All Thoroughbred horses born in the Northern Hemisphere technically share the same birthday: January 1. Happy birthday, horsies!

• horse racing
• sports

What are you optimistic about?

Each year John Brockman asks his nebulous band of futurists and pundits a question. The Edge Annual Question for 2007 is:

What are you optimistic about? Why?

I wasn’t asked to participate, but if I had been, my answer would have been something like the following.

I’m not an optimist by nature, so a question like this is a bit difficult to answer. But as I look around at friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances, what gives me hope is while these people might sometimes be pessimistic in what they say, they are optimistic in what they do. The cost of saying something, publishing something even, is cheap these days, but actually doing something still costs emotionally, physically, economically, socially. As a barometer of how we’re all doing, this is a good sign…in spite of what we hear in the media and from each other.

What are you optimistic about? Why?

• edge
• johnbrockman

10 kick ass opening credit sequences from movies (+ accompanying YouTube videos). The credits for Se7en will forever be my favorite, if only because they inspired me (in part) to become a designer.

• best of
• design
• lists
• movies
• se7en

The sex of my brain is neither male nor female…I’m right in the middle.

• neuroscience
• sexuality

Ian Frazier on operating the shower curtain. As a showering enthusiast, I appreciated the description of the convection effect that causes the shower curtain to inexplicably fly inward.

• funny
• showering

Faces of New York. Photographer Simon Hoegsberg asks people about their faces and then photographs them. “Essentially I would say I have made a drastic change the last three years. Age caught up with me. Good times caught up with me. Wild parties caught up with me. And what I see now is a truly aging woman. I no longer see the spontaneous, witty, charming…I see an elderly woman. And I find that difficult, but in a way very freeing.”

• NYC
• photography

2007 trend maps

A pair of trend maps for 2007, both based on subway maps. The top one depicts the top online companies/brands & how they’re connected while the bottom one deals with ideas (with the River of Consciousness standing in for the Thames).

Both maps were found in this article about internet predictions in 2007. I don’t know about you, but I find these types of maps fun to look at, but completely inscrutable informationally speaking. Surely there’s a more enlightening way to present this information than in Tube map form.

• business
• maps
• remix
• subway
• Web 2.0

A couple worth $2 billion did their own divorce in an afternoon over a bottle of wine. “Life’s too short, they figured. And why give the lawyers all the money if you can work it out yourselves?”

• marriage
• money

Classic Slate piece: how to buy a mattress. “The mattress biz is 99-percent marketing. So just buy the cheapest thing you can stand and be done with it, because they’re pretty much all the same.” (via torrez)

• how to

Aha! So that *was* Richard Branson getting wanded by security in Casino Royale.

Update: Branson also appeared in Superman Returns. (thx, charles)

• casinoroyale
• movies
• richardbranson

Slate’s Year in Culture, the most amazing and disappointing cultural events for 2006.

• best of
• best of 2006
• lists