The future of fashion is the past.

This is way less ridiculous than you might think. Just look at the guy's outfit at the end and realise that every webmaster you know looks like this, except all the gadgets are smaller. That's how the thirties envisioned the neckbeard they knew was coming, instinctively. Women in shiny, metalic dresses? The same outfit throughout the day? These guys knew exactly what was up. There's way to much pointing out of the obvious failures. We forget that the reason we don't have rocket cars isn't because we don't want them, it's because they're too expensive, ridiculous and unsafe. So many of these things are more cyclical than we'd like to admit. Imagine sitting in the sixties movie version of H.G. Wells' time machine and looking only at beard fashions from circa 1880-2010: Seeing unkempt muttonchops degrade to pencil thin mustaches, to clean shaven, to hippie hair, degrading into sideburns, back to mullets and 'taches, on to gelled tops and goatees, to resurgent neckbeards and permastubble.

Evolution as art...

They're already pretty cool, but the most interesting thing about these things is the design process they go through. The artist is trying to simulate genuine animals by selecting successful traits and passing them along to the next generation. If he manages to build some kind of replication function in, this means we might be looking at a genuine plague of pvc sculptures on Dutch beaches. What if he has to build a predator to thin the herd? The possibilities are legion.

Brand diversification...

I used to love the National Geographic magazine, perfect for all the information you needed for any kind of school project and full of interesting pictures and diagrams to contrast the long, boring articles. When I became a bit older, the articles were actually okay, even if they were mostly written in that awful arch magazine style that makes so many publications utterly exhausting to read. But the National Geographic channel is mostly awful. Somehow it always manages to be less informative and a lot more pointlessly stupid than Discovery. There's a hell of a lot more 'America's blankest blank' á la Fox, and a lot less things you actually want to know. This is beyond the pale though. Who in their right minds would buy National geographic endorsed scents? What's next? The Economist sponsored global capitalism meal at McDonald's? Did the latest round of re- or deconglomeration turn these two into strange bedfellows? And what marketing dickhead engineered this?