We took our first walk through the woods this year. Algonkian Park is one of our favorite spots, and it’s only about five minutes from the house. We caught a pretty big northern water snake, a wood frog, and we saw a very large fishing spider (which I did not attempt to catch).
Check out the photos on Flickr.
I know the conventional wisdom is that the internet killed newspapers, but I think that’s too simple of an explanation. And I also think it lets newspapers off way too easy.
I don’t think the internet killed newspapers; I think newspapers killed themselves, and the internet was simply the best and most convenient alternative. In other words, the internet was the catalyst that started a process that had been queued up and ready to happen for a very long time.
What did the newspaper industry do wrong? The same thing most failing businesses are guilty of: they failed to innovate. Rather than constantly trying to outdo themselves, they waited for someone or something to come along and outdo them. Up until a few years ago, I’d been getting the Washing Post (or some other major paper) delivered to my house daily for my entire life, and I’m fairly certain that the only significant change that was ever made to that paper was the transition from black and white photographs to color. Over the course of decades, that’s pathetic.
I believe that the Washing Post, the New York Times, and many other major papers in this country could still have a very healthy and profitable print business if they simply offered a product that people wanted. Of course, the internet is still an incredibly efficient and effective means of delivering news, but I don’t think it entirely replaces the demand for thoughtful, thorough, well-researched, and journalistically sound articles that can be read anywhere and anytime, can be easily shared, that you don’t have to worry about your kids spilling juice on, and that can be comfortably read for long periods of time. Does that mean newspapers could have stopped the rise of the internet as a news medium? Of course not. But it does mean that they could probably have coexisted.
So what would a modern physical daily newspaper have to look like for me to be willing to pay for it?
At this point, it might very well be too late for newspapers to change. They have so completely failed to modernize — and they have given phones, tablets, laptops, and ebook readers so much time to embed themselves in our lives as news devices — that even if the perfect print paper were to be introduced at this point, the general public might scoff at it. But I’m pretty convinced that there was a window of time — a window that started closing a long time ago, but that slammed the rest of the way closed just in the last decade — where newspapers could have made the decision to innovate and keep themselves relevant. And now that it might be too late, I think blaming the internet is letting the industry off way too easy.
Now don’t even get me started on cable companies.
Just got back from a weekend trip to Baltimore during which we witnessed a little flooding.
My science fiction record is getting better. Last week, scientists theorized that it might be possible to use the LHC as a time machine (which is the premise of my story The Epoch Index), and this week, artificial photosynthesis, one of the themes of my novel Containment, becomes a reality.
Check out the article on the ACS website for more details, but the general idea is that Dr. Daniel Nocera, a scientist at MIT, says his team has successfully developed the first practical artificial leaf. In his own words:
A practical artificial leaf has been one of the Holy Grails of science for decades. We believe we have done it. The artificial leaf shows particular promise as an inexpensive source of electricity for homes of the poor in developing countries. Our goal is to make each home its own power station. One can envision villages in India and Africa not long from now purchasing an affordable basic power system based on this technology.
In Containment, the concept is called AP, or artificial photosyntheses, since the scientists are not so much interested in creating an artificial leaf as mimicking (and improving on) the chemical processes that happen inside the leaf. Interestingly, the scientists’ objective in Containment isn’t the energy that photosynthesis creates, but the oxygen byproduct.
Here’s a quote from one of the lead scientists studying the problem from Ishtar Terra Station One, humankind’s first permanent outpost on Venus:
The Agriculture Department has perfected stemstock, or meat without the animal, and now we need to perfect photosynthesis without the plant. As much as I love our ferns, the day is coming when we’re going to need more oxygen than they are able to provide us. Without more oxygen, V1 is as big as it’s ever going to get, and it will always be vulnerable to things like pathogens and any number of other events that can unexpectedly destroy plant life.
If this is the kind of thing you’re into, give Containment a try. It’s available in all digital formats, and for this much hardcore science fiction, you can’t beat the price.
My newest story/novella, Venom, is now available in all formats (Kindle, iBooks, Nook, EPUB, and HTML). Maybe it’s just because Venom is the most recent thing I’ve written, but I feel like it’s one of my favorites.
Venom is sort of a parallel story to Human Legacy Project. It takes place in the Human Legacy Project universe, but it’s an entirely independent story describing the rise of the People’s Party, and the HLP’s attempts to infiltrate it.
If you like fiction — especially science fiction — give Venom a try. For this much hard-core sci-fi, you can’t beat the price.
I was a big fan of Amazon’s Lighted Leather Kindle Cover, but whenever I took my Kindle out of the case, I was always amazed by how light the device is, and how much weight the lighted case adds to it. One of the advantages of reading on a Kindle (as opposed to a tablet) is that the Kindle is far lighter than either my Xoom or my iPad. So I finally decided to ditch the cover and go with a sleeve, instead.
I’ve had dozens of neoprene gadget cases in the past, so I decided to try the BUILT Neoprene Kindle Sleeve. It’s extremely lightweight, very well cushioned, and shaped perfectly. Now my Kindle is well protected when I’m not using it (I’ve already dropped it while in the case on a hardwood floor, and it was perfectly fine), but I can pull it out and enjoy the lightness and form-factor of the Kindle the way it is was designed to be enjoyed.
The only problem is that the case is a little pricey. At $29.99, I was hesitant, but although I would have liked a cheaper alternative, I’ve been very happy with it.
I think it’s time for Tropicana to find a new marketing and branding firm. First, they went after the generic orange juice market with this:
And now they’re apparently chasing the young male demographic with this:
Tropicana, I think your focus groups are messing with you.
My friend PolyGeek forwarded a story to me this morning that completely caught me off guard. The article is called Atom Smasher Could Be Used As Time Machine, and it describes a proposal put forth earlier this month by two physicists that the Large Hadron Collider could be used to send particles — and hence message — forward and backward in time.
Other than being incredibly cool, why was I so intrigued? This is precisely the premise of a story I published in August of last year called The Epoch Index.
An excerpt from the article:
The scientists outline a way to use the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 17-mile long (27-km) particle accelerator buried underground near Geneva, to send a hypothetical particle called the Higgs singlet to the past.
And an excerpt from The Epoch Index:
But the LHC ended up finding something which most people consider to be far more interesting. As the data analysis algorithms parsed through the petabytes of recorded data, they began to uncover very regular patterns in the spins of newly discovered particles. While the direction of the particles’ spins initially appeared random, the analysis began detecting a repetition which looked increasingly like sequences of bytes, and which were eventually decoded into various forms of digital data: text, images, audio, and even simple video. When it was determined beyond a doubt that the encoded information referenced people, events, and dates that did not yet exist, the site was immediately secured and the project promptly put under the control of a small team from the UN. The name of the mysterious particles whose spins had turned out to be tiny windows into the future was changed from “saxions” to “tachyons” — a term derived from the greek word takhus meaning “swift.” The LHC had proven for the first time and beyond any doubt that it was possible for matter to travel faster than the speed of light. At least at the particle level, time travel was possible.
I’ll let them take the Nobel Prize for physics as long as I get the one for literature.
First of all, I should make it clear that I hate just about all printers on the planet. Most are poorly manufactured, the drivers are buggy, and they end up being money pits (as they were intentionally designed, no doubt). But here’s a way that owning one of these pieces of clunky and largely obsolete technology could be slightly less horrible:
When you set up your printer, you should be prompted to optionally enter your Amazon credentials. If I choose to provide them, when I start to get low on ink, I should be able to order the correct cartridges with the press of a button, and have them arrive at my door within two days. The advantages of such a partnership are probably pretty obvious, but I’ll spell them out anyway:
Of course, Amazon isn’t the only option here. Staples and Office Depot could try to negotiate such agreements, as well, or the printer manufacturers could try to sell directly to consumers and cut retailers out entirely. However, because of Amazon’s brand recognition, generally good reputation with consumers, and extremely robust retail infrastructure, I think they are best positioned to pull something like this off.
PS: If you love printers as much as I do, you might enjoy The Oatmeal’s Why I Believe Printers Were Sent From Hell.
Here’s some free advice for Apple and other technology companies: start moving some of your manufacturing to the US. Buy up some plants and factories in places like Detroit, and start using them to manufacture things like iPhones, iPads, touch screens, memory chips, CPUs, and laptops.
I know it would be expensive, and I know they would lose money — at least initially. But here are the advantages:
I’m not naive enough to think that this is a serious possibility since the return is probably too uncertain and too far off for a public company to take seriously. However, if Apple and other technology companies really want to change the world, there are more profound ways of doing it than just slick devices and marketing hype.
Living Digitally 