Until now, we had paper money, and we had plastic - which meant credit cards. Well, now the distinction is blurred: as of April, Israel joined a growing list of countries that have plastic paper money!
See the two 20 Shekel banknotes above. The one on the right is the trusty ol’ paper banknote, showing the late Moshe Sharet. The other showed up in April, amazing many citizens and confounding countless vending machines. It is made of a tough polymer, and looks exactly the same except for the transparent window in the star of David at top left - a transparent area that is continuous with the paper itself, a superb anti-forging device. 
There is also a watermark of Mr. Sharet below the star, but in a resolution unheard of in ordinary paper watermarks. This did not scan well, but you can get the idea in the detail from a Romanian polymer note that fell into my hands - note how the transparency feature here is interleaved with opaque lines in the eagle, and see the bearded man in the watermark, visible only because the scanner shone a light through the thickness of the plastic paper.
These Polymer banknotes were originally developed in Australia, and have the advantage - in addition to making forgers miserable - of resisting the severe wear and tear that paper money must endure far better than their predecessors. They are entering service in a lengthening list of countries, and although at first they complained that they are strange to the touch, I already see people getting used to their unaccustomed smooth texture.
Worth a thousand words?
Greg Bear’s hyper-imaginative Sci Fi novel “Eon” brings its protagonists to a parallel reality whose highly advanced post-humans use Picting to communicate; that is, they project in mid-air sequences of holographic icons to convey their thoughts.
This may work for post-humans… but can become a problem when mere mortals try it with excessive zeal. I refer to the increasingly common practice of using pictures and icons in signage and instruction manuals, even when written text would be far better. The notion that pictures are easier to grasp works fine for signs like “left turn” on a road, or “Danger - High Voltage” on a transformer, which are reasonably self-explanatory. And they are invaluable in instruction manuals when they illustrate some technical complexity explained in the text. The problem begins when those manuals start conveying complex concepts like “Don’t drop this camera on a hard floor”, which they might do by showing a person weeping as the camera smashes to pieces…
Take this picture, from a Konica camera manual. Can you decipher its meaning? Fortunately the text on the same page explains: it means “The battery should be replaced when the flash takes more than eight seconds to charge”. That’s 15 words, and they are far better than the picture. And from the same manual (this time without a Rosetta stone in the text), the “Don’ts” in this mosaic:
The Thermometer I can get, and maybe the “Don’t take a screwdriver to this camera” (or is it, “Don’t stick a screwdriver in the lens?)… but the one in the center eludes me (”Don’t take photos on windy days”??) and the one to its right is a total mystery (”Beware radiation emanating from TV sets and refrigerators”? Or is that a Microwave oven? And since when do fridges emit anything?)
But no manual beats the one we have for our Electrolux dishwasher, which has a pull-out card that starts with exhorting its own virtues (top row, which merely illustrates one word, “RTFM”); then goes on to totally confuse us (is this filter cleanup due daily? Weekly? Daily, but only during the first week of each month?)
And then it shows this masterly rendition of “Help the environment by only using as much detergent as needed”:
Sometimes, I guess, a word (wisely selected) is worth a thousand pictures!