Wave!!!

Say goodbye to the legendary Kacey Jordan aka Courtney Nicole. One woman who ruled the porn business rather than letting it rule her. She has deleted her Twitter feed, which was post-post modern reality genius to the Nth degree. She went out with one last wild two weeks f*cking her fans and devotees at a Nevada prostitution ranch.

Says here she is a star who will be heard from again...

Fun Chart

What day of the month is your birthday? 1 thru 31... Check out this fun numerological analysis here of what the number of your birthday means. Don't take it too seriously. From Tarot.com.

Think your office is getting smaller?

It is probably because it is.



The Los Angeles Times reports that in the 1970s, American companies typically believed that they needed 500 to 700 square feet per employee to build an effectively functioning office. Today, the average is barely more than 200 square feet per person, and the space allocated could hit a mere 50 square feet per by the year 2015. The Times cites several long-term trends that are converging to crunch office space. Technologies like laptops over desktop computers, cellphones over landlines and outsourced data back-up over in-house servers are finally beginning to affect the way offices are laid out. Younger employees are more used to working in communal spaces and as part of a team. Part of the reason too is economic, cubicles have shrunk from an average of 64 sq.ft. to 49 sq.ft. in recent years, and companies continue to look for more ways to stretch their real estate dollar.

Imagine what the office will look like when the Facebook generation arrives.

The LA Times predicts a revolution in the commercial real estate market quoting Peter Miscovich, who studies workplace trends as a managing director at brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle, "We're at a very interesting inflection point in real estate history. The next 10 years will be very different than the last 30."

Read the whole article here.

Science fiction predictions...

that came true. There is a lot of debate about whether or not the majority of science fiction predictions come true. Of course, the easy answer is no. Hundreds, even thousands, of science fiction books are published every year. Most sink like silent stones in the vast cultural pond.

The Clarion Content's editor attended a lecture this week at Duke University, by the great science fiction writer, William Gibson. Gibson made this very point, most science fiction predictions do not come true. He further noted that despite being visions of the future, years on, science fiction books are viewed as a commentary on their times. So while he wrote Neuromancer about the year 2025, it will be viewed by history as a book about 1984 which is when it was published.

It was interesting then, only days after this lecture and absorbing this point, to see a list of eleven science fiction predictions that according to Sarah Kessler of Mashable came true.

Check it out here, from the tank to the i-pod, from the cubicle to the escalator. Kessler includes the excerpts from the texts of the original authors to make her point. It is a fun read.

Clear Airplanes?!?

You read that correctly, dear readers. Airbus engineers have come up with a design for a passenger plane that could be made completely see-through. In theory it would work like this: in flight, the plane's captain would give a warning and then push a button that would send electrical currents through the plane's futuristic high-tech ceramic skin. The skin would peel back to reveal glass all the way around.

Straight out of science fiction! We think they would need a lot of doctors and defibrillators to deal with the heart attacks. Unfortunately for those who think they could hang, the date for the concept plane to hit the runways is 2050. Read more here.

Super Bowl ratings

The last time the Nielsen's were updated this was a cutting edge color TV

A savvy, local, Durham painter made an interesting comment to the Clarion Content's editor the other day. He said that he thought this might be the highest rated Super Bowl ever. The analysis behind his argument was tight. The mid-Atlantic Snowmageddon snowstorm guaranteed a huge chunk of the country is a captive audience. It also means that in that region far fewer folks will be watching collectively at sports bars and other peoples' houses.

Long time readers of the Clarion Content know that we have been highly critical of the Nielsen ratings for ages for just this reason. The Nielsen's are a monopoly and have not been pressed to get better. This flaw has existed for ages and they have ignored it. The biggest television spectacles and especially sporting events tend to be watched collectively, the Oscars and the Super Bowl are the classic examples. The Nielsen's in no way account for this. They continually underrate the viewing audiences for these events by counting television sets, not eyeballs. They do not account for sports bars. The Nielsen's are wildly wrong during the NCAA tournament and every Sunday of the NFL season.

We agree with our local painter, this Super Bowl could be the highest rated Super Bowl ever by Nielsen. But will that really mean more people watched it?

Podcast killed the radio star

Bill Simmons, the Clarion Content's favorite sports columnist, made a fascinating prediction in a pre-Super Bowl chat the other day. Here it is...

I love doing the podcasts and feel like I'm on the ground floor of a medium that is really starting to take off. It's like radio on demand and I think it's going to kill satellite radio in 2 years. I really do. It's also a huge threat to real radio in my opinion, especially when people can get internet in their cars and can just cue podcasts up within 3 clicks. It's astonishing to me that nobody has written a long piece about podcasts yet. This is EXACTLY the same as what happened with sportswriting in the late-90s where nobody was taking the internet seriously and suddenly within 7 years there were a million sports blogs, mainstream sites were crushing newspapers and newspapers were hemorrhaging money. We are headed that way with podcasts. I just think radio is going to become much more niche-oriented over these next 10 years... people don't see it yet. Christian Slater in "Pump Up The Volume" is going to look like a genius.

Links were added ex post facto by the Clarion Content.