M.J. Rose

Isaac Asimov was a true futurist —

For example, he predicted this:

“Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth…”

We Live in the Future Nobody Predicted

(Mysterious Universe blog)

“Flash back to the 1964 World’s Fair. One of the greatest science fiction writers of your generation, someone who is also a well-respected science writer with a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Columbia University, makes a series of relatively modest predictions about the year 2014. If there were, say, a Mysterious Universe radio show covering the fair, Isaac Asimov’s predictions would be among the top stories, and for good reason.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we look back on the article…and most of us agree that Isaac Asimov did incredibly well, because we’ve gotten so accustomed to off-the-wall predictions that Asimov’s stand out as reasonable…”

Read the rest here, at Mysterious Universe.

What do you think the world will be like in another fifty years? Please share your predictions below in the comments section. M.J. and The Museum of Mysteries would like to hear your ideas…

As if the zombie apocalypse happened and everyone abandoned their cars trying to get out of town…

Photos of a traffic jam stuck in the woods for 70 years

(Death and Taxes magazine)

“Around the town of Chatillon, Belgium, the end of World War II left a few creepy hallmarks of the armistice in the form of long lines of cars left abandoned by the hundreds in the woods. While one theory goes that the cars belonged to Americans who left them in a hurry on their way off the continent, Bored Panda points out that no one really knows for sure…”

For more photos of this strangeness, click here.

…But would you have worn them anyway?

Two skeletons dressed as lady and gentleman in “the Arsenic Waltz,” Etching (1862) (courtesy Wellcome Library, London)

Fatal Victorian Fashion and the Allure of the Poison Garment

by Allison Meier

“Staying stylish in the Victorian period could be a dance of death. While industrialization and mass production made more beautiful fashions widely available, the green dresses were dyed with arsenic-based pigments, the mercury necessary to make shiny beaver top hats drove the hatters insane, and all that tulle and cinched corsets contorting women into airy nymphs would not infrequently cause them to tumble into gas lamps and go up in flames.

Opened this week at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, Fashion Victims: The Pleasures and Perils of Dress in the 19th Century explores the dangers of style not just for the wearers, but for the people who made the clothing as well. The exhibition of over 90 artifacts was organized by Bata Shoe Museum Senior Curator Elizabeth Semmelhack, and Alison Matthews David, an associate professor at the School of Fashion at Ryerson University who is publishing a book next year focusing on deadly fashion. Together the curators explored medical archives and collections in France and England, and delved into the museums’ extensive assortment of 19th century shoes and private collections searching for examples of the “poison garment,” hauling green shoes and shoeboxes to a physics lab to test for their lethal secrets…”

For the complete piece click here.