The Economist took a look at the future of airline interiors:

• At the moment there is a wide gap in the airline experience. On the one end planes are figuring out more ways to cram more seats into economy class.
• At the other end is Etihad airways that offers a three room hotel experience, complete with private chef and butler.
• Things could get worse for those who are only willing to pay for economy. Some airlines are thinking about standing room only planes for short haul trips – if the regulators will let them.
• But other changes could take place. By stacking seats so that some are raised, and some are lowered (pictured above) a plane could fit more passengers without compromising on space.
• Another concept is to have seats made of memory materials that can morph. They adjust to a person’s body size, and if a passenger is willing to pay more, the seat expands to become more like a business or first class one.
• Things like lighting could psychologically convince passengers that they have more space than they do. Lighting ceiling curves with sky-blue light generates a sense of expanding space above a passenger’s head.
• Meanwhile illuminating vertical walls with white light creates a sense of greater width.
• And the overall flying experience may improve. Large screens could replace windows and provide a better view of the outside as passengers fly through the air.

The full article has many more details, with pictures showing the various configurations that may greet the passengers of the future. You should read it here.

Source: The Economist

As recently as 1970 United Airlines offered men only flights wrote Gary Leff:

• The flights operated between the New York-Chicago and Los Angeles-San Francisco business districts.
• Both women and children were banned from the planes except, of course, for the air hostesses who would light the men’s complimentary cigars.
• “Last minute message service” was offered, allowing passengers to have the airline make a call to the office on their behalf.
• The flights also had a teletype update service to provide passengers with closing market numbers.
• One possibly apocryphal story from the era suggests that when wives of frequent travelers on the men only flights were asked about the flight, the most common response was “what flight?”

See ads for the flight from the era, and read more over here.

Source: View from the Wing

Via: Marginal Revolution

Cracked covered some of the more interesting career options available in the computer gaming industry:

• Computer Sports athletes can make incredible sums of money. Not just through winning game championships – which can be worth millions – but also through team sponsorships.
• Sponsoring a computer game player is particularly lucrative since a lot of people who watch professional esports are players themselves and so a sponsor knows that they’re appealing to their target base.
• But players don’t have to play professionally to make money. Those who stream their screen through services like Twitch while they’re playing can also make a load of money, as long as the way they play is entertaining.
• Any professional sport has professional commentators that describe game action and provide pre/post-game analysis.
• Professional teams with millions banked on them also need teem managers to ensure the players are well rested and don’t party too hard before a game.
• Unfortunately the average person can’t necessarily take up any of these jobs. A lot of the support roles are filled by retirees from the industry – usually those around 30.

Read more about the industry and other fascinating career tracks here.

Source: Cracked

Chico Harlan looked into the depths of internet history and after clearing the dust away was surprised to find a thriving company:

• Fifteen years ago MapQuest was a verb much like Google. People would say that they are “MapQuesting” the directions to a place.
• Yet today it’s not at all a part of the national conversation – despite having the second highest share of the American mapping market.
• It has considered changing its name to get more attention but decided not to as it has a lot of brand equity. 40 million people use MapQuest every month.
• Unlike the users of Google, Bing, and Apple maps who find it preinstalled on their phones, users of MapQuest are making a conscious decision to find and use MapQuest specifically.
• The company has also tied up with businesses. Papa John’s uses MapQuest to power its pizza delivery system.
• The company is careful with its spending. HERE, a competing mapping service, has 6,000 employees. MapQuest makes do with 100.
• It has also avoided jumping on trends that attract a lot of attention but seemingly serve little purpose such as 3D buildings.
• As a result of this the company is profitable and after updating its website, is aiming for a second wind.

Read more about the company, how it got here, how its parent company’s acquisition by Verizon could change things, and more over here.

Source: The Washington Post

Via: Marginal Revolution

Ella Morton wrote about Presidential Libraries:

• The tradition began when, instead of keeping his White House documents with him when he left office, Franklin D. Roosevelt donated them to the Federal Government.
• To showcase them the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum was built.
• By 1978 handing documents over to the government at the end of one’s tenure in office had become law since documents from previous administrations such as George Washington’s kept getting lost or destroyed.
• Libraries serve the purpose of complying with the law and a museum section builds a story of the President’s legacy.
• Money for the libraries is raised by a foundation while the President is in office. The foundation for George W. Bush raised $500 million.
• Because of this the libraries are biased to portray the President in a positive light – even for infamously notorious one such as Nixon.
• Over time, as the administration’s team begins to age and fade away, it is possible for the library to take a more critical view of the President’s legacy.
• For example Truman’s Presidential library wasn’t able to scrutinize the President’s decision to use the nuclear bomb against Japan until long after he had passed.
• As libraries age, and the President’s they’re focused on begin to fade from public memory, the libraries struggle to draw visitors.
• They can then be repurposed as community areas with events such as speakers.
• Nixon’s library is actually a surprisingly popular place to host weddings.

Find out which Presidential Library is the most popular and which is the least, as well as many more details here.

Source: Atlas Obscura

Despite the spread of user-centric technology over the past two decades, democracy, a system of government that is about empowering the individual, seems to have stagnated writes Thomas Carothers. He put together a group of experts to explain why:

• Technology is good at empowering people at the local level, for example by calling attention to potholes in roads, but it isn’t a useful tool to spread change nationally.
• This may change as technology focuses the minds of those governing high density urban centers. Popular mayors who effectively respond to local feedback may then go onto change things nationally.
• Another reason maybe that technology can be used to sow dissent rather than democratic unity. After all radio – the predecessor to social media – was used to stir passions during the Rwandan genocide.
• Autocrats leading countries have also learnt to use social media and technology to crackdown on dissidents.
• And technology hasn’t really spread as much as people commonly assume. In Turkey, for example, half of all households lack internet access. They get their news from easily censored forms of media.
• Finally technology may have very little to do with spreading self-determination. Democracy requires institutions such as political parties and individual-centric social media does little to build them.

Read more of the arguments, theories, and thoughts, in a fascinating article here.

Source: Foreign Policy

Las Vegas, Nevada, is finally building a stadium that will allow it to have a professional sports team. This heralds a wider era of the gamblification of sports writes Joseph Stromberg:

• Due to previous match fixing scandals betting on sports has been banned in the United States – though loopholes exist.
• However the craze for things like fantasy sports shows that people enjoy predicting the outcomes of sports matches – and would likely wager money on their predictions.
• Fantasy Duel, a site that essentially allows people to bet on individual players made $57 billion in revenues last year.
• Teams will want a piece of the action. They could do so by, for example, offering in-seat betting.
• The stadium in Nevada may well be the first place where experiments such as this are set up.
• As for match-fixing, proponents of legalization argue that it’ll be easier to monitor anomalous betting patterns if gambling is done on official exchanges.

Read more here.

Source: Vox

Tyler Cowen discussed research about traffic management by ants:

• Ants never seem to get stuck in traffic jams, even on trails over 60 feet long.
• Unlike humans, when traffic is heavy, ants speed up instead of slowing down.
• They also widen their trail as more of them arrive on it.
• Since they don’t have great vision ants use their antennae and legs to figure out who’s behind and in front of them.
• This seems to be key to their ability to manage traffic. While human drivers are unable to do this, driverless cars probably will be able to.

You can read more here, and find the full study here.

Source: Marginal Revolution

Roberto A. Ferdman wrote about the effects that weight loss drugs have:

• It is thought that those who take weight loss pills such as appetite suppressants may end up gaining weight because they feel that they no longer have to watch what they eat or how much they exercise.
• New research indicates that merely being exposed to an advert for a weight loss pill drives people to eat worse – even if they didn’t actually take the pill.
• It seems that being told that there is a potential remedy for weight gain out there persuades people that they don’t have to worry too much about gaining weight.
• This effect disappears when pills are advertized as supplements instead of drugs.
• This might be because drugs are seen as something that work without any effort on the user’s part, unlike supplements.

Read more here.

Source: The Washington Post