The marketing geniuses at Neutrogena, realizing how crowded the women’s skin care product sector is, have been selling vibrators. But not just any vibrator, a vibrator that a woman can, with head held high, take through airport security, buy at the drugstore, and leave in plain sight for the kids to find. Brilliant.
It’s the Neutrogena Wave, a sex toy with plausible deniability built-in.
Here’s to wiggle room:
Via WSJ:
Can physicists produce insights about language that have eluded linguists and English professors? That possibility was put to the test this week when a team of physicists published a paper drawing on Google’s massive collection of scanned books. They claim to have identified universal laws governing the birth, life course and death of words.
The paper marks an advance in a new field dubbed “Culturomics”: the application of data-crunching to subjects typically considered part of the humanities. Last year a group of social scientists and evolutionary theorists, plus the Google Books team, showed off the kinds of things that could be done with Google’s data, which include the contents of five-million-plus books, dating back to 1800.
Published in Science, that paper gave the best-yet estimate of the true number of words in English—a million, far more than any dictionary has recorded (the 2002 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary has 348,000). More than half of the language, the authors wrote, is “dark matter” that has evaded standard dictionaries.
This creepy PR salvo consists of turning homeless human beings into walking hotspots at SXSWi, and having them wear t-shirts identifying themselves as such. Much like hailing a cab, you flag down a homeless person and have them stand next to you while you feed your jones for sending pointless texts to you friends via human antennae – texts that probably read, “this is so cool. using homeless dude as as WiFi spot at SXSWi. not going to pay him LOL!”
Yep, they don’t necessarily get paid. There is a suggested donation of 2 dollars per 15 minutes.
Their dehumanization is complete. They are just part of the machinery now – Borgs.
Par for the course from what has become the soulless, self-indulgent juggernaut called SXSWi. This cruel novelty is brought to you by marketing firm Bartle Bogle Hegarty via BBH.
More on the manky, disfigured branch of the evolutionary tree upon which BBH perches its hooves, courtesy of Wired.