This may be the smartest thing I’ve read regarding the iPad, and I’ve read everything there is to read.
Steven Strogatz on math, from basic to baffling.
[Over the next several weeks] I’ll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective. It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.
Awesome! (Via Jason Kottke.)
The coolest, most imaginative video you’ll watch this week. I’ve never seen anything like it.
The good enough revolution: when cheap and simple is just fine.
The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they’re actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as “high-quality.”
Who makes the best plain white t-shirt?
Best question ever? Maybe. As some know, I’ve been on the hunt for the best, plain t-shirt for about a decade now (and believe me, when I come across one I really like, I buy 10 or more of them). (For what it’s worth, Abercrombie’s are really nice, but only come in three colors.)
Video of a squirrel with some sort of neurological disorder.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll crack up for the first five seconds and then spend the next two minutes going, “Aww, poor thing.”
The iPhone SmartBase
The unite/Balmuda SmartBase (buy) is an absurdly simple iPhone stand, as can be seen from the picture below (and from the others on the product page). It’s a single piece of semi-hard rubber, with a channel underneath for the syncing/charging cable, which channel allows the cable to stay connected to the stand and the stand to remain flat against the table. But for the pics and video I saw beforehand, I probably would have been a little upset to find such a simple piece of kit inside the package.
The iPhone fits the stand well, and when within it is tilted at an angle that makes for easy texting, etc., even when the phone is kept near the back of your desk.
My only real criticism is that the base is way too light; it weighs next to nothing. Not only would more weight trick you into thinking that your $18 (it was $24 when I bought mine) went to something other than straight profit, but it also would make the stand a bit more practical.
At its current weight there’s really no way to plug the cable into the phone and then place the phone in the stand with one hand; you have to use your other hand to keep the stand in place because it tends to slide around (or even come off the table a bit) as the attached cable tugs at it. In fact, if you use only enough excess cable as is needed to stow it under the stand when not in use (as shown in the video on the product page), then the tension from the cable (caused by it being bent to plug into the phone) is enough to raise the stand off the desk.
I’d love to say more about the SmartBase, but, well, look at it — it’s a piece a rubber. ;)
(For those wondering, before the SmartBase I was using a Just Mobile Xtand.)
Sam Javanrouh, author of the inimitable “daily dose of imagery” photoblog, on shooting people.
Nice read.
The truth about robotic’s uncanny valley.
[I]n person, most robots, particularly ones designed to interact with humans, are simply not scary. They’re bumbling and a little helpless. Like a pet or a child, you cut them slack. In the most generalized, vaguely accurate way, the uncanny valley might apply to the corpse-eyed CG ghouls of The Polar Express or the recent animated Christmas Carol. But when it comes to robots, it’s a largely hypothetical chasm, a term that only partially describes a fleeting, cognitive glitch that has no bearing on the way humans will live with machines.
It seems to me the author is being terribly short-sighted; sure, today, most robots we interact with are as described (i.e., not even remotely close to the valley’s left-handed precipice), but, uhh, it’s just a matter of time before human-like robots are able to accurately mimic our physical and social cues, and along this road, at various progressional stages, there no doubt will be awkward periods — however fleeting — where many facets of the human condition will be questioned, tested and ultimately altered.
I especially liked the following two comments on the article:
(1) I understand the uncanny valley lies in the difference between knowing and feeling. That our brain feels awkward when an intellectual idea (e.g.,, “this is a robot”) contradicts a feeling (e.g., “I could have sex with this”).
(2) If we really want to evolve as a species, and be able to take advantage of the amazing technologies that are coming down the pike – then maybe the first changes shouldn’t be about robots becoming friendlier. Or AI becoming human-compatible. Maybe it’s us that has to change. Maybe, along with the apparent strides we’ve made in conquering racism, we need to also reconsider our automatic reflex of repulsion, when gazing upon all things that are different, or weird. Whether those things are human beings of a different pigment, robots who don’t fit our standards of human-like, or strange looking aliens in the future – maybe the first steps in approaching a truly advanced technological era, lies first in changing ourselves, our reactions, our snap judgements.
While the purpose of Mori’s [1974] paper[, The Buddha in the Robot: A Robot Engineer’s Thoughts on Science and Religion,] was to inform robot design, in a concluding paragraph he cannot resist offering his own theory about the origins of the uncanny valley. He writes: “When we die, we fall into the trough of the uncanny valley. Our body becomes cold, our color changes, and movement ceases.” Human models fall into the uncanny valley because they remind us of death. “It may be important to our self-preservation,” he concludes. […]
But all along Mori hasn’t seen our avoidance of death as a consequence of repressed emotions the way Freud did. Instead he has understood it to be a mechanism we developed to keep ourselves safe. Nearly every hypothesis since has had this flavor. It has been suggested, for instance, that we avoid almost human figures because their peculiarities make them look sick, and we have developed an evolutionary mechanism for steering clear of pathogens. Another theory posits that we avoid figures with features slightly off from our own because they appear to be less-than-ideal mating material.
Ghazanfar rejects all of these hypotheses. “What is really going on is much simpler,” he says. He believes the uncanny valley response occurs because an animal—human or nonhuman—is evolutionarily inclined to develop an expectation of what members of its species should look like, a supremely important skill, as it lets the animal know with whom it can and cannot interact.
Remote-controlled SR-71 Blackbird.
You kind of have to watch this don’t you? (Take-off is ~2:30 and landing is ~5:45.)
The new gadgets “page”
A few weeks ago I linked to my new gadgets “page” (really it’s nothing more than a widget) on Twitter and figured I probably should do so here given that the original gadgets page played such a prominent role on this site, albeit some time ago. The truth is, it became a rather large chore to continuously update the page, and once I decided I wanted it to encompass more than just phones and PDAs, it was clear that the page would be all but impossible to maintain. (I buy tons of gadgets and was cataloging each of their technical specifications; it was total insanity.)
Enter GDGT. When I first got wind of the site my immediate thought was, “Woah! Hopefully I finally can ‘outsource’ the gadgets page to someone else, and take advantage of thousands of others who, collectively, have the time to punch in all of the critical data for each device.” Fortunately, the site/service turned out to be exactly that, and from here on out it’s where I’m keeping track of all this stuff.
Their database already contains a large portion of my older gear (but not everything; for example, it’s missing nine mobile phones of mine, which I may add myself at some point), and newer gadgets almost always are there when I go looking for them. The best part about the whole system is that adding a device to my “have,” “had” or “want” list takes just two clicks, which is infinitely easier than what I was doing before when I was trying to keep up with everything myself (including pictures!).
(I realize all of this means little to most, but in the off-chance you’re interested in what hardware I’m currently using or have used in the past, the new page should sate you. Please try to contain your excitement.)
Horizontal and vertical: The evolution of evolution.
Darwin’s explanation of evolution, [Woese and Goldenfeld] argue, even in its sophisticated modern form, applies only to a recent phase of life on Earth.
At the root of this idea is overwhelming recent evidence for horizontal gene transfer – in which organisms acquire genetic material “horizontally” from other organisms around them, rather than vertically from their parents or ancestors. The donor organisms may not even be the same species. […]
In the Darwinian model, evolutionary change occurs because individuals with genes associated with successful traits are more likely to pass these on to the next generation. In horizontal gene transfer, by contrast, change is not a function of the individual or of changes from generation to generation, but of all the microbes able to share genetic material. […]
For the researchers the conclusion is inescapable: the genetic code must have arisen in an earlier evolutionary phase dominated by horizontal gene transfer.
How the brain filters out distracting thoughts to focus on a single bit of information.
We investigated how gamma waves in particular were involved in communication across cell groups in the hippocampus. What we found could be described as a radio-like system inside the brain. The lower frequencies are used to transmit memories of past experiences, and the higher frequencies are used to convey what is happening where you are right now.”
The importance of engineering motivation into artificial intelligence..
We all know that intelligence, as commonly defined, isn’t enough to impact the world all by itself. The ability to pursue a goal doggedly against obstacles, ignoring the grimness of reality (sometimes even to the point of delusion—i.e., against intelligence), is also important.
From Slate:
A 1978 short film by New Wave director Claude Lelouch may be the most thrilling single piece of driving ever filmed. The director, who had no permits to film or to stop traffic, hooked a camera to the front bumper of a Mercedes-Benz (in the only bit of film trickery, the sound of the motor was played by a five-speed Ferrari) and filmed the entire movie in a single cinema-verité take: He drove through the streets of Paris at five in the morning, through red lights, around the Arc de Triomphe, down the Champs-Élysées, against one-way traffic, over sidewalks, at speeds up to 140 miles per hour.
This will blow your mind, car enthusiast or not.
Creating the world of (Avatar’s) Pandora.
The cast and crew take you on an in-depth look at the making of James Cameron’s epic.
A 23-minute, must-watch, behind-the-scenes video.
Video of bottlenose dolphins creating “mud rings” that cause fish to jump into their waiting mouths.
Unbelievable.
All of the proceeds from the listed software sold today — the 20th — will be donated to Haiti. It’s an incredible collection of applications, of which I use daily the following: Birdfeed, Default Folder X, Ego, Instapaper Pro, MarsEdit and Tweetie.
Buy something.
Instapaper’s Kindle feature dramatically improved.
I’m very happy to announce the result of a lot of work that dramatically improves the Kindle edition of Instapaper: periodical formatting. […]
Tapping left or right on the [joy]stick… quickly switches to the previous or next articles, respectively. No more moving the cursor through the page for navigation links.
Nice. This takes care of one of the two things I’ve been clamoring for, and makes reading Instapaper’d articles on the Kindle much more practical (and much less annoying).
This may be the most powerful set of photos I’ve seen from The Big Picture. Truly gripping.