Ryan Mustard

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Both the data itself and the visualizations of it are fascinating.

Horace Dediu:

But there is another form of ignorance which seems to be universal: the inability to understand the concept and role of innovation. The way this is exhibited is in the misuse of the term and the inability to discern the difference between novelty, creation, invention and innovation. The result is a failure to understand the causes of success and failure in business and hence the conditions that lead to economic growth.

This is a step toward understanding why so many people get Apple so very wrong. If you don’t understand what innovation really is, you’re not going to understand an innovative company.

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If you buy this digital scale on Amazon, the site assumes you might be a drug dealer. Nestled among the calibration weights listed in the Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought section are tobacco pipe screens, rolling papers, powders for cutting drugs (I assume), zipper bags of all sizes (including some decorated with golden skulls), empty pill capsules, and even a Dr Pepper can safe.

See also the mega-packs of whipped cream chargers which are frequently purchased with balloons for the purpose of getting high. (via mr)

Tags: Amazon   drugs

Fantastic resource from former Genius Bar staffer Scotty Loveless. Bookmark this and send it to anyone you know complaining of problematic iPhone battery life.

Andrew Kim of Minimally Minimal got his hands on an original Sony Walkman and provides an interesting look back at a seminal piece of personal technology. Initially, the Walkman was billed as the "Walking Stereo with Hotline":

Next to the dual headphones is a button labeled "Hot Line". This was another key feature of the TPS-L2. When the user pressed the Hot Line button, the device would would override the music with audio from the built in microphone. It allowed you to listen to Subway announcements or talk to a friend without taking off your headphones. I find it to be a particularly clever idea as it uses existing parts from tape recorders. Hot Line wasn't really a sought after feature though, and was axed in later models.

(via @sippey)

Tags: Andrew Kim   design   Sony   Walkman

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In line with earlier rumors, Amazon today announced the Fire TV, a new media streaming device that will compete with the Apple TV, Google Chromecast and the new Roku Streaming Stick.


The Fire TV is set-top box with a bluetooth remote that supports voice search. Internal hardware includes a quad-core processor with a dedicated graphics processor and 2GB of RAM. It supports 1080p via HDMI and features dual-band, dual-antenna Wi-Fi with MIMO for fast video downloads. Amazon claims it Fire TV hardware is three times as powerful as its competitors.

The Fire TV streams Amazon Prime Instant Video titles as well as content from third-party providers such as Netflix and Hulu. Owners can browse through popular movies and TV shows on Amazon Instant Video, with personalized recommendations and a watchlist making it easy to find and save content. A new ASAP (Advanced Streaming and Prediction) feature learns what movies and shows you enjoy and gets them ready for you to watch. The more you use the Fire TV, the better it gets at predicting your media choices.

Setting it apart from its competition, Amazon also bundles games into the Fire TV device with support for a $39 wireless Fire game controller. Well-known gaming studios such as Disney, Gameloft, EA, Sega, Ubisoft and Double Fine are partnering with Amazon to bring their titles to the Fire TV device. Amazon also is launching its own gaming studio, with the tower defense game Sev Zero debuting as the studio's first official game.


Extras packaged into the Fire TV include photos with slide shows and X-Ray that provides IMDB details for movies and TV shows on a second screen device like the Kindle Fire HDX. Music services such as Pandora, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, and Amazon's own Music service will debut on the Fire TV starting next month with support for X-Ray, which will display song lyrics.

Not just for adults, Amazon added its FreeTime service, which offers parental controls and personalized profiles for children. A $2.99 monthly option for a FreeTime Unlimited subscription adds unlimited access to programming from Nickelodeon, Sesame Street, PBS Kids and more.

The Fire TV will ship today from Amazon with a $99 price tag.

Simon Parkin, writing for The New Yorker, about :

One night in March, 2013, Rami Ismail and his business partner Jan Willem released a game for mobile phones called Ridiculous Fishing. Ismail, who was twenty-four at the time and who lives in the Netherlands, woke the following morning to find that the game had made him tens of thousands of dollars overnight. His first reaction was not elation but guilt. His mother, who has a job in local government, had already left for work. “Ever since I was a kid I’ve watched my mom wake up at six in the morning, work all day, come home, make my brother and me dinner—maybe shout at me for too much ‘computering,’ ” he said. “My first thought that day was that while I was asleep I’d made more money than she had all year. And I’d done it with a mobile-phone game about shooting fish with a machine gun.”

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Rolling coffee up into "caffeine sticks" and smoking it is a hot new trend, and it's turning America's teens into "bean-heads," according to one specious local news report.

Read more...

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Developer Subset Games today released its popular real-time strategy game FTL: Faster Than Light on the iPad, coming roughly a year after the title was released on Mac, PC, and Linux to much acclaim.

The game puts the player in the commanding role of a ship aligned with the Galactic Federation, tasked with getting vital data back to its headquarters. However, rebel ships are persistent in attacking the spacecraft, allowing players to engage in top down combat while maintaining and upgrading their ship with new weapons, crew members, and more.

The award winning PC spaceship simulation game from Subset Games comes to iPad!

Key Features:
- Give orders to your crew, manage ship power distribution and choose weapon targets in the heat of battle.
- Pause the game mid-combat to evaluate your strategy and give orders.
- Upgrade your ship and unlock new ones with the help of seven diverse alien races.
- Hundreds of text based encounters will force you to make tough decisions.
- Each play-through will feature different enemies, events, and results to your decisions. No two play-throughs will be quite the same.
- Permadeath means when you die, there’s no coming back. The constant threat of defeat adds importance and tension to every action.

The iPad version of the game also includes the FTL: Advanced Edition expansion, which offers new ship systems, events, weapons, drones, equipment, enemy types, levels and more in addition to user interface improvements.

Our sister site TouchArcade reviewed the game, regarding the iPad version of FTL as the “definitive version”, crediting the title's touch controls and regarding them as more intuitive compared to a traditional mouse and keyboard control scheme. Overall, the title was noted as the perfect “play while you do something else game” and given a five star rating. The full review is well worth checking out, as is a video walkthrough of FTL which can be seen below.


FTL: Faster Than Light for the iPad is available for $9.99 on the App Store. [Direct Link]

Samsung today announced the UD590, a new 28-inch 4K monitor that will go on sale this April in the US market for $700 (Via Engadget). The UD590 model includes a 28-inch display with 3840 x 2160 resolution, 1 billion (10-bit) colors and 1 millisecond response time, making it suitable for gaming or watching high-action sports or movies.

The UD590 ships with a picture-in-picture feature that allows users to connect two computers to a single monitor and view both desktops side-by-side. This same option provides a single user with the ability to view different content in two separate windows without a drop in resolution.


Samsung's UD590 monitor has a minimalist design with a simple T-stand and color options of silver or black. It features two HDMI ports, one DisplayPort connector and no DVI ports. The UD590 can be pre-ordered now for $699 and will start shipping April 18th.

This is the year of affordable 4K monitors with other manufacturers also selling 28-inch displays with sub-$1000 price tags. Lenovo will start selling the ThinkVision Pro2840m in April for $800, while Asus plans to launch its own $800 28-inch offering in Q2 2014. Announced earlier this year, Dell already is selling the 28-inch 4K P2815Q for under $700 on its website.

For those interested in 1080P monitors, Samsung also announced the SD390 and SD590 models. Both monitors will be available in 23.6 and 27-inch sizes and will feature a combination of HDMI and VGA ports. Pricing will start at $250 for the D390 and $310 for the SD590 when the monitors go on sale later in April.

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Errol Morris has directed a new series of Taco Bell commercials where a bunch of ordinary men named Ronald McDonald review Taco Bell's new breakfast menu. Here's one of the spots:

Tags: advertising   Errol Morris   food   restaurants   Taco Bell   video

A few new insider details on the development of the original iPhone have come to light thanks to Apple senior software engineer Greg Christie, who gave an interview with The Wall Street Journal with permission from Apple, ahead of a new patent infringement trial against Samsung that is set to begin soon.

According to Christie, who joined the secret "purple" iPhone project after an invitation from Scott Forstall, his team was responsible for many key iPhone elements, such as sliding to unlock, placing calls from the address book, and more. He and his team spent countless hours perfecting details like the speed of scrolling, and the feel of bouncing back at the end of a list.

He said his team "banged their head against the wall" over how to change text messages from a chronological list of individual messages to a series of separate ongoing conversations similar to instant messaging on a computer.

He also said the team was "shockingly small." Apple declined to specify the number of members.

Christie gave two progress reports to Jobs each month, in a small, windowless meeting room at the company's Cupertino headquarters. Few people had access to the room and even cleaning people were not allowed to enter. The secrecy surrounding the original iPhone's design was incredible, with Jobs even requiring employees to encrypt images of the device.

Jobs was initially unhappy with Christie's progress on the device, and gave his team two weeks to improve.

"Steve had pretty much had it," said Mr. Christie, who still heads Apple's user-interface team. "He wanted bigger ideas and bigger concepts."

Christie's team was able to impress Jobs within the deadline, later giving presentations to Apple's design chief Jony Ive and Apple director Bill Cambell, who said the iPhone "would be better than the original Mac." All three approved the 2005 design, kicking off a "2 and a half year marathon" where the iPhone was designed from the ground up with Jobs clearing every minor detail, as has been noted in several previous reports of the iPhone's development.

Christie's details on the creation of the original iPhone come just ahead of a second major patent infringement lawsuit with Samsung, set to begin later in March. Apple initially accused Samsung of grossly infringing on both its patents and its designs in 2011, a lawsuit that resulted in a $890 million penalty for the South Korean company in the United States.

While the first lawsuit covered older devices, the second U.S. patent lawsuit between the two companies covers more recent products like the Galaxy Note II, the Galaxy S III, the iPhone 5, and the iPad 4.

The full interview on The Wall Street Journal, which is well worth reading, also includes additional tidbits on the secrecy behind the development of the iPhone, major last minute changes, and details on the original iPhone's unveiling.

The more I read about smartwatches, the more I appreciate my “dumb” watches.

These are the two watches I wear. The one on the left is a Tissot, and the one on the right a Seiko automatic. Most days I wear the Seiko.

Here is an exhaustive rundown of all the functionality of my watches: They tell the time of day (albeit they’re imprecise, and usually off by half a minute or so) and the date. The Seiko, being fancy, also tells the day of the week. And since neither watch knows what month it is, a few times per year I have to adjust the date forward from “29″ or “31″ to “1″.

That’s it.

But I don’t just wear a watch to know what time it is. Part of the reason I wear one is as an excuse not to pull out my iPhone.

So often I’d be standing in line at the grocery store and I’d pull out my iPhone to see what time it was. Then, out of sheer habit, I’d swipe to unlock and the next thing you know I’m mindlessly scrolling through tweets or reading emails without actually acting on them. Then the line would move, I’d put the iPhone back in my pocket, and if you’d asked me what time it was I couldn’t even tell you.

My analog watches are my reminder that utility exists apart from an internet connection and usefulness doesn’t require the latest software.

My watches don’t have an interactive touch display. Nor do they have Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, LTE, or USB. Heck, the Seiko doesn’t even have a battery — if I don’t wear it for a day or two then it stops working until I wind it again.

There are no apps for my watches. I can’t pair them with my iPhone, can’t give them voice commands, can’t get directions from them, nor can I use them to change my music to the next track.

On the flip side, my watches don’t require updates, and they won’t be “slow and outdated” in one year’s time after the next version comes out. In fact, they will never grow outdated and irrelevant unless they break altogether.

In 15 or 20 years my sons will hopefully think it’s special when I pass down one of my old watches to them.

That’s not to say vintage technology isn’t special. But an old watch is simultaneously special and usable. In 20 years my original iPhone, as special and nostalgic as it will be, probably won’t even power on.

My affinity for analog watches doesn’t mean I dislike the concept of the smartwatch. My iPhone is one of the most incredible items I have ever owned and used. But my experience with it has also taught me that the promise of convenient notifications and relevant information is almost always paired with the reality of constant distractions, tugs for attention, and perhaps even an addiction to the “just checks”.

When I look down at my watch I know exactly what it will show me: the time.

This is a slow motion video of a hawk flying through increasingly tiny holes in a wall.

Nature, you crazy. (via @dunstan)

Tags: video

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How this quad-copter shooting HD footage of a volcano erupting in Vanuatu manages to escape the flying chunks of lava is beyond me.

(via @DavidGrann)

Tags: video   volcanoes

I love this video. Love love love. Chao-Lin Kuo surprises Andrei Linde and his wife with the news that gravitational waves were detected, proving Linde's theory of an inflationary universe.

Love love love. (via @stevenstrogatz)

Update: Many people have asked what Kuo is saying to Linde on the doorstep. Let's start with "5 sigma". The statistical measure of standard deviation (represented by the Greek letter sigma) is an indication of how sure scientists are of their results. (It has a more technical meaning than that, but we're not taking a statistics course here.) A "5 sigma" level of standard deviation indicates 99.99994% certainty of the result...or a 0.00006% chance of a statistical fluctuation. That's a 1 in 3.5 million chance. This is the standard particle physicists use for declaring the discovery of a new particle.

The "point-2" is a bit more difficult to explain. Sean Carroll defines r as "the ratio of gravitational waves to density perturbations" as measured by the BICEP2 experiment, the telescope used to make these measurements. What BICEP2 found was an r value of 0.2:

From the brief explanation of the science behind the BICEP2 experiment:

According to the theory of Inflation, the Universe underwent a violent and rapid expansion at only 10^-35 seconds after the Big Bang, making the horizon size much larger, and allowing the space to become flat. Confirmation of Inflation would be an amazing feat in observational Cosmology. Inflation during the first moments of time produced a Cosmic Gravitational-Wave Background (CGB), which in turn imprinted a faint but unique signature in the polarization of the CMB. Since gravitational waves are by nature tensor fluctuations, the polarization signature that the CGB stamps onto the CMB has a curl component (called "B-mode" polarization). In contrast, scalar density fluctuations at the surface of last scattering only contribute a curl-free (or "E-mode") polarization component to the CMB which was first detected by the DASI experiment at the South Pole.

The big deal with BICEP2 is the ability to accurately detect the B-mode polarization for the first time. r is the ratio between these two different types of polarization, E-mode & B-mode. Any result for r > 0 indicates the presence of B-mode polarization, which, according to the theory, was caused by gravitational waves at the time of inflation. So, that's basically what Kuo is on about.

Update: The Atlantic's Megan Garber spoke to Stanford's science information officer about how the video came about.

We didn't do any re-takes. The goal was for it to be a really natural thing. We did ask him to tell us what he was feeling and what the research means. But what you see in the video is just very off-the-cuff and raw. Part of it was, we went there not even knowing if we'd be able to use or keep anything that we did. It was just as likely that he would have been emotional in a way that he didn't want us to share, or that his wife didn't. So we went into it with no guarantee-we knew we'd be able to shoot, but didn't know if we'd be able use it. So we're thankful that they agreed to let us do that.

Finally a viral video that's genuine and not staged or reality TV'd.

Tags: Andrei Linde   Chao-Lin Kuo   physics   science   video

Nate Silver’s ambitious re-imagined and vastly expanded FiveThirtyEight has launched.

Tonx co-founder Tony Konecny:

The popularity of capsule coffee systems like K-Cups and Nespresso is a marketing marvel. GMCR estimates that around 13% of all U.S. households have one of their devices. But the real money comes from not from the razors but the blades. Ounce for ounce, consumers are generally paying anywhere from $35–60 a pound for the ground coffee inside these capsules. Lock-in is lucrative.

That’s an insane price for mass-produced quality coffee. The appeal of these machines escapes me — I wouldn’t want one even if the coffee prices were roughly in line with regular market prices. But at these prices it just seems nutty. Is it because they can brew just one cup at a time?

Update: Full disclosure: Tonx has been a recurring DF sponsor, but my interest here is in what people see in these pod brewers.

Redford. 

photo by Annie Leibovitz

Aw man, the International Center of Photography is closing its museum on 6th Ave. The good news is they're planning on reopening in another location.

At our request for an interview, Lubell issued the following statement. "The International Center of Photography has been and continues to be at the center, both nationally and internationally, of the conversation regarding photography and the explosive growth of visual communications. In advancing this conversation, ICP has decided to move its current museum to a new space. This decision reflects the evolution of photography and our role in setting the agenda for visual communications for the 21st century. ICP will announce our future sites this spring. The school will remain at 1114 Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan."

I'm long overdue for a visit...the Capa in Color exhibition looks promising, perhaps I'll stop in this weekend. (via @akuban)

Tags: ICP   museums   NYC   photography

Fantastic...Randall Munroe is turning his What If? web series into a book. Munroe explains:

As I've sifted through the letters submitted to What If every week, I've occasionally set aside particularly neat questions that I wanted to spend a little more time on. This book features my answers to those questions, along with revised and updated versions of some of my favorite articles from the site. (I'm also including my personal list of the weirdest questions people have submitted.)

Tags: books   Randall Munroe   science

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