Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
"Cook is maintaining, by words and actions, most of Apple's unique corporate culture. But shifts of behavior and tone are absolutely apparent; some of them affect the core of Apple's critical product-development process"
The future has arrived: Two tetraplegics, paralysed and unable to speak, have regained some independence. They can control robotic arms by power of thought alone. Tiny electrodes implanted in the motor cortex work the magic
"Glancing at a photo of the Pebble smartwatch, you wouldn’t notice anything too different or special about it — it looks like an understated digital watch." But it's much more than that. This promises to be a watch unlike any other
Media mogul Barry Diller on disrupting TV market. "Television wasn’t the destruction of radio. Cable wasn’t the destruction of broadcast networks. What happens is new alternatives come, and they live alongside whatever existed"
The meteoric rise of smartphones. "In 1982 there were 4.6 billion people in the world, and not a single mobile-phone subscriber. Today, there are seven billion people in the world—and six billion mobile cellular-phone subscriptions"
"For a decade now the company has seemed more like a tawdry reality show than one of the world's great enterprises. It is in the midst of an existential crisis." Can Meg Whitman, HP's third CEO in seven years, put it right?
On the possibilities for implants that augment the human body. Ready to turn yourself into a remote control, a watch, even a hard drive? "A phone would definitely be feasible, but whether it’s desirable is a different question”
"Leonardo da Vinci sketched out tanks, helicopters, and mechanical calculators centuries before the first examples were built. Now another of his flights of imagination has finally been realized." Light-field photography has arrived
If you know what a chumby is, you'll love this long talk with its inventor, now taking a year off in Singapore. Mostly about how to manage start-ups. "Real visionaries have the conviction and courage to see past the facts"
What can the history of the telephone teach us about effects of technology on society? To find out Vanderbilt takes us back to a time when the “talking telegraph” was a novelty, and all telephone receivers had "trumpets"
Analysis of America's proposed Next Generation Television Marketplace Act, currently under review by the Senate. "The future of TV isn’t to be found in deregulation — it’s on the Internet. We just have to let it happen"
Why archivists love and hate floppy discs. They preserve information that would otherwise have vanished. But they're a complete pain to work with. "A box of unidentified disks is about as human-understandable as a box of rocks"
Image by national museum of american history on Flickr
"Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new"
