Category: Wondrous Things

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Smell

The human sense of smell is a wondrous thing, especially when it comes to memories.

A couple months ago I was driving home through one of the less-urban, more heavily wooded residential areas of Denver right after a freak thunderstorm. It smelled exactly like walking through the meadows on my grandparents' old property in western Massachusetts.

My new garage smells like my grandfather's workshop on that same property.

As I got in the elevator to leave work this afternoon, I was greeted with the sweet, flowery smell of my great aunt's attic, something I hadn't consciously thought of in decades.

 

 

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This is Cool

Wolfram Alpha Can Now Reduce Your Social Life to a Series of Graphs

Facebook is a great place to follow the lives of friends, and family, but it's also an amazing repository of your personal information. Even casual users would be surprised how much data they have poured into the service over the years, and now you finally have a way to put it into perspective. Wolfram Alpha, the world's greatest computational knowledge engine, has launched a service that will reduce your Facebook social life to a series of mathematical charts.

To get started just type "Facebook" into the search field, click the analyze button, and create a Wolfram Alpha account. The data gives you a good idea of how much you participate on the service, and will even give you an interesting breakdown of your friends by country, age, and a visualization of how you all know each other.


If you ever wanted to see your entire life broken down into a series of mathematical charts, you owe it to yourself to check this out.

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Beautiful

This is what I envision of when I think "21st Century Desert House," and it really makes me regret having left the architectural field fifteen years ago. From the firm ibarra rosano design architects of Tucson. We'd move back to AZ in a heartbeat if this were waiting for us. Absolutely stunning. (Click on any of the images to embiggen.)

Be sure and check out all their other work!

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A Hole (One of Many) on Mars

Mars is pockmarked with strange, nearly circular holes. The hole in this image was discovered by chance on images of the dusty slopes of Mars' Pavonis Mons volcano taken by the HiRISE instrument aboard the robotic Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter currently circling Mars. The hole appears to be an opening to an underground cavern, partly illuminated from the right. Analysis of this and follow-up images revealed the opening to be about 115 feet (35 meters) across, while the interior shadow angle indicates that the underlying cavern is roughly 66 feet (20 meters) deep. Why there is a circular crater surrounding this hole remains a topic of speculation, as is the full extent of the underlying cavern. Holes such as this are of particular interest because their interior caves are relatively protected from the harsh surface of Mars, making them relatively good candidates to contain Martian life. These pits are therefore prime targets for possible future spacecraft, robots, and even human explorers.

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Computer as Appliance

When I first got into personal computers back in the late 1980s, they were still very much a niche product. For about a thousand dollars a geek could go to any of the weekend "computer fairs" that dotted the Bay Area and buy the parts to build a PC. (It wasn't until 2004 that I actually bought my first pre-assembled computer.)  Interchangeable parts were the norm, and if you wanted to upgrade your paltry little 8088 system board to a "blindingly fast" 286, it was fairly simple (if relatively expensive).

Back in the day, system boards were larger than a sheet of paper, and individual memory chips on those boards were still the norm. There was no such thing as integrated video, parallel or serial connectors on a system board. If you wanted any of those, you had to buy separate cards. Hell, at that point there weren't even built-in clocks! (I remember buying and installing more than one clock card over the course of assembling several PCs.) If you wanted to upgrade your RAM, you came home with a bag full of individual chips and prayed that none of them were bad, because tracking down a bad chip when you've just inserted 32 of the things was an absolute nightmare. (I can't tell you how happy I was when the first SIMMs and DIMMs appeared on the scene.) And if you wanted to run AutoCAD (which I did back in the day), you needed to buy a separate math co-processor chip.

Gawd, I don't miss those days.

Fast forward twenty-five years. Apple's MacBook Air and iPad have shrunk system boards to an eighth the size they once were and now include video, I/O and wireless. The amount of RAM has grown exponentially, and CPUs are packing more power than ever dreamt of in 1988. The Air and iPad have no moving parts (except a CPU cooling fan in the Air) and contain nothing that is user-replaceable. Spurred in no small part by the wild success of the iPhone, the idea of computer as appliance is coming to fruition.

When I remember the sheer number of parts required to build a PC once upon a time, I am amazed when I see tear downs of the iPad and the Air (click to embiggen):

In both cases, the biggest parts of both devices are the batteries.

And even if you don't consider them appliances, but simply as portable computers, compare them with this, the Compaq II from 1987:

My ex brought one of these home from work one evening in 1988 and we thought it was the coolest thing evah. I only wish he were still around to see how far we've come since then.

It all makes me wonder what the face of computing will look like in another 25 years…