Yesterday the folks over at Vox published an article arguing that generations should be defined by the technology they use, rather than by age. They included a graph that purported to show how American society is "adopting new technology more quickly than ever before." The graph is garbage. And here’s why.
The French just banned some employees from responding to work emails after work hours. A city in Sweden is trying out a 30-hour work week in earnest. But while the prospect of working less and enjoying more leisure time used to be the great futuristic promise of midcentury America, today it’s little more than a punchline.
Today’s modern automobile often comes with high-tech crash-avoidance systems. Parallel parking is a breeze when your car beeps to let you know when you’re about to hit something. The people of yesteryear couldn’t have imagined something like that, right? Think again.
Here in 21st century America, train travel isn’t seen as very futuristic. But in the years after World War II
The fakes just keep on coming. And frankly it’s hard to keep up with all the internet-fueled deception. Today we’re taking a look at a few more dubious images that you may have seen floating around the web recently. Punking Putin? Airplane selfies? Rocket to Uranus? Fake, fake, and definitely fake.
No, these aren’t photos from the Hollywood studio where Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing. These are real training simulations in Houston just three months before these men would actually set foot on the moon.
How Would You Redraw North America?
Posted in: Today's ChiliBillionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper recently proposed splitting California up into six distinct states. Draper’s plan is getting a good deal of ridicule in the press, despite the fact that it could actually make its way to California ballots in the next election. But it’s easy to forget that throughout history, political boundaries have indeed been redrawn to suit different needs.
Worried that Earth may soon suffer from overpopulation and irreversible environmental damage? Worry not, my fellow passengers of Spaceship Earth! In the future, we’ll just hop on our space-faring Mayflowers to go find habitable planets. At least that was the promise of this Sunday comic strip from 1959.
"The biggest thing of all in research is the mental effect," Willis Whitney wrote in 1921, "the projecting of a beam of light into the infinite and the growth of man’s appreciation."
Getting people to the airport via train is a natural priority for cities around the country. When Minneapolis built its first light-rail line back in 2004 it had two major stops: the airport and downtown. But despite over two decades of modern Los Angeles embracing subways, there’s still no train to LAX. And even if the city does build one, it probably won’t look as cool as Goodell’s sleek 1963 proposal above.