David Obendorfer creates new versions of classic cars.
I’d like to see the information synced back to Spotify.
Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman take a look back at the history of glass before they explain Gorilla Glass.
(The videos were produced by Gorilla Glass manufacturer Corning.)
Josh Lowensohn visited Apple:
A few blocks away from Apple’s bustling campus in Cupertino is a rather nondescript building. Inside is absolutely the last place on earth you’d want to be if you were an iPhone. It’s here where Apple subjects its newest models to the kinds of things they might run into in the real world: drops, pressure, twisting, tapping. Basically all the things that could turn your shiny gadget into a small pile of metal and glass.
The interesting thing is, that inside Apple, away from the glamorous marketing world, there are the same laboratories as everywhere else.
Chanpory Rith cites a parable from Art and Fear:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot”albeit a perfect one”to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work”and learning from their mistakes”the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
Former Apple CEO John Sculley explains how Apple isn’t selling products but experiences.
John Siracusa has published a new one of his exhaustive OS X reviews. Great read.
Carrot is designed with you in mind. It’s a seamless experience, meticulously crafted, from beginning to end. It’s not just a vegetable, it’s what a vegetable should be.
;-)
60 to 75 percent of all IKEA product images and 35 percent of all non-product images are computer generated. Kirsty Parkin looks into how it all works.
In his article “Will Superintelligent Machines Destroy Humanity?” Ronald Bailey reviews Nick Bostrom’s book “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies”:
Bostrom argues that it is important to figure out how to control an AI before turning it on, because it will resist attempts to change its final goals once it begins operating. In that case, we’ll get only one chance to give the AI the right values and aims. […]
An example of the first approach would be to try to confine the AI to a “box” from which it has no direct access to the outside world. Its handlers would then treat it as an oracle, posing questions to it such as how can we might exceed the speed of light or cure cancer. But Bostrom thinks the AI would eventually get out of the box, noting that “Human beings are not secure systems, especially when pitched against a super intelligent schemer and persuader.”
Fascinating read. Another book for my to do list.
Photo-editing software restricts the control of objects in a photograph to the 2D image plane. We present a method that enables users to perform the full range of 3D manipulations, including scaling, rotation, translation, and nonrigid deformations, to an object in a photograph.
This is absolutely fascinating. I’m dreaming of a way to recreate entire 3D scenes from 2D photographs. This is getting us a step closer.
Henrik Kniberg also wrote “Lean from the Trenches”, a great book about agile development.
Christian Rudder about the result of one of several experiments, they conducted at OkCupid:
So, your picture is worth that fabled thousand words, but your actual words are worth…almost nothing.
I love OkTrends. It’s great that’s it’s back to live with new content. Check out the old posts as well.
David E. Weekly is also done with Foursquare:
So after 3,044 check-ins and 68 badges, your user #11471 is throwing in the towel. Goodbye.
I only have 792 check-ins and 33 badges but I couldn’t agree more.
Google and Adobe teamed up to create an open source font for Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK).
Google shares some more information on its blog. Check out how different the same character can look in the different countries.