I love this.
A Quora member explains the discrepancy between the Bible saying the Earth was created in a day and science saying the Earth was formed over millions of years (actually billions).
Spoiler: the Bible is wrong.
John Gruber on the Swatch Group deciding to make their own watch OS:
Developing your own OS is hard. Most such efforts never really get off the ground (e.g. Samsung’s Tizen). Some get off the ground but never get anywhere (e.g. Windows Phone). It’s especially hard for a company that doesn’t already have experience developing software platforms.
A third-party watch OS is never going to have tight integration with phones running iOS or Android.
“Around the end of 2018” is a long ways off. I expect Apple to ship major updates to Apple Watch in September 2017 and again in 2018. So whatever Swatch is planning isn’t going to debut competing against WatchOS 3 and second-generation Apple Watch hardware — it’ll be competing against WatchOS 5 and fourth-generation Apple Watch hardware. Good luck with that.
Gruber is totally right. This is not going to work.
What would be super cool is if Swatch sold custom watch faces and bands for Apple Watch. Kids are all about retro fashion and the 90s is back, but Swatch could also offer more sharp, modern designs. There’s tons of possibilities. I’d love some funky Swiss faces and bands for my Apple Watch. It could roll out much the same way the Hermes partnership did.
Is this likely? No.
I would guess convincing Swatch to “collaborate with” Apple would be asking them to go against their watch philosophy. It’s very much like Nintendo. What makes Nintendo what they are is just as much about their fun hardware as it is their fun games.
Remember, it took 8 years for us to get just one Nintendo game on iOS.
Back in 2014, Norway announced they would be putting newly designed bills into circulation in 2017.
It’s 2017 and they’re here.
Below is the front and back of the 500 kroner note:
The bills were designed by two different Norwegian design studios. The front (top image) by The Metric System and the back (bottom image) by Snøhetta.
The decision to use two different design styles on either side was a mistake. Without a unified design style the bills lack cohesion. In isolation each bill is gorgeous, but when viewed together it just doesn’t work.
So close. Sigh.
To end on a slightly positive note, these bills are still light-years better than what we have in the States (although that’s not a very high bar).
via kottke
Francisco G Delgadillo, Executive Creative Director of Brand at Oracle, on the people who do work for Apple, but can’t share it:
“How dare I suggest he remove from his pitch one of the most valued brands in the world, one of the most beloved brands by the creative community?”, I thought to myself. But I went on to tell the creative director that without any meaningful details, his “we do work for Apple, but we can’t show you”—and customary companion Apple-logo slide—was an irrelevant reference and could potentially have a negative impact on my assessment of his presentation.
I’ve talked to designers over the years who’ve done work for Apple, so I’m very familiar with their strict confidentiality agreements. Hell, what doesn’t Apple try maintain secrecy about?
I think it sucks people can’t share the work they did for Apple, but I guarantee every one of them knew exactly what they were getting into before they agreed to work with Apple.
If you or your agency was great enough for Apple to pick, then your portfolio is already rock-solid. Stop crying you can’t add the the Apple logo to your client logo page on your website. You come across like the kid in school who brags about having a girlfriend he met over the summer, but she lives far away, but trust him, she exists.
Jason Kottke on death in the celebrity age:
Frankly, I don’t know how we’re all going to handle this. Chances are in 15-20 years, someone famous whose work you enjoyed or whom you admired or who had a huge influence on who you are as a person will die each day…and probably even more than one a day. And that’s just you…many other famous people will have died that day who mean something to other people. Will we all just be in a constant state of mourning? Will the NY Times national obituary section swell to 30 pages a day? As members of the human species, we’re used to dealing with the death of people we “know” in amounts in the low hundreds over the course of a lifetime. With higher life expectancies and the increased number of people known to each of us (particularly in the hypernetworked part of the world), how are we going to handle it when several thousand people we know die over the course of our lifetime?
Our brains were not built to make everything we see on TV and the Internet a priority.
Whether it’s donating to a humanitarian org, keeping in touch with real friends, or “mourning” over the loss of celebrities (read: cultural icon, artist, musician), it can’t all be important to you. You can’t donate to every disaster on every continent. You can’t keep meaningful relationships with 500 Facebook “friends”, and you won’t be able to stay sad over the deaths of more than 5-6 celebrities for more than a few weeks. There’s only 24 hours in a day.
Figure out what’s important and disregard the rest.
Donald Trump Is Said to Intend to Keep a Stake in His Business:
President-elect Donald J. Trump is considering formally turning over the operational responsibility for his real estate company to his two adult sons, but he intends to keep a stake in the business and resist calls to divest, according to several people briefed on the discussions.
Under a plan now being considered by the Trump family and its lawyers, Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s elder daughter, would also take a leave of absence from the Trump Organization, in the surest sign that she is exploring a potential move to Washington with her husband, Jared Kushner. Mr. Kushner is discussing an as-yet undetermined role advising his father-in-law, and Ms. Trump plans on being an advocate on issues in which she has a personal interest, like child care.
I’m confused. I thought when a person assumes the role of POTUS, they have to put their investments in a blind trust and divest their business dealings?
Apparently this is all optional. Just like it’s apparently optional to disclose your tax returns when you go into office, something most GOP candidates since the 70s have done.
Now that I understand these things to be customs, not laws, people need to shut the fuck about them until they are actual laws, and I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
There’s an exploitation going on here that the media justifies for self-interested reasons. They recognize that most of the people in the debates are not serious candidates — they’re running to be talk show hosts, or something like that. In any case, the belief is that this stuff is not actually deciding the election.
But this stuff gets talked about, and that’s why they do it. Trump understood that and he’s exploited it masterfully. He recognized the rules of the game and took advantage of it in a way we haven’t seen.
The press is often blamed for the politics we get; what usually happens is the press exaggerates and reinforces the phenomenon that it observes. It doesn’t create the phenomenon – it makes it bigger; it feeds it. And then the phenomenon wouldn’t be able to contain itself without the press being a willing enabler.
—How Trump masterfully exploited the structural weaknesses of the press, Vox, 8 Nov 2016
Zdziarski explores the myth of professionals needing 16GB of RAM (via The Loop):
Apple’s latest MacBook Pro line is limited to 16GB due to energy (and likely heat) constraints, and that’s gotten a lot of people complaining that it simply isn’t enough for “real pros”. Ironically, many of the people saying that don’t quite fall into what many others would consider a “real pro” themselves; at least based on the target demographic of Apple’s “pro” line, which has traditionally been geared toward working professionals such as photographers, producers, engineers, and the like (not managers and bloggers). But even so, let’s take a look at what it takes to really pin your MacBook Pro’s memory, from a “professional’s” perspective.
First of, “myth” is a misnomer. It’s not a myth, it’s a view held by some (not all) professionals who legitimately need at least 16GB of RAM to work smoothly. Zdziarski acknowledges these people exist but I disagree in calling them “edge cases” like he does.
Zdziarski correctly points out developers need to write software that doesn’t try to eat every gig of memory your system has:
A couple apps you won’t see on this list are Chrome and Slack. Both of these applications have widespread reports of being memory pigs, and in my opinion you should boycott them until the developers learn how to write them to play nicer with memory. You can’t fault Apple for poorly written applications, and if Apple did give you 32 GB of RAM just for them, it wouldn’t matter. Poorly written apps are going to continue sucking down as much memory as possible until you’re out. So it’s reasonable to say that if you’re running poorly written applications, your mileage will definitely vary. RAM is only one half the equation: programmers need to know how to use it respectfully.
This is the Catch-22: Apple could raise the Macbook Pro’s memory to 32GB but then there’s the risk that developers just make more bloated, memory-hogging software.
This reminds me of what Robert Moses did in the early 20th century in New York City, building bridge after bridge after bridge to alleviate automobile congestion. In the short-term it worked, but eventually the number of cars increased to fill all the bridges and the congestion returned.
Inside Donald Trump’s Last Stand: An Anxious Nominee Seeks Assurance:
Mr. Trump’s campaign is no longer making headlines with embarrassing staff shake-ups. But that has left him with a band of squabbling and unfireable advisers, with confusing roles and an inability to sign off on basic tasks. A plan to encourage early voting in Florida went unapproved for weeks.
The result is chaotic. Advisers cut loose from the campaign months ago, like Corey Lewandowski, still talk to the candidate frequently, offering advice that sometimes clashes with that of the current leadership team. Mr. Trump, who does not use a computer, rails against the campaign’s expenditure of tens of millions on digital ads, skeptical that spots he never sees could have any effect.
Trump doesn’t use a computer and his campaign staff took control of his Twitter account. It seems like he spends half his time on Twitter. Where is he channeling all his angst?
His head might explode in the next 48 hours.
Financial Times: Apple in talks on McLaren supercars takeover:
Left to right: Eddy Cue sits on the board of Ferrari, Sir Jonathan Ive has fondness for Aston Martin, and Phil Schiller owns a McLaren
Apple has approached McLaren Technology Group, the British supercar engineer and Formula One team owner, about a potential acquisition, in the clearest sign yet that the iPhone maker is seeking to transform the automotive industry.
Whaaaaaat.
I’m envisioning a very, very affordable car.
UPDATE: Nevermind.
Over at The New York Times, Mark O’Connell talks about his Useless Machine, created by computer scientist Marvin Minsky in the 1950s at Bell Laboratories:
There is something charming, and even inspiring, in the paradoxical efficiency of this machine that does nothing, that fulfills its entire purpose by bluntly refusing to fulfill any purpose at all. When I reach over to flick the switch on my Useless Machine and then watch it rouse itself, with patient defiance, to switch itself off again, I wonder whether this is what it might mean for a technology to be truly intelligent: to receive an order and to respond by politely but firmly declining to follow it. The plain contradiction here, of course, is that in refusing to do what it’s told, the machine is stoically following its explicit commands. In this sense, the Useless Machine is like a battery-operated koan: a playfully profound riddle on the relationship between humans and technology, and on the nature of intelligence.
I think O’Connell shows us The Useless Machine is far from useless in the questions and thoughts it arouses in people who see and interact with it. Sometimes seemingly silly things can effect us profoundly.
The article also points out the other useful things that came out of Bell Laboratories: the transistor, the solar cell, the laser, and the UNIX operating system (which is the foundation of iOS and what Linux is based on).
