Author: Alan Oppenheimer
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Send-a-Fax-from-the-Beach Party, part 3
People may have been a bit underwhelmed by our demo of “sending a fax from the beach,” but other You Will Future technologies at our party were hopefully more interesting. “Borrowing a book from thousands of miles away” and “Crossing the country without stopping for directions” were much more demonstrable in 1993, as well as…
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Send-a-Fax-from-the-Beach Party, part 2
Our Send-a-fax-from-the-beach party QuickTime invitation, and the party as a whole, was inspired, in particular, by three questions from the first of the You Will ads: Have you ever borrowed a book from thousands of miles away? Crossed the country without stopping for directions? Or sent someone a fax… from the beach? You will. And…
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Our Send-a-Fax-from-the-Beach Party (part 1)
Most of the time we’ve found ourselves as accidental Future distributors. It’s just been a side effect of what we enjoy doing. But in 1993, inspired by AT&T’s You Will ads and the confluence of various technologies, we intentionally and literally distributed the Future, to friends and family. The You Will ads weren’t just our…
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More Zettabytes
The previous “You Heard it Here First” post included a number of orders of magnitude approximations, especially in regards to zettabytes and the human connectome. To be a bit more accurate, all the world’s digital data is actually estimated to be around 200 zettabytes (a fifth of a yottabyte!). That compares to “only” 1-2 zettabytes…
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You Heard it Here First
Zettabyte. A thousand exabytes. A million petabytes. A billion terabytes . 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Or maybe it’s 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 bytes, depending how you count.* Regardless, it’s a lot of bytes. You’ve likely heard of a terabyte, which is about the size of a computer’s disk these days, or a high-end phone’s memory. But where did these peta-,…
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Crowding Together
Crowds are usually something you want to avoid, although by their definition, you often can’t. But crowds are something that event organizers and technologists often look for. A crowded talk, event, or website is often a good thing. Crowdsourcing is a natural extension of the positive aspects of crowds. We use it, for example, any…
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A Tale of Two Earthquakes
On June 24, at 8:10am Pacific time, a magnitude 5.6 earthquake struck Northern California. Later that day, at 6:04pm local time, a back-to-back quake, magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5, struck northern Venezuela. The first quake did little damage; the second was devastating. Both quakes triggered similar mobile phone-based alert-system warnings. But how those systems detected the…
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Prototyping Life
Scientists at the University of Minnesota have created, from scratch, a prototype of a living cell. It’s not quite life, but almost. From an ingredient list consisting of basic chemicals, a team led by Dr. Kate Adamala created “SpudCell,” a synthetic single cell that performs many of the key aspects of what we consider life: feeding,…
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More from Alan’s Bookshelves, part two
Continuing where we left off, here, top to bottom, are the atoms on the second of Alan’s two office bookshelves.
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