DARPA Captive Air Amphibious Transporters (CAAT)

This is just cool!

GOP Serving Garbage 'Facts'

In a frenzy of gleeful abandon, clearly intended to conceal any hint of conscience, the GOP has begun turning facts upside down and inside out, in an attempt to find some accusation that will stick to Obama long enough to pry him out of office.

The manner in which they are going about this reminds me of someone who just jumped out of an airplane without a parachute, relishing the fall as long as they can.

Wingsuit Flying: EXPERTS ONLY!

This is among the few most amazing videos I've ever seen, including on network television! VERY DANGEROUS!

concealed meaning in Apple's WWDC 2012 graphic, intentional or otherwise

When I first saw the announcement for WWDC 2012, the graphic caught my attention, that customary apple outline but composed of layered, translucent, diamond-shaped lozenges of various sizes, in bright colors, and what immediately popped into my head was how thoroughly apropos it was, whether intentionally so or not. For me it symbolized where I hope (and believe) iOS and OS X are headed, in the context of iCloud, twin manifestations of a well-ordered assemblage of lean-but-complete modular components, robust enough to be used alone, but only revealing its true prowess when connected to the cloud, represented in the graphic by the white background, which shows through in a few spots.

Actually, I suspect the layering is intentional, and is meant to allude to the genesis of the fully 3D user interface, which would be a welcome development, but, for me, the graphic will continue to have the meta-meaning outlined above, even if it's only a personal interpretation.

airborne wind turbine

This is such a good idea! Even better, it could have two counterrotating turbines, either in series (coaxial) or in parallel (twin air channels), to reduce issues associated with torque.

Bookmarks Bar folder labels, brevity, and OS naming

I don't, but if I did have a Bookmarks Bar folder for Android, it would probably be labeled "Andrd" for the sake of brevity. Brevity is at a premium because I have a lot of Bookmarks Bar folders, and like for them all to be visible when I'm browsing. I do have a folder for non-Apple websites that focus on Apple and its products, and that folder is named "iOSX". If I weren't so concerned with keeping it short and more concerned with precision in folder labels, I might rename it i/OS/X, to indicate that there's a spectrum of devices running a spectrum of operating systems, all closely related.

What primarily distinguishes iOS from OS X is the user interface paradigm supported, touch screens versus mouse/trackpad and keyboard. But this quickly becomes a less clear distinction when you consider that iOS devices already support keyboards, both virtual and physical, and might at any time gain support for pointing devices, and Mac trackpads already support gestures, even if they're not identical to iOS gestures.

At some point in the not-to-distant future, maintaining the distinction between OS X and iOS may no longer make sense, but by that I don't mean the obsolescence of keyboards and mice, rather I mean support for whatever user interface equipment is available, be it touch screen, trackpad, mouse, keyboard, eye tracker, stereo video for mid-air gestures, or voice, with an API that makes basic functionality available regardless of the user interaction mode, while offering the opportunity to tweak performance in particular modes.

This is far easier to say than to do, but there's some evidence to suggest that Apple has been hard at work making it possible.

A secondary distinction between iOS and OS X relates to the sandboxing of apps. In iOS, third-party apps on non-jailbroken devices have been sandboxed from the get-go, whereas on the Mac sandboxing is a recent thing, and only necessary for apps distributed through Apple's App Store. For that matter, kernel extensions are still allowed in OS X, and will continue to be allowed on a limited basis in Mountain Lion. But the issue isn't really about sandboxing versus developer latitude; it's about security and utility, two goals which aren't necessarily at odds.

When Apple finds a way to bring the utility of OS X to iOS, without sacrificing security, and to bring the security of iOS to OS X, without sacrificing utility, it will be time to discard the distinction, and perhaps rebrand the recombined system "iOSX".

Proview like a crooked used car dealer

Here's Apple's statement regarding Proview's claim that it never licensed the name "iPad" to Apple for use in China

“We bought Proview’s worldwide rights to the iPad trademark in 10 different countries several years ago. Proview refuses to honor their agreement with Apple, and a Hong Kong court has sided with Apple in this matter.”

What Proview has done is very much like a used car dealer who sells you a car and then later claims that the engine wasn't included in the deal, sues you for damages because you're using the engine, and calls the police to stop you from driving the car until you pay, explaining that the agent who sold you the car didn't have the right to sell the engine with it.

I wonder what the government of the PRC would do in such a case.

Siri and Apple's long history of anticipating voice/touch/agent user interfaces

The USPTO has just published the first heavyweight Siri-related Apple patent application, and Patently Apple makes it almost comprehensible. Of particular interest in that article, is this speculative Apple-created video from 1987…

deep truth from an irreverent crew

This link leads to the last few minutes of the 13th and final episode of what should probably, on the whole, be called a mockumentary, based on a group visit to North Korea.

progress, and the factors which constrain it

While the timing of the transition from one year to the next is arbitrary, an artifact of the choices made in calendar design, the passing of time is at least a persistent illusion, and the metamorphosis which accompanies it convincing. "The times, they are a-changin'", as a younger version of Bob Dylan once sang. Change has been a frequently recurring factor in the lives of myself and my contemporaries, like a stressed and agitated Earth repeatedly shifting beneath our feet, and much of it at least seemingly not for the better.

I say "at least seemingly" because for any change there will be cascading effects which are difficult to predict at the time, and these cascading effects often interact in surprising ways, so even if you find it hard to believe in "progress" you can still place hope in serendipity.

Having a basic education in biology, the way I see progress is informed by the simple rule of thumb about plant nutrition I once learned, that the growth of a plant is constrained by whatever nutrient is least available (relative to the proportions in which all nutrients are needed). Similarly, progress depends on all of the necessary conditions being in place, or at least acquirable, not just one or two of them, and resources spent on bringing the limiting factor(s) up to snuff yield the most bang for the buck.

So what is/are the limiting factor(s) hindering progress? I can think of a few.

One has been the cost of computation, but it could scarcely be called a limiting factor anymore, even though many applications remain for which the necessary processing capacity continues to be prohibitively expensive, and/or too power hungry. Much that hasn't yet been done could be done within the limits of current technology.

Another is the knowledge and experience to make good use of that computational power. This too is changing, but it's trailing behind the improvement in computing hardware. I'm referring here not only to software but to techniques for interfacing with the physical world, the sensors and actuators of robotics, and the integration of all these into working systems.

Less obviously, but perhaps more importantly, progress has been constrained by what we have (habitually) used these improving technologies to do. To riff on the old saying about when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, we have, until quite recently, treated every new thing to come along as another kind of hammer, and measured its value in terms of how good it was at driving nails. In other words, we haven't been much interested in changing what we do, only the details of how we do it. I believe people are generally ready to climb out of this rut, if they could rely upon mutual support in doing so.

Progress has also been limited by how we organize ourselves, primarily driven by the conservatively defined interests of capital. There's been a great deal of experimentation with alternative ways of bringing people together to do creative/productive work collaboratively, much of it supported by venture capitalists, but there's still a lot of inertia in the old way of doing things and not yet enough successful counter-examples to point to, or enough general experience with participating in them.

And finally, there is a tremendous need for remedial education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, most of which will have to be conducted remotely, via self-instructional packages, video courses, or mass media. I believe this deficit to be the twin product of the counterculture's rebellion against all things technical and a resurgence of the thread of anti-intellectualism that runs through western culture, which can perhaps be traced to Celtic pride in the lack of a written language, but which in any case has been encouraged by those who find a well-informed, clear-thinking populace inconvenient.

Most of us are in a position to work on one or another of these, even if for now it's only to educate ourselves. Let's get to it!