Technology

The Value of Twitter

Posted on February 18, 2011February 18, 2011 by Sam Kornstein in Technology

I’ve personally been very skeptical of Twitter’s value, other than for mindless entertainment and time killing, but I’m beginning to change my mind. Here are a few of my reasons: 1. I’ve recently started auto-feeding my blog posts to Twitter, and I’m finding that random people are beginning to follow me. At first this seemed a bit creepy. But most of my random followers appear to have found me by searching for terms in my post titles, and I’ve actually begun to find some interesting and useful links by following them. Is this some modern form of community building based on common interests? Am I late to the game here? Probably. 2. Last week I blogged about a Virgin America

Astronauts Could Ride Asteroids to Mars, Study Says

Posted on February 11, 2011February 11, 2011 by Sam Kornstein in Technology

No, they really can’t. Or won’t. But what’s the difference? From National Geographic: Future astronauts could hitchhike their way to Mars—without the need for aVogon Constructor Fleet. According to a new paper, space explorers could reach the red planet by riding along inside asteroids. Landing a ship on a space rock would solve a key issue facing Mars travelers: how to shield astronauts from galactic cosmic rays, high-energy particles traveling at near light speed that come from outside the solar system. (Related:”Black Holes Belch Universe’s Most Energetic Particles.”) Cosmic rays can damage DNA, increasing the risks of cancer and cataracts for space travelers. Current research suggests that the amount of radiation that would bombard an astronaut during a thousand-day, round-trip Mars mission

No, Shut Up

Posted on February 2, 2011February 2, 2011 by Sam Kornstein in Technology

This is dead on. Via Ezra Klein, the following answer was provided on Quora in response to this question: Why is Dropbox so popular? Well, let’s take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do: There would be a folder. You’d put your stuff in it. It would sync. They built that. Why didn’t anyone else build that? I have no idea. “But,” you may ask, “so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders and files!” No, shut up. People don’t use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs. “But,” you may say, “this is

A Good Reason To Hang Out With MIT Undergrads

Posted on January 31, 2011January 31, 2011 by Sam Kornstein in Technology

You learn things. “Remember back in the 1990’s when people used, like, disk drives? Yeah, well now they have that for hard drives.” That’s MIT undergrad Iggy Chen as he plugs a 1TB hard drive into a $10 docking station to connect it to his MacBook Pro. Who knew?

When Ideas Have Sex

Posted on January 27, 2011January 27, 2011 by Sam Kornstein in Technology

I previously posted a link to a remixed TED talk. It’s Matt Ridley talking about innovation mixed over some wackies dub. It’s pretty funny, but it occurred to me that the actual talk, with, you know, the slides and charts Ridley refers to is even better. So here it is:

A Real Babel Fish?

Posted on January 19, 2011January 20, 2011 by Sam Kornstein in Technology

Via Ezra Klein: Life imitates art. More specifically, it imitates “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”: For context, one of my favorite parts of The Hitchhiker’s Guide: The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. The practical upshot of this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any language. Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers