The Weekly Echo 11/11

It's 11/11/11! Make a wish — especially if you happen to be reading this at 11:11 p.m. We love the way Gawker celebrated this Day of Many Ones by digging up the New York Times story from the last 11/11/11 — that would be 1911. Of course, that full date technically had us beat, with seven ones to today's six. But as we are among "those who delight in curious trifles," we admit we got a kick out of writing so many identical digits so close together. Such a date gets one wondering about the next 11/11/11 — you know, the future! There are always plenty of ideas about the future floating around, especially in the design and tech fields. Should those ideas feel familiar, or should they awe us with mind-blowing speculation about what the world could become? We enjoyed this rant about why one newly popular vision of the future just isn't visionary enough. If you've paid attention to any social media projects in the past few years — and you're reading a blog, so we're guessing you have — you've probably stumbled across the notion of the "social graph," the idea of representing your relationships in a convenient, machine-readable form. But what if this mythical "social graph" turns out to be neither social nor a graph? We loved the subtitle on this article: "Your phone can get you to the museum, but it can't guide you to the T-Rex." Why is indoor navigation so hard? Speaking of indoor navigation, do you ever walk into another room, only to immediately forget why you were going there in the first place? A new study suggests that doors act as event boundaries, wiping our memory clean when we walk between rooms. We wondered: Does the same thing happen when switching application windows or even browser tabs? And finally: Never send your colleagues an embarrassingly outdated YouTube video again! A new tool called Is It Old? aims to help you prevent the public shame that could result from telling everyone about this hilarious "double rainbow" dude you just discovered. And no, according to the tool, Is It Old? can never be too old to share. Whew.