About two months agoIn January of 2011, I decided to try something new.I am a computer teacher at a private school in New York City. I teach mainly first and second grade as well as the occasional high school elective. Students come into my computer lab and spend 40 minutes completing whatever…
I think Farhad Manjoo has this exactly right on Twitter:
The Lumia 900 is the first phone since the iPhone that I want without even touching it. bit.ly/zMeyqd
— Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo) January 9, 2012I have yet to touch this (or the Lumia 800 for that matter), but what was shown today immediately makes every Android phone look like shit. Well, the iPhone has done that for years. Even more like shit, let’s say.
This is how you need to make a phone in the post-iPhone world. I fully intend to try this phone out to see how it stacks up against the iPhone.
See, it’s not that hard. Make something that looks awesome with a clear attention to detail and people like me will want to try it out. Hopefully this quiets the notion that anything that’s not the iPhone will get no love simply because it’s not the iPhone. (Sadly, it won’t.)
The iPhone is a great product. To beat it, you need to be better than it. No one has done that yet — but even worse, it hasn’t looked like anyone was even trying until now.
Coincidentally, it was exactly 5 years ago today when the iPhone was first unveiled on stage during the Macworld keynote in 2007.
Using last.fm Data to Map Geographic Flow of Music
By tapping into the last.fm API, these Irish researchers modeled the geographic flow of musical influence. They were able to identify where certain tastes frequently originated, and draw a hierarchy of influential cities (like the chart shown above for North America).
Surprisingly, the size of a city doesn’t associate very strongly with how influential it is. That means that despite its enormous size, NYC isn’t that much more influential than Portland or Austin. There are prevailing theories that large cities are the drivers of cultural invention, but this seems to show (for music, at least) that a connected online world is leveling that playing field.
Also, they have a graph displaying “Normalized Radiohead vs. Normalized Coldplay”, which has to go down as one of the best figures in a research paper, ever.
(via arXiv)
Introducing Calidor
Here at Style Hatch we’re excited to release Calidor as our 12th and possibly most customizable theme yet! Virtually everything you see with the theme can be customized from background images to colors to Typekit fonts to layout options. Install it on your Tumblr blog for only $49.
It’s Responsive!
As a bonus Calidor responds beautifully from large desktop resolutions down to smartphones. Go ahead, try it out on your iPhone or iPad.
Latest Version - Calidor 1.2.1 | May 9, 2012
Fixed responsive issues for article images.
Tell Amazon.com’s Omnivoracious blog! They’re filming a video with him today!
(Hurry. The interview is in like three hours.)
I’m 22. After looking for only 4 months, I found a job which I love and allows me to fulfil my potential and promote the values I believe in. I am surrounded with people I love: my family and my friends. I don’t know if I will be able to buy a house one day, or even if my nephews, or future children will have the chance that I had. The future is becoming more and more uncertain, and it frightens me. I worry about them, I worry about me, I worry about us all.
I’m the 99%
(Belgium supports Occupy Wall Street)
A computer chip that emulates the human brain – and might one day replace it
Your brain is home to around 100 billion neurons, all of which are perpetually establishing and breaking connections, known as synapses, with other neurons. There are trillions of these connections throughout your brain helping orchestrate everything from movement, to learning, to establishing and recalling memories.
But we still don’t understand how all the connections between those neurons work. Now researchers at MIT and Harvard have created a new computer chip model that could change that in a big way.
