Miscellany

In lieu of a properly composed, thoughtful entry, here are a few things I've been meaning to blog for weeks.

A. Stuart Elliott directs us to this great viral campaign for Folger's, which smartly parodies territory Folger's has been lazily mining for years. Check out the hilarious wake-up calls and auto-email responses, too.

B. A co-worker pointed out this "interface-free" touch-screen, which might remind you of the one Tommy Cruise manipulates in Minority Report. Check out the video and screenshots, too. Watch the whole video to see how extraordinarily advanced and interactive this thing is. Makes your current screen look so 20th century. (Cool music in the video by Peter Kruder, too.)

C. Details obsessives and those interested in typography may be fascinated with Andrew Hearst's detailed explanation of the kerning in the digital timer on TV's 24. Short version: the designers cheat to save space by artifically kerning the digits closer than they would typically appear in a digital display. Read the whole thing and you'll get it. I love that he noticed this and finally concludes: "The onscreen time sequences are dictated partly by the typographic limitations of the clock font." An interesting version of the tail wagging the dog. (Reading more about Andrew, I find we're neighbors. Howdy neighbor.)

D. The universe as Groundhog Day. That's kind of the possibility presented in this Guardian article. Can't be too cutting edge a theory as I was turning similar stuff over in my head back in grad school and I ain't no physics professor. The idea's either terribly horrible or terribly beautiful, depending on your mood or point of view. You might also consider it a basis for a sort of empirically-based form of reincarnation. If you're into that kinda thing.

E. Ray Troll has cool new(ish) Embrace Your Inner Fish t-shirts.

That will be all.