Just Steve Jobs giving his middle finger to IBM…
| January 2, 2012
Category: News
Apple’s Jonathan Ive is knighted in New Year Honors
| January 2, 2012
Apple’s chief designer Jonathan Ive has been appointed a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE) in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours list.
He was initially frustrated by Apple, but when Steve Jobs returned to the head of the company the two formed a strong bond. Jobs described Ive as his “spiritual partner,” according to Walter Isaacson’s recent biography, but didn’t let that stop him taking credit for some of Ive’s designs, to the latter’s great annoyance.
Ive remains with Apple for the moment, living in San Francisco, but there are persistent rumors that he is keen to make a return to the land of his birth. The Queen’s honour may be an added inducement for Sir Jonathan to return home.
Microsoft’s New “Magic Wall”: A Holodeck in Your Living Room?
| January 1, 2012
Microsoft might’ve missed the boat when it comes to Tablets, but it might just have an ace up its sleeves. Check out Joshua Topolsky of The Verge touring Microsoft’s Edison Lab, where a team of really smart people are building a magic wall:
Stevie Bathiche, director of research at Microsoft’s applied sciences lab, says to “imagine a day where in your home, one wall is dedicated to being your magic wall. A wall where it can teleport you to another world without really going anywhere.” Bathiche shows off a number of systems that aim to accomplish this vision, including a system that projects LED light to detect a human being’s movements in space, and a glasses-free stereoscopic display that can be “steered” by the viewer as they move.
Monumental Interactive Smiley
| December 31, 2011
Fühlometer (Feel-o-meter) is an interactive art installation that shows the mood of a city by displaying it in the form of a monumental Smiley. The system allows to read emotions out of random people’s faces. The faces are analyzed by sophisticated software (contributed by the Fraunhofer Institut). The obtained mood data are then stored on a server and processed by the smiley to visualize the emotions in real-time.
The system has been developed as joint project by the artists Julius von Bismarck, Benjamin Maus, and Richard Wilhelmer.
Colombian city gets giant, outdoor escalator
| December 31, 2011
Officials in Colombia’s second-largest city on Monday inaugurated a giant, outdoor escalator for residents of one of its poorest neighborhoods.
For generations, the 12,000 residents of Medellin’s tough Comuna 13, which clings to the side of a steep hillside, have had to climb hundreds of large steps authorities say is the same as going up a 28-story building. Now they can ride an escalator Medellin’s mayor says is the first massive, outdoor public escalator for use by residents of a poor area.
“It turned out very well,” said Mayor Alonso Salazar, adding that he has not heard of any such project elsewhere in this world.
Salazar said officials from Rio de Janeiro plan to visit Medellin to see if such an escalator would work in that city’s favelas, which also cling precariously to hillsides.
What makes us yawn?
| December 31, 2011
Next time you’re in a meeting, try this little experiment: Take a big yawn, cover your mouth out of courtesy and watch to see how many people follow suit. There’s a good chance you’ll set off a chain reaction of deep breaths and wide-open mouths. And before you finish reading this article, it’s likely you’ll yawn at least once. Don’t misunderstand, we aren’t intending to bore you, but just reading about yawning will make you do it, just as seeing or hearing someone else yawn makes us do it, too.
So what’s behind this mysterious epidemic of yawning? First, let’s look at what this bodily motion is: Yawning is an involuntary action that causes us to open our mouths wide and breathe in deeply. We know it’s involuntary because we do it even before we’re born: According to Robert Provine, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, research has shown that 11-week-old fetuses yawn.
