Step In and Stand Clear of the Good News

Some of the country’s most classic designs share a sensibility with its most grievous offenses.

The Museum Of Endangered Sounds is owned and operated by me, Brendan Chilcutt (handle: kidpeleus99@aol.com).

I launched the site in January of 2012 as a way to preserve the sounds made famous by my favorite old technologies and electronics equipment. For instance, the textured rattle and hum of a VHS tape being sucked into the womb of a 1983 JVC HR-7100 VCR. As you probably know, it’s a wonderfully complex sound, subtle yet unfiltered. But, as streaming playback becomes more common in the US, and as people in developing nations like Canada and the UK get brought up to DVD players, it’s likely that the world will have seen and heard the last of older machines like the HR-7100. And as new products comes to market, we stand to lose much more than VCRs.

Imagine a world where we never again hear the symphonic startup of a Windows 95 machine. Imagine generations of children unacquainted with the chattering of angels lodged deep within the recesses of an old cathode ray tube TV. And when the entire world has adopted devices with sleek, silent touch interfaces, where will we turn for the sound of fingers striking QWERTY keypads? Tell me that. And tell me: Who will play my GameBoy when I’m gone?

These questions and more led me to the undertaking that is The Museum Of Endangered Sounds.

My ten-year plan is to complete the data collection phase by the year 2015, and spend the next seven years developing the proper markup language to reinterpret the sounds as a binary composition.

If you don’t understand my passion and the significance of my work, you probably never will. But if you do, then you’ve come to the right place.

Women under thirty and retired men might have surprisingly similar tastes for gambling. Natasha Dow Schüll explains how casinos have created a new kind of crowd.

mentalflossr:

Thanks to lost paperwork, diplomatic technicalities, or just plain forgetting they had declared war in the first place, many countries remained in a state of war long after the actual fighting had stopped.

1. Roman Republic vs. Carthaginian Republic – 2,134 years

After two Punic wars,…

It’s here. The self-making bed. Whether it is because you don’t have time to make things tidy, or you can’t be bothered to do it yourself it doesn’t really matter. This bed will make itself in a mere 50 seconds.

Spanish furniture maker OHEA is behind the bed that makes itself. The bed looks unassuming enough, but once activated it looks like one of James Bond’s cars with all kinds of hidden doors and levers springing into action.

I hope women don’t have to take pills to restore their fashion drive.