If time goes fast, it means you are doing nothing.

If time goes slow, you are doing much... but of no use.

Only if you look back a year, and you already lost the score of how many times you felt pride... there has been some use to your life.

JarFil

Many fiction tales have us delighted with slimy and "awful" monsters, born to the swamps, muddy pits and other places. Whay they haven't told us, and marketing tries to erase from our minds at all cost, is the fact that the first one dripping slimy beast, is the human being itself.

There's out on the ("civilized") world, an extended belief or way of thought most curious, which puts as on top of all the animals, calls us "superior beings", and believes in absolute cleanliness and tidiness. What a piece o bullshit.

The truth is that we're a bunch of slimy and dripping beings. All of us outpour liter after liter of sweat, saliva, mucus, feces, urine and wax through the ears. We are filled with sticky dirty blood stuck under pressure, lymph full of waste, stomach acids, bile, and a swarming wealth of bacterias int the intestines. If that was not enough, half the humanity drips vaginal secretions quite an amount of time each year.

We should look at ourselves from time to time, even if (specially if) we don't like whatever we see.

Of course, watching -civilized- extraterrestrials fleeing in dread and disgust at the mere sight of any of us, doesn't sell as much as making it the other way around. We humans must be the best ones, the most educated and civilized. Nobody likes to see how provincial, bad-mannered and awful one is, no matter how true that might be even according to his own opinion.

The future of technology related object design seems to fall towards miniaturization, but perhaps will come a day when we reach the actual physic limits of matter itself. The only way left then, would be to design multifunction systems, that is with functions at different functionality layers at the same time for a given element.

Today, it's usual to separate structural layers from functional ones, using different processes to achieve both, and a third process to join them together. But this means a single piece may have only a single function, needing another one -which would add up used space- to have a different function.

Future will probably bring us pieces both structural and functional simultaneously.

To achieve this, we will need precesses for automated systematization and joining, be it with artificial intelligence or not, in order to predict the joining possibilities between the different functionality layers.

Te downside of these systems, would by it's supportability. Pieces designed just to perform some given function elements needed at a single point in a design, absolutely non-standard according to our actual perceptions. Maybe before we start mixing layers together, we should find standardized ways of producing higly customizable pieces at a minimum cost far lower than current custom production processes...

Any case, future will be interesting.

Or that's what this video of a crossroads in Saint Petersburg seems to suggest (via macgyveresfriki, Menéame).

No giving way, no looking if someone is coming, no slowing at the crossing, overtaking on the inside... and all of that on an icy road! Looks like some would be glad to win a Darwin award at all cost.

A bit like this other video of another crossing, this time in India (via Menéame.) Yet here, most surprisingly as nobody seems to follow any rules, there seem to be no accidents