Using their heads for a fingertip Web
MICHAEL Arrington of the popular technology blog TechCrunch issued a challenge Monday to his circuit-savvy readership: “I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen Web tablet to surf the Web.” In other words, a computer that consists of nothing but a thin, flat, touch-sensitive screen that can sit in your lap. No device like that exists yet, Arrington wrote. “So,” he said, “let’s design it.”
Apple’s iPhone has proven how much a computer can do without a keyboard, mouse or the need to be anchored to a particular location. With the exception of a few complicated kinds of applications -- games and moviemaking software, mostly -- almost all of what we do with our computers can now be done online. (Can you remember the last time you sat down at your PC and didn’t open a browser?)
Personal computers, actually, are not really about computing anymore, at least not in the traditional sense. What they’ve become are windows onto the online landscape: tools to seek, find and share the world’s information.
One implication for newspapers is that tablets could become a kind of midpoint between office computers and printed media.
You’ll be able to sit with your screen at the kitchen table and read your favorite publications while you sip your morning coffee. But because the device is online, you’ll be able to read brand-new news, not just the day-old stuff you get from the bag on your front porch. That might help go a bit further in separating newspapers’ biggest strength -- news -- from their biggest weakness: paper.
There aren’t many people around with the influence to recruit all the people you’d need to build a sophisticated new product from scratch -- and without being paid for it. But Arrington is off to a good start. He posted his call to action Monday afternoon, and by Tuesday, thousands of people had written saying they’d like to contribute to the project.
“We can access the best of the best,” Nik Cubrilovic, the co-editor of TechCrunchIT, the business technology arm of TechCrunch, wrote in an e-mail. “The people who have contacted us *are* the people who have previously worked for the companies the open source products compete with.”
A bit of idealism is required to believe that a group of hobbyists will be able to create a product that Apple, Google and Microsoft couldn’t. But it sounds good on paper.
British mind control
In the hands of magician and hypnotist Derren Brown, the mind too can seem like a blank slate.
This is the British “mentalist” who visited a series of stores in New York City and tried to pay for his purchases with scraps of blank paper. The trick didn’t always work -- although he was able to use the paper at a jewelry store to buy a $4,500 diamond ring, the fellow minding the hot dog cart angrily refused the phony cash.
There’s a whole library of Brown’s bizarre mental magic buried in the YouTube haystack. In another video, he teaches a man at the dog track how to convert a losing ticket into a winning one: Simply insist to the teller that your ticket is the winner. One after another, confused tellers find themselves pushing piles of cash through the window like automatons.
It’s hard to decide if Brown himself is an illusion -- an actor who hires other actors to participate in his unbelievable scenarios.
But the more Brown you watch, the more you start to believe what you already know: There’s nothing magic at all about the human mind’s susceptibility to distraction -- and manipulation.
Stack cups, get famous
Have you seen the new sport where people stack plastic cups into pyramids at blinding speeds?
Apparently this pastime, called “speed stacking,” has been around for a decade and has grown into a competitive sport with its own governing body and everything. Though people of all ages compete in the sport, the reigning world champion is a 10-year-old boy named Steven Purugganan, who can conjure and collapse cup towers in seconds.
Speed stacking has spawned its own online mini-culture where kids videotape themselves doing timed practice runs and post the results on YouTube. You may suspect that these videos are artificially sped up. They’re not.
What you’re witnessing is a level of dexterity and speed that could only be possible in this Xbox-centered universe.
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