How many of you have I pressured to read “Perdido Street Station,” by China Miéville? It’s been more than a few of you and everyone I know of has dug it, some as much as I did. Artist Gordillo has taken a stab at a new visualization of the titular station. If you haven’t read the book yet, consider this artwork a reminder that you should.
A beautiful BMW commercial featuring sculptor/engineer Theo Jansen.
Wager time. Many people are underwhelmed by Apple’s new ultra-thin laptop. The chief complaint (along with the lack of adequate storage) seems to be the lack of a persistent data connection via 3G, WiMax, 4G, etc. After all, if you’re purchasing the ultimate in mobility, you kind of want to be able to access the internet from anywhere.
Here’s my prediction, and you can take this to the bank:
By the end of 2008, Apple will enable a speedier data connection on the iPhone and enable the MacBook Air (and their other portable computers) to utilize that data connection. This will be the ubiquitous data connection all the winers are looking for.
How certain am I? Well, the AT&T CEO is already on record saying that the iPhone will have 3G this year. The MacBook air has no card slot. Bingo, bango, bongo. Quod erot demonstrandum.
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Images “Courtesy of Apple”
A great hour-long interview with Jeff Bezos, mostly centered on the new Amazon Kindle e-book reader but with other interesting tidbits on innovation in general.
The “True Knowledge” demo of a semantic search engine looks quite promising to me. It incorporates user feedback and intelligent parsing of intent to yield search results completely impossible by Google. It’s hard to imagine where a fully adopted version of this technology could go but it would be amazing to use this in combination with Google or Amazon’s efforts to scan books into a giant database. I also wonder what happens with more ambiguous questions than the ones asked. Anyways, exciting nonetheless. Why would true knowledge demo the app prior to launch and give their competitors such a full look at the their user experience? That’s either crazy confidence or terribly naive - we shall see.
Look out iPhone, now there’s something even more useful. Imagine being able to touch your data while not blocking it from view on a small screen. This new interface concept allows you to use the fingers that are wrapped around the back of a device as input you can view on the main viewing screen. Just check it out!
The folks at Blimp TV posted this snarky phony commercial for Vista, Make sure to stick with it to the very end!
The primary skill of an economist is identifying all of the explanations for various phenomena. Cognitive dissonance is, at its core, the inability to recognize and accept other explanations. I’m oversimplifying, but you get the point. The more your brain is trained for economics, the less it is susceptible to cognitive dissonance, or so it seems.
When you see an explosion that no one could have survived and the person is still running, then it’s bullshit. And that’s frequently why digital effects are not as good. Whereas when you do it physically, you’ve got to be careful — like, really careful. With digital, the painting book is unlimited; the world in, say, Lord of the Rings would not have been nearly as impressive 30 years ago as it is today.
The article is here:
In October, the online retailer Amazon.com will unveil the Kindle, an electronic book reader that has been the subject of industry speculation for a year, according to several people who have tried the device and are familiar with Amazon’s plans. The Kindle will be priced at $400 to $500 and will wirelessly connect to an e-book store on Amazon’s site.
Update: Apparently, this is a hot Amazon story today. Another blogger is reviewing the product before it even comes out.
I love this. Some guy (by the name of lonelysandwich) made a spoof iPhone concept video on how to invoke a non-existent copy and paste function. It’s especially eery as he used a mashup of the iPhone tutorial guy and spliced in his own sound and altered visuals (anyone remember ? Yeah, kind of disjointed like that). It looks like a pretty good idea though, and makes good use of multi-touch and screen real estate. Precise selection of a block of text looks like it would take some getting used to.
iPhone Copy and Paste from and Vimeo.
