Tekhnologia

If Curiosity has proven anything, it’s that even unmanned space exploration can be really damn exciting. NASA has done a stellar job of promoting Curiosity’s launch, descent, and landing with diagrams and videos, and the response from the public has been magnificent. 

The lesson? Don’t downplay the importance of good publicity to ramp up excitement and build strategic support. A few more successful (and well promoted) missions and we’ll be on our way to Ray Bradbury’s imagined future.

IHave50Dollars is a parody site, obviously (there’s an Easter Egg at the end) but it does offer a fairly poignant criticism of the bandwagon mentality in the Valley. Arguably, I paid my $50 just to see what will happen, but one of the benefits of Facebook and Twitter is that they’re accessible to all and hold few visible, external grandiose visions of a $50-based social utopia.

Having re-blogged this, I must confess I plunked down my $50 in the days leading up to App.net’s successful funding — which, in light of yesterday’s Twitter API announcements indicating the death of third-party clients and immediately followed by an intelligentsia & digerati uproar, may not have been such a bad idea after all…

But Microsoft’s website still invites devs to create “Metro style” apps.

As of this re-blog, Windows has since removed the requirement not to “Metro” in app descriptions. Thus, the Windows Metro UI branding confusion continues…

It’s also one of the few movies I’ve seen where the future is not a dystopic nightmare, 3D-generated phantasmagoria, or otherwise unbelievable peek into a not-too-distant hellworld. It’s future that seems real, palpable, and just around the corner — one where we have to figure out not just what our technology will do to us, but what it will mean to us.

The future is what we make of it, best predicated on how we envision it coming to be rather than a response to our fearful fantasies.

Get ready to see iPads zipping around your office. As a remote worker I’m fascinated by telepresence robots, or a remote robotic avatar which lives at an office and roams the halls under your control, typically interacting through a 2-way video chat tool. Naturally, Double Robotics took the iPad’s advantages and built what looks like a tiny Segway for the iPad to move about on, calling it the Double.

A tool for replacing live teachers? I hope not. One that can put qualified teachers into classrooms regardless of geography? Quite possibly.

The portal’s interactive design is a major evolutionary step for a website that has since been almost entirely based on YouTube lectures (with over 178 million views). I rarely get excited about online education, which often just recycles our antiquated education system into a digital format, but the new Khan Academy Computer Science project is beyond impressive.