Finally, the orangs get a chance to have fun and make decisions.
And Apple has a great new market.
Will these primates knock out another Shakespeare play? These Orangutans Play with iPads |
Orangutans, it turns out, love the iPad and its games just as much as some humans do. |
A budding program at the Milwaukee County Zoo is working to place iPads into the giant, gentle palms of their orangutans. Two of the zoo's orangutans already look forward to weekly sessions with an iPad. They even have favorite apps, shows and games, but they haven't yet been given free rein with the Apple device because keepers worry they might get frustrated and simply snap one in half. |
"One of the biggest hurdles we face is that an orangutan can snap an iPad like you or I could rip cardboard," said Richard Zimmerman, executive director of Orangutan Outreach, which hopes to extend Milwaukee's iPad enrichment program to zoos around the country. "Even the little guys like Mahal are incredibly strong. A big male could take it apart in about five seconds." |
Size matters, but in space, it's the smaller the better.
We need more breakthrough thinking/engineering like this.
So, read all about it. Computer Chip-Sized Spacecraft Will Explore Space In Swarms |
by Peter Murray August 15th, 2011 | Comments (2) |
We knew to expect a paradigm shift with the end of the space shuttle program, but this is ridiculous. Mason Peck and his group of forward-thinking engineers are taking NASA’s slogan of Faster, Better, Cheaper to the extreme. Their spacecraft will cut down travel time to Alpha Centauri from thousands of years to just a few hundred, and instead of the $1.7 billion it takes to build a space shuttle, Peck’s ships can be built for an amazing $33. |
I might mention that there’s no room for astronauts. In fact, if one were to try and board these spacecraft they would crush it. |
The spacecraft are called Sprites and they weigh about 10 grams each. Integrated circuits 3.8 cm on a side, they’re literally spacefaring computer chips. This past May the space shuttle Endeavour brought three Sprite prototypes to the International Space Station. Fixed to the station’s exterior, they are currently in the early days of a two year test to see how they stand up to the harsh elements of space. |
Here's a guy who knows the story from all sides, and is not afraid to tell it like it is.
Should Agents Publish? (Writers Beware!)
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AGENTS, ERR... PUBLISHERS...? |
The answer to this question is a resounding don't even try to argue with me NO!
How can I say this when so many have neat little answers? Because it is like having your lawyer be your judge. In the last few months I have seen the book agent turn tail and not only abandon all ethics of their business, but chase the money like so many drowning rats. Am I being to harsh? Maybe, but I have good reason. Read more at theworstbookever.blogspot.com |
Please do not ignore this essay. Please. Editor Robert Runte is sharing an important reminder for us authors: we need a will. |
One topic that most writer's advice columns never get around to addressing, but which is fairly crucial, is estate planning. Yes, I know, you are immortal and are never going to get sick, let alone die, but let us for the sake of argument talk about a couple of simple steps to save one's family a fair bit of trouble, and to perhaps ensure one's literary immortality. |
First, write a will. No one likes to think about wills much, and certainly don't feel it's something they need to address today...sometime in the indefinite future will be fine, they think. But, stuff happens. So, right now, make an actual appointment to draw up a will. And then, in addition to the usual content, put in a couple of clauses outlining who gets the literary property, and what they should do with it. |
There are four issues here: (a) who gets the royalties (if any) from the work; (b) who has artistic control over one's published work; (c) what is to be done with any unfinished manuscripts that are left lying around after one is gone; and (d) what is to be done with one's online presence. Read more at writer-in-residence.blogspot.com |
One good reason many international readers should buy my books through Smashwords—save lots of money. Amazon Hold Back The Growth Of E-Books Around The World |
 Writers often wonder why the growth of e-books is so much slower in the rest of the world.
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There are a number of reasons for that, but one big factor is the $2 surcharge that Amazon levies on all e-books in most international countries. |
This charge is levied by Amazon, and kept by Amazon, and has nothing to do with taxes. |
Kris slices up yet another repetition of a stupid old prediction.
Masterful writing and thinking, as usual from Kris. If you're interested in the writing/reading business, you should follow her blog. Absolutely. The Business Rusch: Slush Pile Truths |
Why am I calling Felten’s piece ridiculous? Aside from the fact that he says the same thing writers from places like NPR to The Daily Beast have been saying for two years, he shows no understanding of the book business whatsoever. If he actually gave the subject some thought and did a little research, then perhaps he would have come to a different conclusion. |
His premise is pretty simple: without book publishers, readers won’t be able to find the good stuff in the middle of all the crap. |
Jeez, dude. Those arguments were old one hundred years ago when reading ceased to be the right of the rich and well educated, and trickled down to the masses. Anyone ever wonder why we ended up with a divide between “high-brow literature” and “low-brow crap”? It was because the cognoscenti no longer controlled what people read, therefore the cognoscenti lost a great deal of their power, so the cognoscenti had to make up words to distinguish between the “approved” books and that stinky genre stuff. |
by Robert Krulwich
This is not a trick. There are no invisible strings, no post production video fixes. What we have here is a graceful, flapping, unfeathery machine that looks and flies like a seagull. It was built by a team of engineers at a company called Festo in Germany, which specializes in factory automation, and for years now they've been doing what Leonardo dreamed of when he sat on those hills near Florence sketching birds: they copy from nature's designs.
Watch the movie! See th... more by Robert Krulwich
This is not a trick. There are no invisible strings, no post production video fixes. What we have here is a graceful, flapping, unfeathery machine that looks and flies like a seagull. It was built by a team of engineers at a company called Festo in Germany, which specializes in factory automation, and for years now they've been doing what Leonardo dreamed of when he sat on those hills near Florence sketching birds: they copy from nature's designs.
Watch the movie! See the artificial bird fly! - Jerry URL: www.npr.org
By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared to keeping my mind in check. Over the years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of CEOs all with the same experience. Nonetheless, very few people talk about it, and I have never read anything on the topic. It’s like the fight club of management: The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown. |
At risk of violating the sacred rule, I will attempt to describe the condition and prescribe some techniques that helped me. In the end, this is the most personal and important battle that any CEO will face. |
Read the entire article, then read Feynman's letters. When Richard P. Feynman, one of the giants of 20th-century physics, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965, he received hundreds of congratulatory letters from friends and admirers, including one from a former student named Koichi Mano. Acknowledging the letter, Feynman asked the young scientist what he working on. Koichi sent a doleful reply, regretting that he wasn’t working on fundamental problems of science, but only on “a humble and down-to-earth type of problem.” |
“Your letter made me unhappy,” Feynman wrote back, “for you seem to be truly sad. No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it. It seemed that the influence of your teacher has been to give you a false idea of what are worthwhile problems.” In his own career, Feynman pointed out, he had “worked on innumerable problems that you would call humble, but which I enjoyed and felt very good about because I sometimes could partially succeed.” He went on to describe a dozen of those experiments, some of which failed, including one on the theory of turbulence that he “spent several years on without success.” |
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