Stereograph of man with device designed for flying. xplanes

Happy New Year, everyone! (photo via Flickr Commons)

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5 RND(1)); : GOTO 10, an awesome downloadable book elaborating about the title’s Commodore 64 one-liner (which produces something like in the above image).

This piece of retro advertising is almost perfect (-ly wrong) on so many levels. And I love the texts — “For responsible work” / “Porto Cigarettes — the base of your decision”. It only lacks one thing: booze. Pedro Quintas

Soviets in space! Here’s an interesting set of USSR space propaganda posters. Politics aside, I always thought the Russian space program rocked. Just look at how the Soyuz spaceship is now the only reliable vehicle for taking cosmonauts to orbit, now that the Space Shuttle has been decomissioned. Or consider that the Soviets managed to land a probe in Hell (meaning, of course, planet Venus) and send back some pictures. Trivium

New York storefronts.

A 110-year old map of undersea communication cables from. The Portuguese coast is quite busy and I wonder if this is still the case today Boing Boing.

On a related note, Neal Stephenson’s Mother Earth Mother Board, a surprisingly entertaining (at least for me) account of the laying of undersea fiberoptic cables in late 20th century.

Video games vs Real Life: When I was a child, I may have spent too many rainy days playing Double Dragon in my ZX Spectrum. Such my Pavlovian reaction to this picture.