![//assets.nydailynews.com/img/2009/01/10/gal_obama_blackberry_8.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2009/01/10/gal_obama_blackberry_8.jpg "Bam 'n' Berry")
‘ “I'm still clinging to my Blackberry. They're going to have to pry it out of my hands.”
Obama uttered these now famous words – which might just be the mother all endorsements for Blackberry – in an interview with CNBC and the New York Times Wednesday.
It got us thinking, what a great ad campaign!
So we've gotten leading advertising firms to create hilarious, moving and altogether awesome ad campaigns around Bam's devotion to his Berry.’
via New York Daily News.
Interactive graphic shows the percentage of the population issued passports in each of the fifty states. I am not surprised at the regional discrepancies, which sort with so many other measures of sophistication state-by-state. I am surprised by how low the percentages are across the board. Overall, less than five percent of the American public hold passports. If that doesn’t speak to our insularity… Update: As a reader points out (see the comments), it is likely that the statistic represents the percentage of Americans who were issued passports in just one year. A Google search on “percentage of Americans who have passports” comes up with a figure more like 20-30% instead.
via Good.
“The system projects a virtual bike lane (using lasers!) on the ground around the cyclists, providing drivers with a recognizable boundary they can easily avoid.”
via Good.
Heather Havrilesky is writing here about Battlestar Galactica, about which I do not share the fascination, but her introductory remarks may be worth pondering regardless:
‘I hate hearing, “I liked their early stuff the best.” Even if it’s true, there’s something about that sentiment that’s just so overused and predictable. “Of course you liked early R.E.M. best,” I want to say. “You were 17 years old and drunk on tequila and in love with a girl who didn’t know you existed, and ‘Harbor Coat’ summed up your melancholy mood like it was written just for you.”
The truth is, we all loved early U2 and early Genesis and early “SNL” and early “Sopranos” and early reality TV and the first season of “Lost” and early Modest Mouse and some of the first webzines and the first days of Burning Man (before it got so popular) and John McEnroe (before he was everywhere) and the Dead (before the frat boys caught on) and weed (when it was cheap, remember the dime bag?) and early David Foster Wallace and early Dan Clowes and early This American Life and early Spy magazine and early, early, early, early to the party, not late! Not like everyone else, the herds, the masses! I knew about it all first, I was there, goddamn it, I was right there, discovering it. Just me, me, me!
But you weren’t alone, sugar plum. We were all there. We all liked the same crap, and then we didn’t like the stuff that came after that. And then we got fat and our hair started falling out and our backs started to hurt and we didn’t like anything at all anymore.’
…and, if you’re not there yet, take it to heart because you will be.
By the way, I beg to differ. I didn’t like the same crap, Heather. It is even more hip not to turn your nose up at things you and your crowd used to like but not to care for them in the first place. Things I never ever liked, even in their early days, include: Genesis, SNL, and especially reality TV and This American Life (and how could you forget Dave Eggers?) … And should I boast that I haven’t even heard of Dan Clowes. (You’re right about the Dead, though; I was as fanatic as they came, and I can’t listen to nearly anything past ’78.)
This is only peripherally related, I suspect, but writers on creativity have distinguished immature and mature varieties; immature creativity being brash and bold, energetic and iconoclastic, while mature creativity is more sober, reflective, integrative and synthetic. Psychologists have studied what makes some creative geniuses peak early and others continue to age constructively. As a culture, we increasingly favor the former and ignore, if not spurn, the latter (as our society does with the wisdom of age in general). I suspect the crowd-pleasers are largely of the brash variety. (It is sort of like drinking some Gallo to get smashed out of your mind as contrasted to appreciating a fine Medoc, isn’t it?)
‘According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.
If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”
The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.’
via New Scientist.
