Pandemic life is lived in the cloud. Work, school, and dating have been virtualized by Zoom calls and instant messages. Friends share meals or moments via Instagram and badly lit webcam video. Out of view, the logged-on life requires many more photons and electrons to zip through precision-engineered glass and silicon inside data centers. As […]
By John P. Mello Jr.May 20, 2020 11:21 AM PT Apple may launch an augmented reality line of smart glasses in the spring of 2021, according to Jon Prosser, host of the video blog Front Page Tech. The new peepers will be called “Apple Glass” and sell for US$499, with prescription lenses costing more, Prosser […]
Times Square wouldn’t be Times Square without all the flashy billboards and blinking signage, but if you’re the type who’d rather see it without them, you’re not alone. Photographer Theo Derksen is also peeved by commercial displays and how they’ve overrun the builtscape, a subject he brilliantly documents in Disneyfication. The book depicts the myriad […]
The race is on for a Covid-19 vaccine, but the pace is less hare and more tortoise. And necessarily so: Developing a vaccine that’s both effective and safe is grueling, methodical work. “When experts optimistically say that they expect a Covid-19 vaccine by the end of 2020, they’re talking about an emergency use authorized vaccine, […]
Our debts have now come due. The last thing taxpayers should do is bail out an industry that hurts animals, workers, consumers, the environment, and public health. But we don’t need to scrap the whole system and start again. The Achilles heel of factory farming is that we try to force unapologetically biological, infection-prone, metabolically […]
On Friday, Facebook made its fifth-largest known acquisition ever. The company bought Giphy, a database and search engine for the short looping videos known as GIFs, for $400 million. Today let’s talk about some of the reasons, stated and unstated, that Facebook bought Giphy, and then consider what might come next. The stated reason for […]
Self-driving cars are having a really rough time gaining our trust. This is not a total shock considering autonomous vehicles remain theoretical and elusive for most people. The limited number of self-driving cars on the road today are mostly test vehicles that aren’t available to the riding public. Combine that with Americans’ very, shall we […]
Now we know what books are on Bill Gates‘ nightstand, thanks to his summer reading list for 2020. Gates posted his top five books, along with a few extras (about meditation, memory, and Mars), on his site GatesNotes. He also added some movies and TV shows he’s been enjoying, as well as the tidbit that […]
These days, one of the main tools you need to start a business is an internet connection. There are so many different opportunities out there to start businesses online. And in some cases, you don’t even need much more than that connection in order to get your business going. Online Business Online business continues to […]
It’s impossible to know how much each child is learning in lockdown. But according to survey data from the Sutton Trust and Teacher Tapp, a teacher polling app, private school students in the UK are twice as likely as state school students to be accessing online lessons every day. Similarly, working class students were spending […]