The chart above is a lovely info-graphic showing the introduction of colors into the Crayola crayon box over time. The creator of the chart derived from the data Crayola’s Law: the number of crayon colors doubles every 28 years.
Here’s a collection of silly protest signs of 2009. My favorite:
And, yes, it’s been a slow day at work.
Since everyone in the media is all agog over the latest existential threat to our very way of life (i.e., Yemen), I thought I’d look around a little and see what I could find. Via a link Jonathan Schwarz’s A Tiny Revolution, I came across this excellent blog post by Adam Curtis, a documentary filmmaker who produced, among other gems, The Power of Nightmares (2004) and The Mayfair Set (1999).
It’s really worth reading the whole post, but one key takeaway is that
only forty years ago the British government fought a vicious secret war in the Yemen against republican revolutionaries who used terror, including bombing airliners… [T]he chaos that has engulfed the Yemen today and is breeding new terrorist threats against the west is a direct result of that conflict of forty years ago.
His blog post contains some excellent archival video from the BBC documenting British adventures there in the 1960’s. It’s worth every minute of your time.
The other key takeaway is that, apparently, British people call it “the Yemen.”
With all the news chatter on the recent CES in vegas, here’s a look at some of the hottest technologies from 1983
“In 2003, inspired by an episode of The Simpsons, he grafted together a tobacco root and a tomato stem to make ‘tomacco’.
In ‘E-I E-I D’oh’ (episode 231, first aired November 1999) Homer invents giant tomacco plants that taste disgusting but are completely addictive (‘That’s horrible!’ says Bart as he spits one onto the floor: ‘I want another one!’).
Baur’s tomacco, on the other hand, has made him something of a Simpsons legend and given him a story to dine out on to this day (at wastewater conferences, he says, he often gets introduced as ‘Mr Tomacco’). After the plant produced its first fruit, he sent a press release about what he’d done to a local television station, thinking they might find it reasonably funny.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/6872418/Simpsons-stories-the-tomacco-man.html