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Better Book Titles

Dan Wilbur of Better Book Titles aims to "improve" book titles by distilling them to their essential elements: This page is for people who have trouble slogging through the information on book jackets or feel intimidated by the title and cover itself. How many times have you perused the cover of a novel only to rub your sore eyes and realize you’ve learned NOTHING from the book’s title?! This blog is for people who do not have thousands of hours to read book reviews or blurbs or first sentences. I will cut through all the cryptic crap, and give you the meat of the story in one condensed image. Now you can read the greatest literary works of all time in merely seconds! Take...

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The Baby Name Map [Google Maps]

Check out the Baby Name Map to find out which names are most popular in your state (or country), all conveniently laid out on a Google Map. What's interesting is that many of the most popular names seem to have no state or country boundaries, which wouldn't have been the case just 50 years ago with limited media and mass communication channels. I think that J, whose primary requirement in choosing baby names was not to know anyone in real life with that name, would be happy to find out that the name we chose for our girl does not seem to be very popular at the moment. Neither the first nor middle name made it to the top 100 in...

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What Credit Card Agreements Should Look Like

Branding expert Alan Siegel has designed a model credit card agreement that is only one page long, is easy to understand, and communicates everything that the average user would need to know about their credit card. As such, "It therefore has no chance of coming to life" according to The Consumerist and I must sadly agree. See TED to view Siegel's talk, which calls for a simple, sensible redesign of tax forms, credit agreements, healthcare legislation, etc to make legal paperwork intelligible to the rest of us. ...

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