Ahoy!

Some things are really amazing. When the first calls were made by phone (approx 1870) someone had to invent a greeting! It had to be a greeting that didn't rely on visual clues, nor on formal introduction of a handshake. There was no way to tell you were connected to someone else. According to history, AG Bell used "ahoy, ahoy" to answer the phone but it would be "hello" ("invented" by the dreaded competitor Edison) that would survive. With thanks to Wired.

A car in one piece

And we can take that literally. The McLaren MP4-12C has been build from a single piece of molded carbon fiber and most of the controls in the interior are integrated in a touch-sensitive screen ... This is a real Top Gear Car: environmentally UNfriendly and way too expensive ($250K) but hey! This car has been designed by the same guy who reinvented the Fiat 500 and the Mini. He's done his share of politically-correct cardesigning, wouldn't you say ? BTW: I prefer this one in red.

Forgetful By Design

With thanx to Clive Thomson. Some Harvard Professor has written a book (due out one of these days) in which he argues that technology has inverted our millenia-old relationship with memory. And I quote: "For most of human history, almost everything people did was forgotten, simply because it was so hard to record and retrieve things. But there was a benefit: 'social forgetting' allowed everyone to move on from embarrassing or ill-conceived moments in their lives. Digital tools have eliminated that amnesty."

I must admit I hadn't looked @ it this way. The book is called 'Delete: the Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age' by V. Mayer-Schönberger.

whatever happened to ... old movies?

57 channels and nothing on. This weekend I was in a nostalgic mood. Remember those days when you had an old movie on the telly every Saturday afternoon? Or those very late Sunday nights when one of the French tv-channels (I'm pretty sure it was TF1) would broadcast an oldie, in original version if the movie wasn't French. My mother used to watch them and when i was old enough to stay up so late (never on a school night :-))we would really make a big thing out of it. Or the returning 'White Christmas' movie every Christmas: in those days we'd say 'oh no, not again' but now it's like all those old movies have simply vanished into thin air. No more Jean Gabin, Simonne Signoret, Lauren Bacall, Gene Kelly, or countless others... no more great films noirs, no more tough PI's, no more femmes fatales. All gone with the wind.

why not use the web for this?

It's a bit like those 'spoorloos' programs on tv where people try to find long lost friends, lovers, familymembers ... Except here it's a gorgeous Danish single mom who got pregnant and is now trying to find the father. Well ... I suppose if it gets posted enough everywhere she might even get lucky. Hope she foresaw some security measures concerning her privacy and her whereabouts but otherwise ... why not indeed? With thanx to Nodesktophero for tweeting about it.