xBlog: The visual thinking weblog
15th June 2006

Which products, used by few today, will be essential in five years?

“Y! Answers has its problems (about half the questions can be answered better by Google searches, and about half of the questions are retarded), but sometimes, there’s an absolutely brilliant question or answer. This is one of the brilliant questions, sheerly in terms of how compelling it is. ‘Which products, used by few today, will be essential in five years? Think about how much technological innovation has changed our lives in the past 5 years‚Ķand what products we use every day now. What’s the next big thing that will change the way we live?’”

posted in Technology | Permalink | Comments Off

15th June 2006

The history of typographical bleeping

“A few days ago, I wondered in passing about the origins of typographical bleeping, in which asterisks or hyphens or underscores are substituted for certain letters in order to avoid violating lexical taboos. Greg Hanneman emailed an example from 1869, and this caused me to do a small search that pushed it back to 1688 1680. No doubt some readers will be able to push it back further.” (Thanks kottke.org!)

posted in Language | Permalink | Comments Off