story identification - Identify a futurology book from the 1980s with sci-fi style depictions about how the future will look

I read this book between 1985 and 1990, it was in English and it had a hardback red cover.

It covered several depictions of the future, and was sparsely illustrated with humorous single-panel cartoons or drawings.

Some of the content I remember includes:

the standard depiction that we will consume all our necessary calories, vitamins and minerals through a single pill a day, with meals being unnecessary

a humorous cartoon that covered the fact that wars would not be something that the average person was involved in or even knew happened - it showed two people talking to each other, one saying "did you know there was a war last night?" and the other replying "Oh? Who won?"

a segment on future air travel, which would involve massive airliners holding thousands of people, which never landed in normal operation. They would travel on routes around the world, with smaller short range aircraft landing on their backs to transfer travellers to and from ground destinations. These airliners would have cinemas, shopping malls and other things not associated with air travel. The massive airliners would land on massive runways in the Sahara desert for maintenance.

Comments

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In time Keeps on Slippin' , Farnsworth creates a basketball team which he matures by abusing Chronitons. This leads to time skipping forward by random, but ever increasing amounts. How much time was skipped in this way? Answer Unfortunately, I don't think a good estimate can be made for this, for two reasons: Many of the time skips move forward by an indeterminate amount of time. At one point, the Professor mentions localized regions of space skipping forward much more than others. We then see two young boys on the street below complaining about having to pay social security, only to suddenly become senior citizens and start complaining about wanting their money. Thus, each individual could have experienced a different amount of time skippage.

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Both the elves and the dwarves were famous for their metal work in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but what is the difference between what they made, and which one had the better skill of making amours and swords? Answer James Christopher's answer sums up the second part of your question well, but as to the difference in what they made, a little more detail is needed. Once the Elves learned to forge with steel, the shape of the sword changed, now being able to take on the form of a great broadsword or a light and agile curved sword. Additionally, they took great pride in decorating their swords. As we see in the Lord of the Rings , some swords like Sting had magical properties such as glowing blue when orcs are near. As far as the use of Mithril, lotr.wikia has two contradictory passages: Thus, Elven blades became renowned as great weapons, capable of performing deeds beyond the skill of their handlers and were even more glorious when the use of Mithril was allowed to the Elves. ...

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