Matt Lee 13 Jun 06

That banner is proper nasty. I can still see bits of it.

I miss the ‘slap the monkey’ era of banners.

joe 13 Jun 06

That universal packing list is pretty cool. I was thinking the other night about a “whole week grocery list” generator… I wonder what other cool auto list generators people can think of…

Jon Maddox 13 Jun 06

The creator of that ad should be ashamed of them selves.

Luis 13 Jun 06

I don’t know man.

The last thing I remembered was this flashing banner, then I woke up not being able to account for 5 hours of lost time!

Weird.

Eric 13 Jun 06

High Fructrose Corn Syrup is evil, it is way too hard to find any food that doesn’t have some in it. I modified my diet a few months ago to avoid HFCa dn I still get a little (why is it in Ketchup?) but I feel a lot better and have lost a little weight.

Randy Peterman 13 Jun 06

I’m actually allergic to corn (though corn oil doesn’t appear to have any negative effects on me in smaller quantities. I don’t bathe in the stuff). By not eating corn or corn syrup I don’t find my skin drying up and cracking and eventually bleeding [allergy induced stigmata?].

I avoid corn syrup because I have to, but to get organic ketchup and organic everything else is expensive. I eat healthier than most because I have to. Corn Syrup is from the devil ;)

sj 13 Jun 06

I finished reading the abs diet a few weeks back (impending nuptuals make you do strange things) and it was pretty compelling. I always thought of myself as a healthy guy, but between all the corn syrup and trans fat I’ve ingested in my lifetime it’s a wonder I didn’t die when I was twelve.

Mike Morton! 13 Jun 06

The Universal Packing List may be the greatest website I’ve ever seen.

bg 13 Jun 06

The Phaidon Design Classics book may be great, but these flash transitions suck a great deal. I stopped exploring after the third click.
Made me a non-buyer.

Roman 13 Jun 06

Along with corn syrup, soy seems to be added to everything these days as oil or even worse as a partially hydrogenated oil. Trans-fats, yumm.

Maybe a good alternative to other oils, but I’m allergic to it. It gives me the same problems as Randy, dry cracking skin… nice.

Rob Cameron 13 Jun 06

100 years ago they didn’t have high fructose corn syrup. Of course, 100 years ago the average life expectancy for a male was 49 years. Direct correlation? Yes.

Kevin 13 Jun 06

A great and extensive discussion of HFCS is in Michael Pollans’ book “The Omnivore’s Dillema.”

Rob: they didn’t have high fructose corn syrup *20* years ago, much less 100. It’s very hard not to see a correlation between its introduction in the 1980’s an the obscene number of hugely fat people in America. I practially weep when I see parents in grocery stores loading up carts with gallons upon gallons of sugary childrens’ drinks and boxes of crunchy sugar cereals. But on the other hand, how damn stupid do you have to be to feed that shit to children?

Jeedee 13 Jun 06

I guess the banner acheived it’s goal since you are talking about it on this website ;)

Don Grantham 13 Jun 06

Whoever created that banner could be sued for throwing somebody into an epileptic fit!

Grant Hutchins 13 Jun 06

That banner ad is so distracting because it’s hard to count how many frames it has. If it were just two frames I would say “Hey, that’s one of those dumb two-frame ads they put together in ten seconds.”

But because it’s four frames (I believe) and the background goes from white to black to white to grey there it keeps throwing a color at you that isn’t in the last few that you’ve seen, right after a color that is. And fast enough that persistence of vision doesn’t quite kick in.

Just enough to be quite jarring. It really reverse engineers our cognitive ability to notice difference in our vision over time. Look! That moving thing might be a threat!

hubris sonic 13 Jun 06

but these flash transitions suck a great deal.

agreed, total chart-junk.

Tuftelives 13 Jun 06

sonic- Tufteisms never die they just multiply…

MT Heart 14 Jun 06

Bugger. I have the atdmt.com vectored off to a dummy page on my localhost in the HOSTS file - so I can’t see it. Nor can I be bothered to go edit my HOSTS file and reboot.

Territan 14 Jun 06

Interesting that talk of the world’s most offensive banner ad should come on a blog titled “Signal vs. Noise;” that’s kind of the dichotomy here.

Any document can be broken down into sections of “signal” (the content that the reader wants to read) and “noise” (the content that the reader considers an annoyance and wants to avoid). This includes web pages.

And this is where the advertising industry has its great dilemma: they’re in the business of pushing what they and their customers consider signal, but the readers (who they depend upon) consider noise.

The result is a sort of “arms race” between advertisers vying for the customers’ attentions by hook or by crook, and the customers trying more and more desperately to get the content they want without getting the noise in the process.

Dan Grossman 16 Jun 06

I love that ad. I bet it gets a great CTR!

Don Schenck 19 Jun 06

This particular SvN blog entry has literally changed my life.

Seriously. I have begun an active crusade — in my own life — to eliminate HFCS and tell others about how evil it is.

And the stuff is everywhere! Sheesh. A recent trip to the market was very eye-opening.

Thanks. Seriously.

Rob Sanheim 22 Jun 06

Its not rocket science.

The human body evolved on things like meat, nuts, plants and weeds that didn’t poison us. Occasional fruits. Then came grains, and then processed grains. Then sugar. Then, in the last ~30 yrs, highly refined sugar that goes straight to your liver and your bloodstream and basically sends you into an insulin coma. The human body is just not made to deal with it.

This is the common interplay between what our bodies evolved to be survive with, and what modern society provides in abundance, and how they conflict to make us fat, diseased, and unhappy.

And as I write this, I’m drinking a huge lemonade and vodka. Damn, it is good.

Don Schenck 23 Jun 06

You give a paragraph about healthy eating, and then say you’re drinking “a huge lemonade with vodka”.

Great. You’re talking out of both sides of your mouth! I mean … _lemonade_???

*smile*

Tamer 28 Jun 06

That banner has burnt a part of my cornea