The Future (Circa 1911)
Painfully accurate vision of the future, that.
(via dbreunig)
Google Zeitgeist Shows We’re As Clueless As Ever -
I suspect that Googling a website rather than just typing in the address bar turns out to be a highly rational habit. Given the phishing and other unsavoury sites out there, a simple typo in a URL can be a pretty dangerous mistake.
See that tiny white sign hanging off the middle of the Toowong pedestrian bridge? It says “Next time, take the train”. Any driver who could read it l would probably end up ploughing into oncoming traffic. It’s lousy, hectoring messaging, too. I sort of think political action needs to convince people, not make the activist feel smug.
Addendum: I should have pointed out that I saw the kids wearing blue “Climate Change” tee-shirts hanging the sign as I walked past them. I don’t know who they were associated with.
Joan Vinge’s The Snow Queen: The girl-power counterpart to Star Wars -
Good, somewhat spoilerish review of one of the great SF novels of the 1980s. Certainly better than io9’s slightly daft headline would suggest.
“Unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases threaten multiple catastrophes, any one of which justifies action. Together, they represent the gravest threat to humanity imaginable. The fact that the overwhelming majority of the mainstream media ignored the overwhelming majority of these studies and devoted a large fraction of its climate ‘ink’ in the last 12 months to what was essentially a non-story is arguably the single greatest failing of the science media this year.” — A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice « Climate Progress We are so astoundingly screwed. Thanks, the global political class.
Circulating Library: LOL Water Dragons: Part Two: another four for your enjoyment.
Circulating Library: LOL Water Dragons: Part One. We had a lot of fun making these.
Lego DOCTOR WHO!! « Ulises Farinas draws. via io9.com.
“The music industry tried to break Apple’s hegemony over digital downloads by removing DRM, which in turn allows song files to be played on any device. That had some effect, but probably not enough.” — Web fonts will flourish: True to type | The Economist An odd aside in an interesting piece on web type: The Economist gets the causation for Apple dropping music DRM completely backwards.
“I often think that something like 20% of all broadsheet newspaper higher education journalism is motivated by the fear that someone, somewhere, might be doing Media Studies.” — Finishing schools for gilded youth? — Crooked Timber dsquared in the comments thread.