There’s always a gap between the short-term results of a well-polished system and the first results of a switch to a more efficient one. If you stick with that thing you’ve worked so hard to perfect, the next few hours or weeks or months will surely outperform the results you’ll get from the new thing. [...]
Qimo is an operating system with a difference: it’s aimed at three year olds. Application software for toddlers has been around for a long time, of course, but the existence of an entire operating system (even if it’s Ubuntu a little bit under the skin) gives food for thought. The much hyped digital natives are, [...]
One consequence of the invention of printing was the democratisation of reading, the reverberations of which are still being felt. One consequence of the invention of universal self-publication is the democratisation of writing, the reverberations of which are only just beginning to be felt at all.
Google is celebrating its tenth birthday, and as part of the celebrations has put online the oldest version of its index it can find, which as it happens is from 2001. You can play retro-google and marvel as you search a much smaller and simpler online world. But the bigger jolt comes from realising that [...]
We weave our memories together on demand, filling in any empty spaces with the present, which is lying around in great abundance. In Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psych prof Daniel Gilbert describes an experiment in which people with delicious lunches in front of them are asked to remember their breakfast: overwhelmingly, the people with good [...]
Think on this, and think on it carefully: you are seeing a manmade object falling gracefully and with intent to the surface of an alien world, as seen by another manmade object already circling that world, both of them acting robotically, and both of them hundreds of million of kilometers away. Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy [...]
Seth Godin is providing advice on how to blend in with the natives: A blog is something you have (unlike a Facebook). And blog is also a verb. As in, “I have a blog, this blog, which you probably found by googling me. I blogged about Facebook (which I’m on but don’t use often). I [...]
More evidence, this time spotted by Charlie Stross in the Economist, of the future arriving every more quickly. Charlie writes science fiction, so needs a good store of plausible futures which haven’t quite arrived yet: Say you want to set a story 30 years out, and as part of your world-building exercise you want to [...]
Somebody left a new telephone directory on my doorstep today. I can’t begin to imagine why, or what I might do with it. If I want to ring a friend, the number is in my phone – and the number which actually gets to them isn’t in the directory in the first place. If I [...]
We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. Towards the end of 1999, my boss was going to have breakfast with Bill Gates – no doubt alongside a few dozen others. My contribution to this momentous event was to read Business @ [...]