1. Steve Jobs derided early Apple tablet prototypes as only good for surfing the web on the pot.
2. Apple sells products that Steve Jobs likes.
3. Steve Jobs has recently suffered from medical conditions that have serious gastrointestinal consequences.
Last weekend my brother told me to call him at a new number, and say anything to his voicemail. I did. Then he pulled out his iPhone to show how incredibly well it had transcribed the message. To his surprise, it hadn’t transcribed it at all. He then spent the next five minutes figuring out how to listen to the audio.
Today he informed me that Google had finally transcribed the message. Here it is.
(In his view, it underlines the words as the audio plays. Unless they add that feature to the public view, you’ll just have to guess.)
This picture of Betelgeuse is rather blurry. But that can be forgiven, since it’s 600 light years away. Or can it? How hard is it to see something that distant?
Consider measuring the moon by holding your hand out and squeezing your thumb and first finger like a caliper. It’s cloudy today, but I’d guess it would be slightly less than an inch from thumb to finger.
Betelgeuse is one of two stars marking the hunter’s shoulders in the constellation Orion, but it’s not practical to conduct this experiment. Which is why we have math. It’s about 600 light years away, and as wide as the orbit of Jupiter (light takes 80 minutes to cross from one side to the other.) Assuming the distance from your eye to your hand is one meter, you would need to hold your thumb and finger about a nanometer apart.
That distance is the length of ultraviolet light wave. But that picture was taken using infrared– with a thousand times the wavelength. That’s like painting fine art with a really wide paint roller.
[Sylvia was watching Jordan and me do these calculations last night. With luck she learned that math is fun and useful for grown-ups.]
Why doesn’t the press or the blogosphere pick up on these sorts of things? (They report it, but forget it instantly.) The virtual strip search that people have been talking about would detect an unusual dense device, but can’t tell an explosive from a wallet. (I suppose if the underwear bomber had expected a full-body scan, he could have hidden the explosives in Depends.)
For that matter, we seem to have forgotten that you can do a lot more damage with box cutters than a bomb. What we need is not more security: we need more perspective. Terrorism, at its worst, kills fewer people than car accidents, murder, high blood pressure, lightning, or just about anything else that actually kills people every year.
I’m in agreement with Bruce Schneier on this one: the airport security worked, in that it forced the terrorists to use small, hard-to-detonate bombs– thereby making it likely that passengers will notice and defuse them. Without airport security, it would have been a standard-issue, tried-and-true suicide bomber vest. Which is to say, airport security stops the low-budget and the me-too attacks but will never be able to stop a cunning, highly organized attacker.
Should old computers be forgot
And never brought to mind
Don’t let old Usenet be forgot
So post to alt.lang.sign.
New acronym for the social sciences: WEIRD, or Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. The notion (hardly new) is that most research is done on WEIRD people, and may not be applicable to most of the people on the planet.
We got a kitten for Sylvia’s birthday. Right now she’s living in Sylvia’s room until she’s ready to share the house with Britannicus. Sylvia is changing her litter and giving her food and water. And somehow Sylvia’s still managing to get enough sleep.
I just upgraded this blog to the latest version of WordPress, due to a WordPress worm that was infecting all sorts of sites. I wasn’t vulnerable, but it doesn’t pay to be complacent.
The reason I wasn’t vulnerable is because the worm needs to be able to create an account, and I’ve disabled new account creation. I used to require an account to comment, as an anti-spam feature. Now I require people to answer a question about octopodes, or octopuses. Turns out the plural is questionable. Regardless, it has blocked 100% of the spam, and as long as I’m the only one using that question, it’s likely to remain effective.
Last Thursday, Sylvia started school at Park Spanish Immersion, the local public school for English speakers whose parents want them to learn Spanish. This morning at the school bus stop she taught the whole family a convoluted counting song she’s learned. It’s the kind where you add a motion with each verse, until it’s impossible to keep up without just convulsing randomly. (Not long after cinco, in this case.)
Most districts in the Twin Cities seem to have a Spanish immersion schools, and there are plenty of other languages available in the public schools. You can thank open enrollment, whereby Minnesota students can apply to any school, regardless of where they live. (Busing is only available within one’s home district, though.)
I’ve created a Twitter account, but not just for any old random drivel. Only the random drivel that the kids force me (or Jordan) to say. twitter.com/KidsMadeMeSayIt.