Saw this at a friend’s house — a combination hammer / screwdriver. With a gratuitously beautiful floral print. (I blew the image up to show the pattern better, like what they do on the outside of cookie boxes.)
It’s part of an ingenious product line (”Pretty Useful Tools” — get it?). Offering drab-free functionality for handymen and handywomen near you!
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Recently finished Daemon and Freedom, Daniel Suarez’ two-part semi-dystopic vision of the future. I say semi-dystopic because they weren’t all bad news. Loved them both, for the fact that they informed of the capabilities of computational power today — in a seamless manner that didn’t slow the action of the story. In this feat, they reminded me of Gore Vidal’s Creation, the master’s bracing tale spanning pretty much the entirety of 5th-century-BC Eurasia. Which, come to think of it, might be deserving of a re-read, about now…
On the surface, Daemon is a story in the “machine turns on its creator” genre. Like “2001″. And “Frankenstein”. And for that matter, the Bible. 
Freedom builds on this to reveal a clash between two competing visions for the future.
More profoundly, the dyad explores how our social/societal structures may change in the coming decades, based on the interplay of our current crises and the capacities of new technology. All wrapped up in a masterful storyline. With fiction like that, who needs textbooks? 
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note: Suarez has also given a lecture at the Long Now Foundation, well worth the invested time. It’s available here. Most intriguing to me was the idea that in a short time, bots will begin to outnumber humans online. We won’t be the dominant “species”.
It seems somehow analogous to the apparent fact that mutual funds outnumber stocks, in the investment sector: the derivative species (bots, mutual funds) ultimately flourishing more than the original species it interacts with (humans, stocks).
Apparently, the images-with-distorted-text used to prevent automated e-mail signup, are being used to manually digitise sections of text archives which OCR (optical character recognition) technology can’t use.
That’s the premise behind reCaptcha, the follow-on to Captcha (which — being “Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computer and Humans Apart” — initials out to Capttttcha).
This is very, very cool — it makes the anti-spam login step bifunctional: in addition to fulfilling the intended purpose, a valuable side benefit is also provided.
Like Skype or file-sharing, it leverages an existing infrastructure. But instead of data transmission infrastructure or computer memory, reCaptcha capitalizes on the “gatekeeping service” crucial to innumerable websites.
Very cool, and worthy of being my first polyfunctionality tag!