At Future Me you can send e-mail to your future self — and read what others have sent:
I hope you’re happy now. I hope you have a Valentine this year. I know you didn’t last year. I hope you’ve done something positive with your life, but that’s unlikely. You’re ugly. Everyone hates ugly people. You’ll never get laid. You’ll never have another girlfriend. Girls hate ugly people. (written Sun Feb 13, 2005, to be delivered Tue Feb 14, 2006)
It’s just an ordinary office in Palo Alto, but it’s going to need some extra space for plaques. This one building, 165 University Avenue, has served as the incubator for Logitech, Google, PayPal, and Danger Research, makers of the Danger Hiptop handheld device.
That’s even more surprising given the building’s small size. The first floor is occupied by storefronts, and the upper story is only 5,000 square feet, usually divided among three companies. The tenants are almost stepping on each other: Google left behind a sign with its logo, which Paypal then left in place for the next tenant, Danger.
What accounts for so many huge successes in such a small space? It’s probably mostly due to the proximity to Stanford, but don’t rule out owner Rahim Amidi, who runs a small company that provides early funding to tech companies. Apparently Amidi has a good eye: Of the 20 companies in which he’s invested, two have gone public and only two have failed. “If you know someone who is the next Danger or Google or PayPal,” he says, “let me know.”
In 1900 the Ladies Home Journal made 29 predictions about the year 2000. Sample:
There will be air-ships, but they will not successfully compete with surface cars and water vessels for passenger or freight traffic. They will be maintained as deadly war-vessels by all military nations. Some will transport men and goods. Others will be used by scientists making observations at great heights above the earth.
These prophecies reveal as much about the nature of science fiction as about the nature of science. They’re often utopian, or naive extrapolations of existing knowledge. And change is accelerating. I’m sure the world of 2100 is literally unimaginable to us today. It’s not even worth trying.
Even the pristine hinterlands aren’t pristine anymore. In the early 1990s, British zoologist Tim Benton took a walk along a mile of shoreline on Ducie Island, a speck of land 4,970 miles east of Australia. Here’s what he found:
And “0.5 toy airplane.” That’s 953 items of debris altogether, on an island of 2.5 square miles, in the least populous country in the world.
Contact Sheet takes the drudgery out of ransom notes.
Doctor Macro has high-quality images of classic films and their stars, mostly from the 1940s and earlier. This one is a publicity still of Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian-born star of Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah.
Lamarr is an object lesson in the price of beauty. She had quite a good technical education, and actually patented a device that made radio-guided torpedoes harder to detect. But the world saw only her face: She had to drug her obsessive husband to escape to London, and then Hollywood saddled her with demeaning epithets like “the most beautiful girl in films” and “the Laurence Olivier of orgasm.” When she tried to join the National Inventors Council, she was told she could better help the war effort by selling war bonds.
In the end she went through five more husbands before she passed away in 2000; if she was bitter at her fame, it was certainly understandable. “Any girl can be glamorous,” she once said. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”
One downside of open-source software is the amount of profanity in the programmers’ comments. Vidar Holen tracks the number of swear words in the Linux kernel: At last count there were 139 craps, 101 shits, 61 fucks, 16 bastards … and 110 penguins.
Steven Wright used to say, “I’ve been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas. I just think about it.”
With Mr. Picassohead you can make a Cubist portrait in about 60 seconds. I spent a little longer on this one, pretending to get the composition right, but it’s hard to go wrong with drag-and-drop noses.
Even simpler is the Mondrian Machine — even a dead guy could produce a neoplasticist masterwork if you clicked the mouse for him.
I suppose the masters wouldn’t approve of these pushbutton knockoffs; Picasso seemed to take a dim view of technology in general. “Computers are useless,” he once said. “They can only give you answers.”
Of course, if you have real talent, machines can be a useful tool, too. Art.com’s artPad is a lot easier to use than real brushes and paints, and the gallery has some decent abstracts.
“The bow is a simple weapon, firearms are very complicated things which get out of order in many ways … a very heavy weapon and tires out soldiers on the march. Whereas also a bowman can let off six aimed shots a minute, a musketeer can discharge but one in two minutes.”
That’s Colonel Sir John Smyth in 1591, advising the British Privy Council to skip muskets and stick with bows.
InfoToday collected a lot of similarly farsighted advice into an online feature, appropriately called OOPS!
The Museum of Unworkable Devices debunks a whole fleet of perpetual-motion machines.