Thursday night!

* 40 obsolete technologies.

* 15 clever logos.

* They're virtually mapping Mt. Rushmore in case it ever gets destroyed.

* Photographs of extinct animals.

Apropos of my birthday, this post from Kottke on "timeline twins."

When I was a kid, "oldies" music and movies seemed ancient. Even though I'm now in my 30s, the entertainment that I watched and listened to in my youth still feels pretty recent to me. Raiders of the Lost Ark wasn't all that long ago, right? But comparing my distorted recall of childhood favorites to the oldies of the time jogs my memory in unpleasant ways. For example:

Listening to Michael Jackson's Thriller today is equivalent to listening to Elvis Presley's first album (1956) at the time of Thriller's release in 1982. Elvis singles in 1956 included Blue Suede Shoes, Hound Dog, and Love Me Tender.

Lots more examples in the post and in Kottke's comments. Surely every generation experiences this to some extent or another—but it seems to me there really is good reason to think there's more cultural distance between Hound Dog and Thriller than between Thriller and now. (Though I must admit that to my comfortable perch on this side of thirty Thriller doesn't seem especially fresh.)

First, the political, cultural, and technological revolutions of the '60s and '70s really were far more radical than anything that has been experienced since. Not every set of 36 years is identically tumultuous.

But the way we consume media has also changed in a way that has tended to ensure continuity, in two senses—first, technologies like the explosion of niche cable networks, DVDs, MP3s, YouTube, etc. allow media-cultural events to have cultural vitality for far longer, and second, repeated quotation and citation as both self-referentiality and nostalgia (famously characteristic of postmodernism) has in general helped keep these things alive.

Against future shock, call it future drag: things no longer seem to change, time no longer seems to pass, the past is always at our fingertips.

I also like the analogy improbable makes to oil painting:

Lots of other fields have the same property of developing rapidly once the technology is there. We've had oil paints for how many centuries? The first few decades saw rapid innovation, and the grand masters are from not long after that.

So music back then really was newer, fresher, and better. That's why we're still listening: it's still the best there is.

The seven modern wonders of green technology.

Is Google making us stupid? (Via MeFi.) It's certainly true that in my daily life I find myself using a indexing logic to process most new information, remembering what I'll need so I can find It again if I need It rather than just remembering the thing itself. Just one example: I recently spent a few weeks aimlessly trying to retrieve the terms studium and punctum. Google searches describing what I remembered of the concepts were completely hopeless; unusual for me, I'd remembered bad keywords. It was only when I somehow dredged up the name of the theorist who coined them (Barthes) that my search became possible—and after that it over in fifteen seconds.

Also in the Atlantic, a classic Canavan hobbyhorse: traffic signs make us less safe.

Dr Jannini said: "For the first time, it is possible to determine by a simple, rapid and inexpensive method if a woman has got a G spot or not."

The language in this BBC News story on the possibility of detecting the G spot using ultrasound is a fascinating document on the continued medicalization and pathologization of female sexuality in the 21st century.

And take note, would-be sex millionaires: my patent on the G Spotter™ is already pending.

Time for a science and technology minute.

* All blue-eyed people have a single, common ancestor.

* Diet sodas make you fatter.

* With news that Netflix is going to stop carrying HD-DVD discs, it looks like Blu-ray is going to win the format war. (I wonder how big a role the Playstation 3 played in this—I suspect it wasn't small.) Like kottke, I still wonder whether these companies aren't fighting over a graveyard. On-demand digital delivery seems like the future.

Cell-phone jammers: threat or menace? I understand why these things have to be illegal, but there have been plenty of times I would have loved to have one (and I've been known to be a cell-phone chatterer myself).

“If anything characterizes the 21st century, it’s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people,” said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. “The cellphone talker thinks his rights go above that of people around him, and the jammer thinks his are the more important rights.”

No, no! The jammer is an altruist; she jams for the community.

And of course, there's always the Larry David option:



Via Steve. MetaFilter has more discussion.