It’s pretty common, and correct, to compare a computer to the human brain. After all, they both use incredible amounts of connections and combinatory pathways to process information and make decisions. But your computer can also be like the body as a whole. Both are incredibly complex, with way more packed in there than seems […]
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As anyone in the Bay Area can tell you, there is still a huge disconnect between how we live our mobile technology and how pop culture portrays it. Nowhere is this more true than in the “tech nerd” character that still somehow keeps popping up. Nervous, stammering, sun-starved, Cheetos-stained: the tech nerd explains something to […]
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It’s weird and conceptually difficult to think about size limitations in smartphones. After all, the numbers involved in making them are nearly impossible to think about. For example, a typical processing chip for a smartphone, say the iPhone 6, has over a billion transistors (the physical component that allows it to “think”). A billion of […]
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Let’s look back through the fog of time to the far-distant year of 1990. Imagine going to work one day, and finding a memo (possibly mimeographed) on your desk that said that from now on, your company was instituting a “bring your own device” policy. You could now use your own cell phone and computer […]
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When reading history, we tend to mark off eras with thick black lines. We have the Dark Ages, and then we have the Renaissance, as if everyone in Europe woke up one morning and said “You know what we could use around here? Some culture!” This ignores the continuum: Dante was dead a hundred years […]
READ MOREFor years, the quest for the perfect mobile battery has been like the old vaudeville “good news/bad news” routine. The two characters are trying to solve a problem, and the first one keeps leaping up, to swelling orchestral strings, and yelling “I got it!” The other guy jumps with him, before the first guy thinks, […]
READ MOREThe history of literature is filled with lost manuscripts. Ernest Hemingway’s wife lost a collection of his short stories. T.E. Lawrence left what he considered the superior version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom at a train station. Thomas Carlyle wrote a history of the French Revolution, only to have a maid mistake it for scrap […]
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Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian genius and writer who in many ways was a strict and old-fashioned Luddite, has somehow become a lodestone for the mobile tech age. His short and humble stories often revolve around how we deal with the intrusion of the fantastic into the every day, which is what we are dealing […]
READ MOREI was one of the last people in my group of friends to get a smartphone, and before that, I still had a limited amount of texts on my monthly plan for my flip phone. These factors, combined with small buttons, my persnicketiness with grammar, and clumsy thumbs, meant that each text on that flip […]
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Computer terminology changes in weird ways which we sometimes don’t recognize until the new terminology is already part of our lexicon. Think about it: there was a time, not too long ago, when you could ask someone to “Google it” and they’d be confused. Another example of that is “Notebook.” At one point I wasn’t […]
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