2013-04-22

coatesism-news:

Graphene Silicon Nanoplatelets Increase Lithium-Ion Battery Capacity 4 Fold (via Cleantechnica)

This stuff is going to have a serious impact on the world.

Source: cleantechnica.com

2012-04-13

blackwingexperience:

Artisanal Pencil Sharpening by David Rees

Source: blackwingexperience

2012-02-14

Essentially, Matchbook is like Foursquare or Yelp, minus the check-ins, reviews, and social networking — just a simple bookmarking feature for favorite places. While this may sound a bit too pared-down for the taste of tech enthusiasts, you have to remember that there are a lot of people out there who don’t use Foursquare, who aren’t comfortable or used to checking-in at every place they visit, or voraciously social networking while on the go. So Matchbook offers users the ability to organize all of their to-dos by neighborhood on a map layout, search bookmarks for date spots, find the best of those bookmarks, along with top places flagged by other users — to name a few.

—

Behind New Funding, Matchbook Wants To Turn Bookmarking Into Action With Intent-Based Deals | TechCrunch

Happy to take part in Matchbook and investing in it. This paragraph pretty much nails why I’m interested.

I am obsessed with Foursquare, that’s why I invested in it when Dennis invited me. I love it to death. I think that it’s basically becoming a better Mobile OS. But part of what is frustrating for me is how good some of the features are of it, and how people don’t necessarily realize. For example, at this point, for me, Foursquare’s location database and mapping is hands-down better than Google Maps. I use mapping almost exclusively to find businesses, and Google Maps is becoming almost useless for it. An obvious example here in New York is General Assembly which, after a year of being in existence, is still hard to find in Google Maps. I was in Atlanta last year looking for a particular burrito establishment. I checked Google Maps, and started driving towards the closest location. Less than halfway there, I passed another location that wasn’t even IN Google Maps! But of course it was in Foursquare.

Sometimes, though, it’s just too much work to go into Foursquare and use some of the utilities in non-traditional ways. It’s a bit of a pain to use the mapping feature - you have to pretend to be checking in.

And ditto for the lists. Matchbook, which runs on the Foursquare API, is a drop-dead simple list management tool for people who just want to use one feature. For those people who aren’t techies. For people who still like drop dead simple interfaces and single features. And believe me, they’re out there.

I also think companies like Matchbook reinforce Foursquare’s new trajectory of providing utility beyond gaming and socializing. Matchbook is an extension of that, to me: location software for those who are less enamored with gamification and talking about where they are. It’s pure exploration.

(via rickwebb)

Source: TechCrunch

2011-12-20

2011-11-10

Rare Black Rhinos Airlifted to Safety

Source: National Geographic

2011-10-27

Steve Jobs pumpkin illuminated by iPhone (Taken with instagram)

2011-08-15

This will be mine.

2011-07-19

It occurred to me today that my generation will leave little behind of the culture we created.

We won’t build anything like a Grand Central Station, cathedral, monument, or pyramid. Everything we build is temporary and will shortly disappear.

Our culture will be gone too. Written documents will go out of style with printed books to make way for cheaper and more efficient digital files. The day we make the full transition to the digital world will be the day that the cultural trail goes cold.

In the irony of being the most documented, over sharing generation ever to live, that digital information will be lost. Services will shut down, technology will change, and the electricity may one day go out. A hiccup in our civilization caused by war or worse will cause the network to crash. It wasn’t architected for the relentless erosion of time. It’s built on a flimsy patchwork of services that barely work when given the constant attention of engineers.

If the system goes down, even for a brief time, all that data will be gone. It will be locked on magnetic disks and memory chips in ones and zeros, and we will lack the precise technology to decipher them. Our focus will be on getting the system and our civilization back up and running. The task of figuring out how to retrieve all of that data will be insurmountable. It will be stored on machines that no longer work, in software that no longer runs, written in languages that are no longer used.

It’s already happening. The data and high quality footage from our first moon landing, a seminal event for our civilization, is locked on giant reels of magnetic film. There are no machines left to read their contents; it might as well not exist.

The digital representation of our culture will become dead bits, and instead of reviving them we’ll start over. Tumblr seems like the perfect place to lament this eventuality. In a short time it will disappear, along with everything else posted here.

2011-06-16

Make Love not Pointless Hockey Riot

Today I