This is amazing:
Take that, Icarus.
by John Cole| 49 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
by $8 blue check mistermix| 65 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
Apparently this past week was a good one for Dear John letters to your former employers, because James Whittaker, who left Google for Microsoft, has posted his take on why he left. Read it yourself, but as far as I can tell, his argument is basically that Google shouldn’t have thrown so many resources into Google+, and that the trend of gathering more information about users via their social networking leads to overly invasive ads.
I think he’s right that Google+ is pretty obviously a fizzle so far, and it’s doubtful that it will succeed simply because there’s just limited market space for social networking in general, since each social network requires a huge number of people to participate in order to be worthwhile. That said, I think Google had to give some kind of integrated social networking a shot, since they already had millions of users with Google accounts and sites like YouTube, Picasa and Reader that all had some kind of stand-alone social networking component.
But what I see in Google isn’t too much Google+ or too many ads (those are always going to be with us if we’re going to get free services from any provider), but rather a lack of innovation. Google’s list of great products includes search, Gmail, Maps, Chrome and Android. Lately, there’s not only Google+, but Google Music, Video and Books (which have been bundled together under the name “Google Play”). Google+ has a bit of innovation with hangouts and circles, but Play is strictly a me-too offering, and it’s tanking just like Google+.
When I started to use Google search, I was amazed at how good it was compared to the other alternatives. Gmail was so much better than any other web-based email at its time of introduction that having an invite was a big deal. Maps was remarkably better than the competition at the time (and still is), Chrome was the best browser on the day it was launched, and even with its fragmentation, Android’s integration with Google Mail, Calendar and its maps and navigation are standouts. The same can’t be said of Google’s latest product offerings, yet they seem to be devoting a huge amount of time and energy to developing and promoting them.
The deai with being a Googlebot has always been that you tolerate the ads in return for using incredibly good products for free. Whittaker seems to think that ads are the deal-breaker, but for me, the deal-breaker will be spending the time of one of the best engineering teams on earth grinding out me-too copies of Amazon, iTunes or Facebook.
(h/t reader MW)
This post is in: Science & Technology
I find this stuff to be horrifying:
About 3.7 million Americans live within a few feet of high tide and risk being hit by more frequent coastal flooding in coming decades because of the sea level rise caused by global warming, according to new research.
If the pace of the rise accelerates as much as expected, researchers found, coastal flooding at levels that were once exceedingly rare could become an every-few-years occurrence by the middle of this century.
By far the most vulnerable state is Florida, the new analysis found, with roughly half of the nation’s at-risk population living near the coast on the porous, low-lying limestone shelf that constitutes much of that state. But Louisiana, California, New York and New Jersey are also particularly vulnerable, researchers found, and virtually the entire American coastline is at some degree of risk.
“Sea level rise is like an invisible tsunami, building force while we do almost nothing,” said Benjamin H. Strauss, an author, with other scientists, of two new papers outlining the research. “We have a closing window of time to prevent the worst by preparing for higher seas.”
It might only be 3.7 million here, but globally, so much of Asia is clustered around low elevation areas that it is inevitable that there will be horrific disasters.
by John Cole| 87 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
Movies and television shows are full of scenes where a man tries unsuccessfully to interact with a pretty woman. In many cases, the potential suitor ends up acting foolishly despite his best attempts to impress. It seems like his brain isn’t working quite properly and according to new findings, it may not be.
Researchers have begun to explore the cognitive impairment that men experience before and after interacting with women. A 2009 study demonstrated that after a short interaction with an attractive woman, men experienced a decline in mental performance. A more recent study suggests that this cognitive impairment takes hold even w hen men simply anticipate interacting with a woman who they know very little about.
What do you all think?
This post is in: Science & Technology
Maybe I am wrong, but this seems like a pretty good idea:
An “experiment” which involved using homeless people as mobile wi-fi hotspots has attracted criticism, forcing the advertising agency behind it to defend itself.
A division of Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) equipped 13 homeless people with 4G mifi devices in Austin, Texas.
It suggested the public pay $2 (£1.30) for 15 minutes access to the net.
Comments posted to the BBH’s site accused the project of being “unseemly” and “wrong”.
Members of Twitter asked “what has this world come to?” and accused the project of being a “gimmick”.
However, others praised the idea as being “inspirational” and a chance to create a “positive interaction between the public” and homeless people.
How is paying someone to distribute wifi access any different than paying someone to work in your food stand at SXSW for a week? I don’t see anything unseemly or wrong about it at all- they are providing a service and making some money, and I fail to see how it is different from a vendor selling t-shirts or bottled water.
And the fact that they are using homeless people seems to be better than what normally happens any time a big conference comes to a big city, which is basically they are cleared off the streets and penned up out of sight and out of mind. Again, maybe I’m wrong, but I just don’t get what is so awful about this.
This post is in: Open Threads, Science & Technology
Because hominids cannot live by snark (or rage) alone, let’s have a moment of science sweetness, courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History’s Neil deGrasse Tyson:
<div align=”center”><iframe src=”http://player.vimeo.com/video/38101676?color=00c4ff” width=”400″ height=”225″ frameborder=”0″ webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe><p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/38101676″>The Most Astounding Fact</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/schlick”>Max Schlickenmeyer</a> on <a href=”http://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p></div>
And, he said, shuffling his feet just a little, if you want a more detailed account of what Neil’s talking about here, you can watch an hour long NOVA special produced, directed and written by (ahem!) your humble blogger. In the program Origins: Back to the Beginning Neil leads us through from what was in essence the discovery of the Big Bang to the evolution of cosmic habitats that could support the kind of life we know exists at least one place in the universe.
I particularly enjoyed making the section that talks about the cooking of the periodic table in the hearts of stars — you can find it in the Youtube excerpt below.
<div align=”center”><iframe width=”420″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/neMEo8ZrwuI” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
What gave me pleasure in the sequence that included that scene is its juxtaposition of a (very distant) homage to one of my favorite movies (Searching for Bobby Fisher) with a quick lesson (in the next scene after this cut ends) from one of New York’s best chefs, the Union Square Cafe’s Michael Romano, who teaches Neil how to prepare a galactic bouillabaisse.You can check that out, along with the rest of the film at the PBS website. (The soup bit starts at around minute 41.)
Oh, and by the way: Open Thread.
PS: Tim F. Not dead yet!
by $8 blue check mistermix| 75 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
There’s a new Apple TV coming, and, as Atrios points out, the tech press is wrapped up in whether Apple will “kill” the competition, without wondering how cable companies are going to react. Comcast already has a cap, and Time-Warner is flirting with different usage billing strategies. If Apple TV causes more people to switch from cable to the Internet as the pipe for their entertainment, I expect we’ll hear more about bandwidth “hogs” even though Internet bandwidth is getting cheaper every year. For the cable ISP monopolies, you’re only a “hog” when you use your bandwidth to watch TV.
As usual with the tech press, Apple gets a lot of attention, but an excellent new Apple TV (the current little box is by all accounts mediocre) will only accelerate the inevitable. I bought a Roku on impulse a couple of months ago, for something like $50. Like Apple TV, it’s a tiny little box that lets you stream different services, mostly Netflix, on your TV. Since then, there’s been very little traditional TV watching in my household. We already had Netflix, but the Roku Netflix app is just a little better that the Wii we were using, plus it’s hi def. Since we don’t watch a lot of sports, our TV service is now vestigial, and we’ll probably trash it soon. I can’t believe that the cable company will take that loss of $70/month in recurring revenue lying down, so I’m expecting to be labeled a hog in the near future.