61–70 of 111 posts
Paleofuture has – as always – at least some context: http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2007/9/10/french-prints-show... I wonder to what extent these prints are just jokes. Will someone in a thousand years look back at Futurama and think it was a serious prediction of the future?
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_sGYULzoQCgA/RuSVOqUY0CI/AAAAAAAABD...
Anyone know of some modern equivalents? What do we think the year 2100 is going to look like, for instance?
They weren't so wrong... sure their form factors were way off but they had all the ideas down... 1. Electronic Books 2. High speed aerodynamic trains 3. Computer aided manufacturing 4. Motorized personal transport 6&7. Ok no one is letting a robot cut their hair or do makeup, but we're using robots for surgery 9. Aerodynamic motorcycles 10. Webcams 11. Where's my flying car! 12. Tanks 13. Electronic news etc. etc. If…
Although we are using a electric mechanical device to do so. In particular with shaving we have devices that do all the cutting and make it virtually impossible to cut yourself. So kind of similar even there.
I think that our future is actually more impressive than anything that they could have even possibly imagined then: http://thingist.com/t/pageview/1674/ What's interesting is that these illustrations are only 100 years old. The things we have right now, smart phones, robots, the internet, MP3 players, etc. seem far beyond what the futurists of the last century were imagining. Honestly, the things we have now seem bey…
MP3 players, etc. seem far beyond what the futurists of the last century were imagining. Yes; the servant carrying a wax cylinder for the gramophone device was a huge miss. It missed electronic amplification and loudspeakers, it missed miniaturisation of audio players, it missed room sized personal libraries of vinyl/tapes/CDs, and of course it missed digitisation of music and electronic or wireless transfer of infor…
Yeah, I don't get that one. What was the advance here supposed to be? I would have imagined that's what rich people did in 1910.
Paleofuture has – as always – at least some context: http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2007/9/10/french-prints-show... I wonder to what extent these prints are just jokes. Will someone in a thousand years look back at Futurama and think it was a serious prediction of the future?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personalized flight on the whole was really the only big miss. I think the main reason that isn't more mainstream is that even with small planes, we chose to emphasize safety far more than with road vehicles. I don't know why that is; I'd gladly trade some amount of safety if it meant I could afford to own and operate a plane. A Cessna 172 is no more complicated than an economy car. It costs $275,000 due to regulatio…
A Cessna 172 is no more complicated than an economy car. Not trying to sound snarky here, but have you ever piloted an airplane? The pre-takeoff checks take a little while, require a good bit of technical expertise, and are absolutely required if you want to be pretty damn sure that your airplane won't fall out of the sky. Safety is, at times, overemphasized, but then again your car won't fall from the sky when it st…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personalized flight on the whole was really the only big miss. I think the main reason that isn't more mainstream is that even with small planes, we chose to emphasize safety far more than with road vehicles. I don't know why that is; I'd gladly trade some amount of safety if it meant I could afford to own and operate a plane. A Cessna 172 is no more complicated than an economy car. It costs $275,000 due to regulatio…
A Cessna 172 is no more complicated than an economy car. Not trying to sound snarky here, but have you ever piloted an airplane? The pre-takeoff checks take a little while, require a good bit of technical expertise, and are absolutely required if you want to be pretty damn sure that your airplane won't fall out of the sky. Safety is, at times, overemphasized, but then again your car won't fall from the sky when it st…
There's an interesting pun in this one: http://acidcow.com/pics/20110225/future_11.jpg The label next to "concierge" reads "descenseur". It's a reference to the French word for a lift, "ascenseur", from "ascension", "to go upwards". A descenseur would then be the exact opposite of a lift - an apparatus to go downwards. :)
The sense of perspective in these is mind-bending. Look at the lady passenger, and imagine her taking a couple of steps 'away' from the viewer, to approach the green walkway. By then she has to be short enough to fit under the wing, and after walking over the gangway, she has to be small enough to get in the Alice-in-Wonderland door, under the wing with no headroom, into a box so small the coachman-pilot would barely…
(For example, in http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3g08423/ , the way the boat meets the water is baffling. As far as I can tell, this is an error, not a knowing artistic cheat.)
I assume that the drafting skill of even low-quality drawing went up quickly as photographs became ubiquitous, but I don’t have the art history background to support the notion.
There's an interesting pun in this one: http://acidcow.com/pics/20110225/future_11.jpg The label next to "concierge" reads "descenseur". It's a reference to the French word for a lift, "ascenseur", from "ascension", "to go upwards". A descenseur would then be the exact opposite of a lift - an apparatus to go downwards. :)
I simply read that straight as being "a lift moving downwards", can you explain the pun?
Instead of calling it an elevator they are calling it a depressor.
