Mr. Dalliard: Time travel in movies. Nice work.
I can't help but notice that the chart's title says "… in movies" but a couple of TV series are included. And yet no Doctor Who. Odd, that.1
[Via The Great Escapism]
Big:
In the future, you have access to all your data. Memory, or the lack thereof, is no longer discussed. It is only assumed, a feature of modern life, since you can now relive all your past data as experiences. But because of "technical constraints," all of your experiences are taxonomized and merged for ease of efficiency/retrieval. To access your past, then, is to relive each experience – in real time, all at once.
You begin:
You spend seven weeks holding your iPhone to your ear on hold.
You pull to refresh for seven months, click to refresh for nine.
You miss 30 Thanksgiving dinners restarting your laptop.
12 Valentine's Days restarting your iPhone.
You swipe past iPad ads for 48 hours before ever seeing content.
[...]
Coming to a digital clock near you this weekend:
UTC TIME STEP
on the 1st of July 2012A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2012.
The sequence of dates of the UTC second markers will be:
2012 June 30, 23h 59m 59s
2012 June 30, 23h 59m 60s
2012 July 1, 0h 0m 0s
I wonder whether my Mac will display 23:59:60, or just repeat 23:59:59 twice.
[Via jwz]
Greg Beato ponders the enduring popularity of the calendar:
According to Publishers Weekly, there were fewer than 200 calendars for sale in 1976. Today, there are more than 6,500 from which to choose. Part of this proliferation is due to the fact that we once got the bulk of our calendars for free, from banks, insurance companies, and other businesses eager to keep their phone numbers in front of their customers' eyes throughout the year. But it's not as if those businesses were giving away more than one copy to each customer, or offering them in multiple formats. And yet, as we shift gears from 2008 to 2009, how many among us are not tacking up a Sarah Palin 2009 calendar in our kitchen, and clearing off a space on our desk at work for the Insult-a-Day 2009 calendar, and jotting down the year's first doctor appointment in our New Yorker Cat Cartoons weekly engagement calendar? Clearly, we are far more concerned about the passing of each day, each week, each month, than our carefree, calendar-lite counterparts in the 1970s.
I never buy calendars myself,1 but it seems to me that as often as not the primary function of the modern calendar is to serve as a collection of posters (Be it of images of the buyer's favourite musician, actor or movie series, or of a sequence of works by their favourite artist.)), with the use of the calendar to mark the passing of time of at best secondary significance.