Analog Nation

Analog Nation is pleased to present our predictions for the first year of the second decade of the third millennium — and beyond.

• Financial markets in Europe will grind to a halt due to a toothpaste shortage in Finland.
The world economy will once again teeter on disaster’s edge.

• Tectonic activity will cause major geological changes in the Great Lakes region, including a new volcano in Detroit.
Because really, what else can go wrong for them?

• The words “chimney,” “fulcrum,” and “hand-me-down” will come to be seen as unspeakably filthy.
Linguists will have to think up replacement words, which will be particularly tricky for chimney because “smokestack” is already a little dirty.

• The United States Supreme Court will relocate its chambers to a floating castle that drifts along the Capital Beltway.
This one just makes sense, and probably should have happened by now.

• Broncos legend John Elway will discover the lost city of Atlantis.
The “how” won’t be nearly as surprising as the “why.”

• The governors of at least seven states will turn out to be covert assassins.
The ensuing media storm will be called “Assassingate,” because we have lost the ability to come up with scandal names.

• Someone will show up at Oscars wearing a dress made entirely of leaves.
The Golden Globes will also happen, apparently.

• The National Hockey League will merge with Major League Soccer, creating a soccer-hockey hybrid called “kickpuck.”
Within minutes, children in Canada will be born with a natural ability to play the game.

• Opera mashups will sweep the Internet
Lady Gaga, we’re looking at you.

• The Prime Minister of Australia will lose a bet with the President of Portugal, forcing the populations of those countries to switch places.
Sooner or later we’ll guess right on this — and who will be laughing then, editors of Prognostication Monthly?

COMPLETELY ACCURATE BONUS: THE DECADE AHEAD

• By the end of 2018, nearly all birds will be able to speak Norwegian.
This won’t be as unsettling as it sounds.

• Cal Tech will clone Abraham Lincoln, including his memories and personality.
The project’s lead geneticists will be forced to file a restraining order against Doris Kearns Goodwin.

• To combat inflation, prices will be capped at five dollars.
Nothing, anywhere, will cost more than five dollars.

• Retailers will introduce DRM-encrypted physical items that disappear after a set amount of time.
Everyday necessities such as chairs, socks, garbage cans, etc. will be licensed, not sold.

• The 2016 presidential election will be settled with a jai-alai match between Kathleen Sebelius and Tim Pawlenty.
The winner will be revealed in the December 2015 edition of “Completely Accurate Predictions.”

Grade for our 2009 predictions: Solid B+ (We were close with the John McEnroe thing, but should have said Tiger Woods.)

Analog Nation presents the Twenty Best Lists of 2009:

1. Top 10 Reality Show Knife-Fights of 2009 — Access Hollywood
2. Top 10 2009 Corporate Decisions That Came Close to Not Losing Money — BusinessWeek
3. Top 8 2009 Media Trends Your 15-Year-Old Doesn’t Have to Explain to You — TechCrunch
4. Top 2 American Automobiles of 2009 — Car & Driver
5. Top 5 Ill-Advised Professional Rodeo Clown Comebacks of 2009 — Cowboy Sports News
6. Top Animal-Related Celebrity Arrests of 2009 — Wall Street Journal
7. Top 12 Extra-Solar Non-Planetoid Orbital Body Discoveries of 2009 — Astronomy
8. Top Microbrew Launches of 2009 — The Oregonian (65-page special report)
9. 2009’s Top 7 Vaguely Racist Myths About Swine Flu — USA Today
10. Top 250 Horrific Injuries of 2009: The Year in Pictures — Sports Illustrated
11. 2009’s Most Important Developments in City Zoning Legisl-OMG KITTIES! — Cat Fancy
12. Top 5 Moves in the Hotel Laundry Sector That You Didn’t Think Were Going to Pay Off (But Did) — Journal of the American Association of Hotel Laundry Technicians
13. Top 5 Moves in the Hotel Laundry Sector That You Thought Were Going to be a Sure Thing (But Missed Badly) — Journal of the American Association of Hotel Laundry Technicians
14. Top 10 Viral Videos of 2009 — New England Journal of Medicine
15. 2009 Top 20 Straight-to-DVD Movies That Were Actually Kinda Okay — Missives From Mother’s Basement (A Condé Nast publication)
16. Top 10 Things You Searched For In 2009 (Not “You” as in Collectively, “You” as in Specifically YOU) — Google, Inc. press release
17. Top 1,000 Most Banal Facebook Status Updates of 2009 — Time
18. Top 25 Things Oprah Did — O Magazine
19. Top Lists About Lists of 2009 — List Fancy (Our list made #7!)
20. People of the Year — Person Monthly

Some of you may have heard that the Internet recently marked its fortieth anniversary. Technically this is true — the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANet) established the first link between distant computers in late 1969. It’s kind of like saying that television is sixty-five million years old because that’s when the dinosaurs were wiped out, but whatever. The Internet is forty. Like any proud parent, DARPA (similar to ARPA, but with a “D”) celebrated with some balloons and a suitcase full of cash.

Wow, they’re all, uh … right there. Great scavenger hunt, guys.

The balloons were the centerpiece of an experiment, designed to test how accurately information spreads on the Internet. This past weekend, DARPA officials positioned ten red weather balloons at undisclosed locations around the country. The first group to correctly report the coordinates of all ten balloons would win forty thousand dollars. One person couldn’t possibly stumble upon all ten balloons, so online communication would have to be the key. The winner was a team from MIT, who will presumably be using the money to pay for World of Warcraft subscriptions and prank-related liquid nitrogen.

Look, we here at Analog Nation are not here to tell DARPA how to do their jobs. (If we were, we’d be demanding more hoverponies.) But if DARPA really wanted to know whether information travels accurately via the Internet, we could have saved them forty grand and ten balloons.

Here’s how it works:

• Someone sees one of the balloons, takes photo on a cell phone, and uploads it to Facebook.
• A friend sees the photo, comments on it, and adopts a duck for his farm.
• The friend’s friends see the comment and join the conversation.
• A three-degrees-removed friend sees another balloon, but misses the Facebook conversation because her News Feed is out of order and her Live Feed is too long.
• #Redballoons starts to trend on Twitter.
• Wired posts a “How-To Wiki” on coordinating balloon hunts.
• The BalloonFinder app goes live on iTunes.
• #Redballoons tops the trend ranking on Twitter, fueled mostly by tweets like “LOL whut’s redballoons?” and “#redballoons #redballoons #redballoons #redballoons.”
• A video of a red balloon gets half a million views on YouTube, though it’s unclear whether it’s one of DARPA’s.
• YouTube videos recording people’s reactions to the balloon video get well over fifteen million combined views.
• A giant red balloon appears in Second Life, and is immediately pelted with winged genitalia.
• Reddit and Digg vote up balloon-related stories. Slashdot looks on from afar with sad eyes.
• BalloonLocator, a competing app, gets stuck in approval hell at Apple and launches on Android Market instead.
• iPhone vs. Droid flame wars overrun Wired’s balloon wiki.
• Omigod you guys, kitties!
• Blogs start to cross-pollinate posts about the contest, creating a Möbius strip that has neither beginning nor end.
• TMZ breaks a story claiming that all ten balloons have been found.
• CNN begins to report the TMZ story as news. Fox and MSNBC polarize the issue and initiate a red/blue feedback loop.
• The true location of the balloons is forever obscured and can never determined, as one half of the country believes one thing and the other half believes the exact opposite.
• This happens.
• Pale nerds at MIT hack DARPA’s website and find the balloons’ exact coordinates without having seen a single one, wining forty thousand dollars.
• My mom forwards me the Mrs. Fields cookie recipe urban legend email from 1998.

There you go, DARPA. That’s what forty years has wrought.

On Monday, December 1st, the Federal Trade Commission’s new guidelines on endorsement transparency go into effect. This is the first time the FTC has updated these rules in nearly thirty years, which means that the rules A) are old enough to have been disappointed by the “Star Wars” prequels, and B) probably love zombies. The most notable additions to the guidelines are §§ 255.0, 255.1, and 255.5 — language that specifically includes bloggers and other online entities. We here at Analog Nation wanted to take this opportunity to fully disclose all promotional considerations.

The Analog Nation home page is sponsored by Gap, Inc. This holiday season, let your loved ones know precisely how much you care by showing them where they fall on the gift spectrum:

Old Navy™ (meh) << The Gap™ (getting warmer) << Banana Republic™ (now we’re talking)

When writing each week’s “Completely True Fact,” I get my creative juices flowing with the help of some Eclipse™ Winterfrost© gum and a nice glass of Tropicana™ Pure Premium© grapefruit juice. They taste disgusting together, but that actually helps me focus.

Speaking of focus, Analog Nation’s tag cloud is made possible by Novartis, makers of Ritalin®. On those harrowing days when I am unable to get my hands on some Ritalin®, the tag cloud is made possible by can after can of Red Bull™.

Our archives are funded by a charitable grant from Anheuser-Busch InBev, whose products improve my ability to operate heavy machinery (results not typical).

As always, we extend hearty and continuing thanks to Kellogg NA, owners of The Keebler Company, who owns Sunshine Biscuits, who keeps sending us palettes of Cheez-It® for no real reason. It appears to be some sort of clerical error, but we are so not complaining.

Lastly, this post itself was sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC:™ Since 1914, America’s #1 Source for Federal Trade Regulations.©®”

Earth’s salvation rests in a display case on the Upper West Side. It is a cloth, somewhere between a rug and a shawl, with long, wispy tassels. A dizzying pattern weaves up and down its length, the work of many hands. It is a nearly perfect shade of gold. Dozens of pins hold the cloth down, their heads hidden snugly within the thread. The display case stands waist-high, angled like an architect’s drafting table, covered in spotless glass. Yet the case with its golden cloth is a side attraction in this lobby, dominated by a massive Native American canoe that hangs from the ceiling. At first glance, the cloth doesn’t look like something that might save the human race. That may sound like lofty expectations for a rug, but this particular rug happens to be the only known piece of fabric in the world to have been woven from spider silk.

That’s right, my friends. This is a spidergoat thing.

Analog Nation has chronicled the spidergoat menace a couple of times, tracing a direct line from the pursuit of spider silk to the charred end of civilization. The short version is this: A) Spider silk kicks ass. B) Spiders are impossible to farm. C) The biotech sector is working on a way to genetically combine spiders with goats, so that silk proteins can be harvested from the goats’ milk. D) The spidergoats will become sentient and rise as one to cast off the yoke of humanity. E) Apocalypse. Whether we realize it or not, we are in a race to develop artificial spider silk before the spidergoats unleash their Day of Darkness, like a cross between Skynet and the Matrix, but with hooves. And fangs. Horrible, horrible fangs.

[Read the rest →]

So here’s a weird sentence: I’m in a horror movie and we’re doing a raffle.

Here are some other weird sentences:

• I have a wheel barrow and these waffles are delicious.
• My house is on fire and your uncle called.
• The Dutch have a monarchy and some plastic is not recyclable.
• Several dishes are chipped and the children are scared.
• He enjoys ice-fishing and the measuring tape is in the basement.
• There is water on the moon and the floor is covered in leaves.

But the first sentence is a real thing that is actually happening. I have been cast in an independent horror movie produced by 221 Films, and there is a raffle to help raise funds. On the How-Independent-Is-Your-Movie scale, “holding a raffle” rates a solid nine.

Among other things, the money will go toward cabin rental, gas, coffee, makeshift bone weapons, the procurement of a fake deer, and the purchase of cardboard boxes to break a Russian stuntman’s fall. All of these things are also true, and not made up. Come to think of it, I’m starting to have second thoughts about this.