Posted by Paul Ryan, Editor, Anthill Magazine

Global economic news, never a bundle of laughs at the sunniest of times, has been stripped of all but the darkest shades of mirth in recent months. But laugh we must. So here it is, a shard of peat-black humour plucked straight from the shattered looking-glass now resting at our feet.

The Brokers With Hands on their Faces Blog contains photos, one after another, of stock brokers touching different parts of their faces as they watch on in disbelief at recent manic market machinations. The blog contains no words, for none are required. Amateur anthropologists with a wicked streak prefer their irony served raw.

Posted by Paul Ryan, Editor, Anthill Magazine

Ahhh, Google. What did we ever do without you?

I find it quite reassuring that Google, the money-making internet juggernaut, occasionally lets a flourish of humour escape from its well-oiled machine.

Today, Gmail Labs released a new feature called “Mail Goggles”, which introduces obstacles to protect users from their own ill-conceived, inebriated communiqués.

To quote the Official Gmail Blog:

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?

It’s great to see Google’s engineers working on solutions to real problems in their 20% free time, rather than, say, building robot armies.

To my mind, the only way Mail Goggles could be improved is by introducing an occasional secondary pop-up, even (especially) if you get the arithmetic challenge correct. These could include:

“He’s not interested.”
“She’s broke your heart, dude.”
“Move ON!”
Or an audio message, in a C-3PO voice: “Master [name], I really must advise against this!”

But then, that would be implausible, as Google only does algorithms.