retro-futures
Before The Muppets, Jim Henson Made an Adorably Surreal Video For AT&T
To describe a robot future, the makers of The Bell System, at the time the leading telephone service in the US and Canada, hired Jim Henson. Then known as the eccentric behind the variety puppet show Sam and Friends, and before he became a household...
Survive the Summer With These Low-Tech Tips
I used to be a big fan of Red Green, the Canadian guy with that car-modification show where he'd always reach for a roll of duct-tape
The U.S. Census Bureau First Dedicated UNIVAC 61 Years Ago Today
At their core, computers are about counting, and it's easy to forget just how _hard_ that is to do electronically (as compared to, say, an abacus). That's what made UNIVAC, the world's first commercially produced digital computer, so impressive. UNIVAC...
Science Explains What's Cool
Two psychology PhD students get into an argument about whether Steve Buscemi's character on _Boardwalk Empire_ is cool or not. One of them thinks he's the coolest, while the other thinks he's too "weasly" and ugly looking. They do some empiricism and...
How to Be Cyberpunk
First of all, you can't simply _become_ a cyberpunk. And not now. Certainly not now, not that cyberpunk is "everywhere":http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/6/5/what-happened-to-cyberpunk--2.But close your eyes, put on your VR goggles, and return to the...
Ray Bradbury Missed the Singularity
"If you're doing something mediocre, if you're something to fill in time, life really isn't worth living, and I recommend suicide," says "Ray Bradbury":http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/6/6/ray-bradbury-wrote-science-fiction-for-everyday-humans near the...
Watch These Four Suits Pitch Their Terrible Dotcom-Era Startup Ideas
I'm a big fan of Net Cafe, a show that mirrored the rise and fall of the neon, Zima-swilling dotcom era. This episode, from 2001, comes from near the end of the show's run, and as such it's a brilliant look into the coming downfall of Silicon Valley...
Battleships Are the Worst Possible Choice for Fighting Aliens
Transformers, the concept, is the defining ontological challenge of our time. Clue, the film, is a definitive text of the American avant-garde. So the problem is not, as various troglodytes might claim, a toy-based movie in the abstract. No, Battleship...
Ouch: Humans Were Performing Brain Surgery 10,000 Years Ago
Our brains are a real mystery. Ignoring the "Terminal Man":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminal_Man era quandary of whether or not our brains are powerful enough to understand how they themselves work (yes, I'm name-checking Michael Crichton here...
What Happened to Chevrolet's Bikini Train?
Enjoy this promo reel from 1936, in which Chevy touts the Boudoir Express, an absurd land train full of women in bikinis. Let me say that again: a train full of bikini-clad women, that you can drive! Dear automakers, forget hybrids, lifestyle branding...
Cheap Enough for Everyone: Vintage Ad Unearths Apple's Mantra Before Steve Jobs
Apple's long portrayed itself as the feel-good alternative to Microsoft's nameless, utilitarian machines, and as far back as 1995 the company was whipping together six minute videos explaining how Apple envisioned a computer-savvy future for all the...
How Charles Babbage's Train-Sized Mechanical Computer Worked
Kids these days, with their newfangled computer-phones, hardly bat an eye at the hard drives with _tera_bytes of space and CPUs that clock in at the gigahertz range. They probably all think computers were invented by Steve Jobs and that Bill Gates was...