are used to promote sites in Japan. The blogger offers
the explanation of scarcity of good URLs but it made me think of
efforts in the social networking arena to help people gather all of their
various networks and collections into "lifestreams" of everything in one place. If you consider the efforts companies some companies make to get the word out on the Web about their products or to do viral campaigning, it makes sense they'd rather show off a search result than a single site.
Speaking of trends in foreign lands,
emos and punks fighting in the streets in Mexico. The news footage I watched reminded me of old clips of clashes between
mods and rockers.
Speaking of "whose kids are those?",
over the counter DNA paternity testing is not exactly a home genetics kit (you send away for the actual science) but I can't think of another consumer genetics product like it.
Speaking of "who's your daddy," here's that story of the pregnant man. My first reaction was that he's not a pregnant man but a woman on hormones with a double mastectomy. But right away the fellow makes a good point. Legally he's a man and legally he's married to a woman (something he wouldn't be able to do if he was a woman). *(The
print version is easier to read, the
paginated version has the picture.)
Speaking of little girls with parent issues, the YouTube awards coverage generally focuses on the ridiculous categories and silly clips but
the short film winner is really good too. Reminds me of Requiem for a Dream.
Time suck warning:
Line Golfer is Line Rider meets mini golf. (Didn't work for me in Firefox.)
Thing I'm watching that I don't really understand:
Color Wars 2008. The idea is that when Ze Frank was at camp they divided the campers into teams and made them compete in fun games. So now there's a group trying to orchestrate something similar online, dividing online participants into competing teams.
Another site I spent some time trying to figure out today is
Muxtape. After a quickie three-line sign up you are allowed up load 12 mp3s to their site. What you get is a URL built from your user name and a list of the songs you uploaded that (I guess) are supposed to play straight through automatically with no controls. I admire the simplicity of it all but the playing was hit and miss for me. I had to click some songs to get them to load and then click them again to get them to play. Once two songs played in a row but then it died. They just launched so maybe they're working out server load issues.
"You can use Google Trends, a tool to measure search query popularity over time, to
measure internet memes." The more famous one is the unmentionable but bewildering none-the-less
events of early 2006.
NOTE: It's just words, but you don't want to have to explain these words to someone looking over your shoulder.
Have we already seen the
Hidden Passageway store? I've definitely been in some McMansions (or just big houses) that have, say, a fancy dining room that no one ever eats in that could easily be walled off and hidden by a secret wall. (I tried to write one more sentence explaining why you'd ever want to do this but really, does anyone need this explained?)
Speaking of self explanatory,
Eyeport Vision Training sounds like a game (or maybe just a tool) that exercises your eyes and looks like a Klingon weapon. I'm going to take a wild guess that most Clicked readers are like me and go home bleary eyed, trying to ignore a subconscious concern that all this computer use is actually causing damage you'll one day regret. Eye exercise sounds reassuring.
The Extinct Human Species That Was Smarter Than Us - It's just a book summary but the idea is that there was a branch of humans with brains 30% larger than ours. Actually, the Amazon.com
book description says "forebrains roughly 50% larger than ours, and estimated IQs to match--far surpassing our own." Of course, they were taken away by their alien parents 10,000 years ago.
Here's that
Miss Bimbo game site everyone's all worked up about.
Can you imagine how America would handle a picture of its first lady naked?
NOTE: This is a picture of
France's first lady naked.
The world according to newspapers - In each chart the size of the country represents how much it's mentioned in that particular periodical. Frankly I would have expected to see a larger U.S. even for the foreign outlets.
What Does Bush Mean by "Victory in Iraq"? I see Fred Kaplan on the air with Chris Matthews right now talking about this.
