J.J Sedelmier gives a detailed overview of 7Up branding in Salon, from 1929 to the early 1970s.

From the Kalid Azad's excellent BetterExplained blog:

 

Analogies are handles to grasp a larger, more slippery idea. They’re a raft to cross a river, and can be abandoned once on the other side. Unempathetic experts may think the raft is useless, since they no longer use it, or perhaps they were such marvelous swimmers it was never needed!

Analogies are perfectly fine. But why do they work so well?

Our brains are association machines. Connections, relationships, patterns — we need meaning! Yet we present topics as if we could be programmed with raw information.

Conventional wisdom holds that the lottery is a tax on people who don't understand statistics or probability, but DC Woods, a statistician from Melbourne, Australia, begs to differ.

So why do I still buy lottery tickets? Definitely not for the expected monetary return on investment. I think of it as a discretionary entertainment spend. I get literally hours of enjoyment from fantasizing what I’d do if I won. I happily spend $25 for two hours of entertainment at the movies, and I don’t judge the value of that experience based on its expected return. For me, a lottery ticket for the occasional big draw has just as much entertainment value, or more, than the many other things that I spend money on to entertain myself.

The decision of whether to buy a lottery ticket shouldn’t be based on the probability of winning, or the expected return of a ticket, but on the entertainment value that comes from imagining a different life. If that entertainment value compares favourably with other activities with a similar price, then go for it. Plus, it has the added bonus that you might actually win; one-in-a-million events happen every day. Someone eventually wins the big prize, and you have to be in to win.

This surely deserves an Ig Nobel:

Krechetnikov and his graduate student Hans Mayer decided to investigate coffee spilling at a fluid dynamics conference last year when they watched overburdened participants trying to carry their drinks to and fro. They quickly realized that the physics wasn't simple. Aside from the mechanics of human walking, which depends on a person's age, health, and gender, there is the highly involved science of liquid sloshing, which depends on a complex interplay of accelerations, torques, and forces.

This goofy video shows off the Blit terminal from Bell Labs in 1982, one of the first multitasking graphics environments for Unix. Many of us multiask a lot on our computers these days, chatting, surfing the Web, playing games, and even writing blog posts at the same time, but the concept was still very new. Most people hadn't even seen a mouse outside of research labs, so the video has to explain how they work.

(via: VintageCG)

While Adobe Photoshop is synonomous with image manipulation, the concept was well as image processing tools existed before Photoshop was released in the early '90s.

Gerard Holzmann has made his book,  Beyond Photography: The Digital Darkroom, originally published in 1988, available on the Web. It shows a lot of photo manipulation techniques using a program called Pico (not to be confused with the text editor of the same name).

It's always good to remember that modern technologies are often older than you think they are.

Update: Got the cover up. Posterous was being balky about uploads earlier today. I should also take the opportunity to note that a lot of Bell Labs people responsible for Unix, including the late Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson and Rob Pike show up as subjects in the book.

The classic English folk-rock band, minus Sandy Denny but still featuring Richard Thompson at this point. But it's Dawe Swarbrick who dominates with his fiddle. Just watch the crowd go nuts in the second half.

Mozilla's Privacy and Public Policy lead recently wrote to Andy Greenberg of Forbes:

While we wholeheartedly support a more secure Internet, CISPA has a broad and alarming reach that goes far beyond Internet security. The bill infringes on our privacy, includes vague definitions of cybersecurity, and grants immunities to companies and government that are too broad around information misuse. We hope the Senate takes the time to fully and openly consider these issues with stakeholder input before moving forward with this legislation.

One of the many classic lineups: Bill Bruford, Adiran Belew, Tony Levin, and of course Robert Fripp. Yes, that is a Chapman Stick in the video.

RIM must be trying to go out of business:

In one commercial - perhaps the one RIM has pushed most prominently - an attractive woman named Meredith Valiando touts the iconic BlackBerry keyboard, one of the last staple selling features left for RIM in an iPhone- and Android-dominated world. And that's fine - playing to one's strength is a natural and effective marketing tactic. But RIM also thrashes touchscreens, with Meredith dryly saying, "I get 1,000 emails a day. Try writing 1,000 emails on a touchscreen."

Now, have a peek at today's keynote presentation from Thorsten at BlackBerry World 2012. He confirmed that the first BB10-powered smartphone will be a touchscreen-only device.