Category Archives: Future Shock

Big Brother Approves

Penguin Press commissioned designer David Pearson to re-imagine covers of five classic George Orwell novels. Among them is this standout cover for “1984,” with both the title and the author’s name “blacked out.” In certain light you can see the title under the “redaction,” as this graphic portrays. Pearson says that the design went through […]

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Cross-dressing: always in style

Chinese teen-girl fashion clothier Yuekou is using a 72-year-old man as a model. World, meet Liu Xianping, grandfather of Lv Ting, the apparel-maker’s owner. According to Ting, one day Xianping picked up an outfit, tried to give her advice on mixing and matching outfits and instead of saying “Grandpa, that’s gross…” what resulted was Xianping’s first […]

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Are you ready to drop your spam defenses?

Sometimes a problem is so bad, the worst thing you can do is talk about it. Worse than that, however, is talking about a problem when you are completely uninformed on the topic. While spam volumes are at historic lows, the amount of email that traverses the Internet that is unsolicited rubbish was still 68 […]

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The Joys of Plaintext

I don’t do HTML mail. It gets in the way of communication. I recently brought this up with a client and their response was they found it ”refreshing.” That was good to hear, as on this end facing only 12 point Courier as you compose strips away the pretense and forces the sender to really […]

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A FUSSP gets funded

Is a universal unsubscribe feasible? Back in the day, a usenet curmudgeon called it the FUSSP, as in “You have discovered the Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem” and therefore, you are an expert. But that was never the case. Unsubscribe.com believes it is possible, and they convinced venture capitalists to part with $2.1 […]

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News for Algorithms

In Dr. Laura, Associated Content and the Googledammerung Scott Rosenberg lamented about the state of Google News, and rightly so. Is Google News useful? Certainly on a good day. Is it human? Not so much. A week after the Dr. Laura n-word controversy hit the fan, Rosenberg typed |Dr. Laura n-word| in Google News and […]

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The Dynabook that will eat the world

Could Apple’s tablet announcement really be the incarnation of Alan Kay’s Dynabook? More importantly, is Apple going to win the interface war? Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo (among many others) have posited that the desktop metaphor does not translate well to the mobile milieu. And is the iPad, as J.S. McDougall predicted on HuffPo, a Kindle-killer? […]

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Power to the People, Megawatts to the Masses

Though I live in Northern California I was raised in the Great Fly Over, a.k.a. the midwest. Visiting the family lake last month I decided to visit the local metropolis (birthplace of Robert A. Heinlein) and the only wine bar in a 100-mile radius. I struck up a conversation with a young man not quite […]

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Crisis? What Crisis?

Hat tip to Advertising Is Good for You for this gem launched last August by Storåkers McCann, Stockholm, for Dagens Industri, a financial newspaper in tabloid format and the most profitable daily newspaper in Sweden. In the current economic global downturn it is no longer a mystery why financial industries have imploded. If these numbskulls […]

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