Los Angeles Movie Studios Are Forcing Hollywood to Abandon 35mm Film. But the Consequences of Going Digital Are Vast, and Troubling
“There is a war raging in Hollywood: a war between formats. In one corner, standing with Nolan, are defenders of 35mm film. Elegant in its economy, for more than 100 years film has been the dominant medium with which movies are shot, edited and viewed. In the other corner are backers of digital technology — a cheaper, faster, democratizing medium, a boon to both creator and distributor.
Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?
“In 2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier.
Inside Instagram: How Slowing Its Roll Put the Little Startup in the Fast Lane
“The must-have app on the iPhone is not iMessage. It’s not iTunes or Safari or even Find My iPhone. It’s Instagram, the photo-sharing app that once described itself as “quirky.” Cultish would be more appropriate these days.
The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever
“Last fall, the university in the heart of Silicon Valley did something it had never done before: It opened up three classes, including CS221, to anyone with a web connection. Lectures and assignments—the same ones administered in the regular on-campus class—would be posted and auto-graded online each week. Midterms and finals would have strict deadlines. Stanford wouldn’t issue course credit to the non-matriculated students. But at the end of the term, students who completed a course would be awarded an official Statement of Accomplishment.
See also: How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education
How Machine Intelligence is Evolving
“No computer can yet pass the ‘Turing test’ and be taken as human. But the hunt for artificial intelligence is moving in a different, exciting direction that involves creativity, language – and even jazz
The Afterlife of Technology at the End of the World
“The Jamesburg Earth Station is a massive satellite receiver in a remote valley in California. It played a central role in satellite communications for three decades, but had been forgotten until the current owner put it up for sale, promoting it as a great place to spend the apocalypse. It stands feet from a trailer park and down the road from a Buddhist retreat. This is the story of one of the old, weird ties between Earth and space.
Why the Clean Tech Boom Went Bust
“In 2005, VC investment in clean tech measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The following year, it ballooned to $1.75 billion, according to the National Venture Capital Association. By 2008, the year after Doerr’s speech, it had leaped to $4.1 billion. And the federal government followed. Through a mix of loans, subsidies, and tax breaks, it directed roughly $44.5 billion into the sector between late 2009 and late 2011. Avarice, altruism, and policy had aligned to fuel a spectacular boom. Anyone who has heard the name Solyndra knows how this all panned out. Due to a confluence of factors—including fluctuating silicon prices, newly cheap natural gas, the 2008 financial crisis, China’s ascendant solar industry, and certain technological realities—the clean-tech bubble has burst, leaving us with a traditional energy infrastructure still overwhelmingly reliant on fossil fuels. The fallout has hit almost every niche in the clean-tech sector—wind, biofuels, electric cars, and fuel cells—but none more dramatically than solar.
Let the Robot Drive: The Autonomous Car of the Future Is Here
“As we drive the Google car—or are driven by it—I watch the action unfold on the computer monitor mounted on the passenger side of the dashboard. It shows how the car is interpreting the world: lanes, signs, cars, speeds, distances, vectors. The rendering is nothing special—a lot of blocky wireframe that puts me in mind of Atari’s classic Battlezone. (The display is just one of a host of geeky details—to change lanes, for instance, the driver presses buttons marked Shift and Left on a keyboard near the monitor.) Yet it is absolutely fascinating, almost illicitly thrilling, to watch as the car not only plots and calculates the myriad movements of neighboring vehicles in the moment but also predicts where they will be in the future, like high-speed, mobile chess. Onscreen, the car is constantly “acquiring” targets, surrounding them in red boxes, tracing raster lines to and fro, a freeway version of John Madden’s Telestrator. “We’re analyzing and predicting the world 20 times a second,” Levandowski says.
Steve Ballmer Reboots
“For many, the lasting impression of Ballmer is the sweaty, breathless, booming clown seen in countless YouTube clips, such as the “monkey boy” dance from a decade ago. He plays the cheerleader in public appearances in an apparent effort to prove that no one can top his love of Microsoft—and he succeeds cringingly well. Six feet tall and stocky, Ballmer has an enthusiasm that makes him even larger. You get the sense he could beat you up. And yet the man in his private dining room, dipping bits of iceberg lettuce into a ramekin of blue cheese dressing, is an altogether different character. He asks about your family and moves deftly between sports, politics, and business. He listens to your replies. He never swears. At times he pushes his chair back and puts his elbows on his knees; other times he leans deep into the table. In an industry dominated by eccentric introverts, Ballmer is out of place in that he’s pretty normal.
