Progress

The Evolution of Your Desk, Visualized

Over the past twenty years, you entire desk has collapsed in on itself and into your computer. This video, by Best Review at the Harvard Innovation Lab, shows how it happened. The video starts with a classic desk scene from the 80s, replete with everything from fax machine to rolodex. As time progresses, though, the…

Mankind’s major struggle [in the future] will be against boredom, with the suicide rate zooming as people lose the race. — January 4, 1959 Parade magazine

Can Technology Ever Make Us Truly Happy?

Humans are clever: what sets us apart from the rest of the creatures on the planet is our ability to think about the world around us—and shape it. But in making all the technological advances that seems so smart, are we making the world better, or just different? This video takes a pretty lofty view…

How the First Laptop Was Held Back by Its Humongous Price… And Sexism

History remembers technology progressing at the speed of Moore’s Law, galloping between semiconductors and clock speeds. But the real challenge has always been getting people to accept it into their lives. And as Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic reminds us, that has, from time to time, meant overcoming ingrained prejudices. Here’s the story: The GRiD…

The iPhone 5 Is More Powerful than the Fastest PowerBook Ever Made

We’ve come a long way, guys. In 2005, the best possible laptop you could buy from Apple scored around 1,000 on Geekbench, a popular performance testing program. The newest iPhone 5—a phone—demolishes that number. The 17-inch PowerBook, the last of the line that preceded the current MacBook lineage, weighed in at 7 pounds, a full…

The Future Is Unevenly Distributed

One of the big questions of futurism is what kind of world we want to live in tomorrow. But as attendees at a recent conference on futurism discovered, “tomorrow” is relative. People in Egypt look at the future very differently than people in Canada do. This was a heated topic of discussion at the recently…

10 Things To Keep In Mind On Your First Trip To Low Earth Orbit

The future of civilian space travel in low Earth orbit (or “LEO,” for those in-the-know) is looking brighter by the day, but what will life be like when you’re soaring hundreds of miles above Earth’s surface? How will you eat, how will you sleep, and how will you go to the bathroom? We’ve got a…

ISS Astronaut Chases a Spaceship Getting Destroyed Into the Atmosphere

I’ve seen some good re-entries filmed from orbit, but I like this one because it feels like a chase. In fact, it is a chase, as the ISS was following the same direction of the Russian Progress Resupply that was destroyed. The Progress spaceship undocked from the ISS on October 29th. This image sequence, taken…

August’s Russian rocket failure is unlikely to force evacuation of the International Space Station

Back in August, Russia’s Progress 44 cargo vessel ran into complications on its delivery to the International Space Station, falling to Earth after the Soyuz-U rocket propelling it into space failed unexpectedly. https://gizmodo.com/a-russian-cargo-shipment-to-the-international-space-sta-5834023 For weeks there’s been concern over the similarity of the Soyuz-U to the Soyuz-FG, the rocket used to lift manned spacecraft to…

A Russian cargo shipment to the International Space Station has crashed

An uncrewed Russian cargo shipment to the International Space Station crashed into Siberia just minutes after blastoff this morning. The Russian space agency is reporting that the Progress M-12M cargo ship (pictured above) failed to detach from its launch vehicle at the correct stage of the launch, and was subsequently unable to enter the correct…

Scott Adams Is Bored

Here’s pretty much all I know about Scott Adams: Sometimes he says (or does) wacky things. Most of the time he draws funny comics about a luckless office drone named Dilbert. I can relate! But not today. https://jezebel.com/dilbert-creator-deletes-misogynist-rant-5786019 Today, Adams is on the soap box again, penning his way into the public discourse with a…

Self-Checkout Luddites Are Starting to Damage My Calm

Major grocery chains like Albertson’s are eliminating self-checkout aisles at their various locations because management claims they’re too impersonal. What a crock. That’s a polite way of saying some people are simply ill-equipped to use them efficiently. Having lived where I live for about six years now, I have never once interacted with a person…

Air Traffic Controllers Go From Napping to Movie Watching

The Federal Aviation Administration, the country’s top federal agency for documenting instances of unauthorized nappy time, has yet another embarrassing incident on its hands. This time, the air traffic controller wasn’t asleep—he was just watching a terrible Samuel L. Jackson movie. (But not the one about the snakes on the plane. We were disappointed, too.)…

Intel Doubles Capacity of Phase-Change Memory, the Next Step After Flash

Sure, its exciting to see flash memory drop in price and increase in capacity, but flash isn’t the end-all-be-all. In fact, we already know what it’ll be replaced by before it’s even become the de facto standard: phase-change memory. And Intel just figured out how to double the capacity of phase-change memory, shortening flash’s lifespan…

35 Years of Tokyo Progress in 10 Seconds

Witness the progress of Tokyo’s Shinjuku ward from 1969-2004 in miniature cereal box form. I feel for the guy who had to hold still with a camera for 35 years. He must have an iron bladder. [freshcreation]

Scientists Figure Out How to Grow Gas From Bacteria

In our current quest to stop giving the kings of Saudi Arabia billions of dollars to build yachts and bombs via our love affair with gasoline, some scientists at a company called LS9 claim to have figured out a way to grow petroleum from bacteria. The exciting prospect could shoot us to energy independence in…