When I was in Brazil, I was intrigued by the interesting shower heads. They seem to be electric and head the water in the head, which rains down on you, rather than spraying you. The only thing you control is the water turning on -- there is a three position switch on the shower head which I think could make the water hotter or colder, but which I never felt the need to use.

While I was there, a guy was speaking about travelling to the US and how maddening it was that every hotel shower seems to operate differently. Nothing as bad as this article, but I could sympathize, as I've sometimes spent 20 or 30 minutes trying to figure out how to turn a shower on or to effectively regulate the temperature.

Does everyone know the history of Monopoly? It was originally created as "The Landlord Game" by Elizabeth Maggie Phillips and patented in 1904 as a pedagogical tool to help people learn about the consequences of unbridled capitalism. It was originally distributed rather like free software, with people making their own copies and localizing them to help people learn about monopolies. The site referenced above also has an extensive history of the legal battle over the Monopoly trademark, which is how the history of the game was rediscovered. Interesting stuff.

Collecting these has been a long running enterprise at Bell Labs. It looks like the page was last updated in 2003. Who knows how many things you could find today. :-)

Logo is still alive and well and being useful in new incarnations. A particularly interesting one is Netlogo which was designed to explore emergent behavior by simulating a whole population of interacting turtles. I've used it with students to create some neat simulations. It's been great, because many students used it in elementary school and say, "Wow! I remember this!" and can be productive very quickly. I've also used it with my own kids to teach programming. It's cool. Check it out!

James Howard Kunstler has written a lot about this stuff (e.g. Geography of Nowhere). I see it as a change in our society to not value the "common good" -- the modern business and political movements in the US value only the bottom line and its merely cheaper to not care how the structure ends up looking. If you look around there are eyesores everywhere. Our society needs to rediscover that there is such a thing as the "common good" and that it merits investment, to produce an environment that we will want to live in.