Posts in the “technology” category

In this video, Richard Feynman explains how rubber bands work. He seems like he was a great teacher, and a very interesting person.

From this seekingalpha.com link: “Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) discloses that almost half of the orders received since Thanksgiving on its website were placed through mobile devices ... Star Wars toys, drones, and 4K HD TVs were hot sellers during the Black Friday to Cyber Monday period.”

Here’s a list of 50 Colorado Startups to Watch in 2016, from BuiltInColorado.com.

“We’re saying that we made a measurement that is about a thousandth the diameter of a proton, that tells us about two black holes that merged over a billion years ago.” A quote from a story in the New Yorker, titled Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them.

This is a great explanation of gravity waves by Brian Greene of the World Science Festival.

The black hole in galaxy NGC 4889 is really big. According to this Yahoo story, “The supermassive black hole hidden away in NGC 4889 breaks all kinds of records, even though it is currently classified as dormant.”

It continues: “So how big is it, exactly? Well, according to our best estimates, the supermassive black hole is roughly 21 billion times the size of the Sun, and its event horizon (an area so dense and powerful that light can’t escape its gravity) measures 130 billion kilometers in diameter. That’s about 15 times the diameter of Neptune’s orbit around the Sun, according to scientists at the Hubble Space Telescope.”

This is cool. It’s a time-lapse video, showing one year of the Sun hanging out in the sky, rotating around, throwing off some coronal discharges, dealing with insanely powerful magnetic forces, and other things, all in about two-and-a-half minutes. The complete video is 6.5 minutes long, and that’s because there’s some nice narration and explanation at the end. If you’re about to watch it, it’s helpful to know that it takes the Sun about a month (in Earth time) to make a full rotation:

General Motors’ then-Vice chairman Robert Lutz said in 2007 that the Tesla Roadster inspired him to push GM to develop the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid sedan. In an August 2009 edition of The New Yorker, Lutz was quoted as saying, “All the geniuses here at General Motors kept saying lithium-ion technology is 10 years away, and Toyota agreed with us—and boom, along comes Tesla. So I said, ‘How come some tiny little California startup, run by guys who know nothing about the car business, can do this, and we can’t?’ That was the crowbar that helped break up the log jam.”

(A quote from the Wikipedia page on Tesla.)

This video shows the latest version of Atlas, a humanoid robot, built by Boston Dynamics, a Google/Alphabet subsidiary:

I tend to be known as a bit of a cookie monster myself, so I have to like this Apple ad featuring Cookie Monster, Siri, and an interminable wait for cookies to be baked:

This is a good, short video, titled, “How does a compiler, interpreter, and CPU work?”

It was all going so well ... and then the human creator asked Sophia, “Do you want to destroy humans?,” and the robot says, “Okay, I will destroy humans.”

Here’s the two-minute video with the unfortunate Terminator-style ending:

It sounds like Mr. Hanson and Sophia might want to learn about Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, which he developed in 1942.

If that video doesn’t work for some reason, you can find the video here on cnbc.com.

According to this article on ExtremeTech.com, Elon Musk stated that the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels are at an all-time high. Here’s their quote: “Musk emphasized the electric car’s green credentials, noting that we have record high CO2 levels, and that we passed 403.5 PPM as of March 2016 — matching what the Earth last saw 11 million years ago.”

The original name for the Google search engine was “BackRub.” If you’ve never heard the story, there’s a concise version of it here on stanford.edu.

With their new hire, it looks like Apple has its marketing mojo back. Here’s another great ad, this one for the Apple TV, featuring Kobe Bryant:

This is a short video of a Ford Fusion driving itself on a desert road, at night. There’s a story about it here at technewsworld.com.

From this Space.com story, “Radioactive iron in moon rocks collected by astronauts on NASA’s Apollo missions suggests that a nearby supernova blasted Earth a few million years ago, according to a new study.”

From this Motley Fool article: “Over the last four months, desktop browsing has seen a noticeable downturn. Time spent online in the U.S. using desktops fell 9.3% in December, 7.6% in January, 2% in February, and 6% in March, according to data from comScore. What's more, time spent on the mobile Internet in the U.S. is now nearly double that of desktop browsing.”

For almost nine years since the launch of the original iPhone, Apple has posted year over year (YOY) gains in iPhone sales. Today (April 26, 2016) will probably be the first time in that nine years that Apple will report a YOY decline in iPhone sales.

I mention this because it shows that the power of being the “first mover” in a market can last a long time. (While there sales my decline, Apple still makes billions of dollars on iPhone profits.)

Some really smart people that I follow say that this is one of the best technology and career related videos they have ever seen. I’ve only watched the first few minutes of it so far, and he presents his “Principle of Immediate Connection” that states that creators need to have an immediate connection to what you’re working with to be truly creative.