I work in a building (coincidentally, in Spain) where there are apartments with this type of stairs (only with a real banister, not the unobtainium version seen above). The problem is that they have a lot of wobble, which transfers through to the flat next door (whose stairs are a mirror image). Result: your stairs wobbles when your neighbour goes up or down.

Bring on Chicken Little, from the amazingly prescient The Space Merchants (1953) by Pohl and Kornbluth.

Translator's note: "nappy" (GB) = "diaper" (US) - nothing to do with hair :-)

Pity you can't actually see the "blows up into billions of tiny pieces" thing because of the glare on the water's surface. We'll have to take their word for it.

To Bo Bo Boing,

The "English fellow" is Tony Buzan. See his site for a gallery of mindmaps.

Third submarine cable severed in a week!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7222536.stm

I can only quote James Bond: "Once is Happenstance. Twice is Coincidence. The third time it's Enemy action"

Jeff,
Sure it's old. But I value the article not because it's about the latest thing. When I said tech details, I was talking about the art of laying cable in the 19th century (and today), or the tension of jotting down Morse code based on a moving spot of light (Kelvin's mirror galvanometer) in the very early days of trans-Atlantic cables.

My university-age kids can't conceive a world in which there were no computers, when you had to get up off the sofa to change channel on the TV (assuming you had more than one channel), when a phone call to the US cost a small fortune (making it a good idea to book a person-to-person hours in advance), when it might take the phone company 20 years to get around to laying extra land-lines to your village (finally giving you a phone) ...

And what about the art of making phosphorus from urine in the late 17th century?

I totally second Hooeezit's recommendation of the Neal Stephenson "Mother Earth Motherboard". Great writing, tons of technical details, a trip around the world, history of telecommunications, ...
I remember thinking - "I would love to read more stuff like that". But I haven't found much. Comparable good tech/human/history texts include Diana Muir's "Reflections in Bullough's Pond" and Ian Jack's "The Crash that Stopped Britain" (very short).
Note that Mother Earth Motherboard is over 40,000 words (i.e. as long as a novel).

At least it's not a Disney A-level, Cory. :-)

Get it here: http://rynne.org/article/119/

Then there is the Lufthansa ad that appeared in The New Yorker dated 10 September 2001 (and was on the newsstands on that fateful day)

The Rolling Stone link above is broken. This one works.

Even if it's on a foreign server, they can hit the person who owns the blog if he/she is resident in their jurisdiction. There is also the whole issue of sharing personal data between the European Union and the US. Though Europe's data protection laws are admirable in their purpose, I believe that their actual implementation has a stifling effect, particularly on small firms.

Good point about eBay. The only problem is that, unlike stock markets, you can't track items or prices over time. You can only see what's for sale right now (sure, you can track items from here forward, but you get no perspective on the past).

This lack of transparency has drawbacks. A case in point would be the Curta calculator, which first came to my attention in "Pattern Recognition". There are never more than a dozen on sale on eBay at any given time. They invariably sell for over $1,000 (in my experience).

It would be interesting to see whether "Pattern Recognition" and/or the subsequent Scientific American article on Curtas had an impact on prices (presumably they did, but eBay gives you now way of knowing). This sort of analysis, linking prices to events, is standard in the securities markets.