As futurist Paul Saffo says, for a company like Mercedes nowadays, “the value add is the software and the computers. The wheels are primarily there to keep the computers from dragging on the ground.”

I for one welcome our new robot-car overlords. Hell, they have to be better drivers than 90% of this town.

But it’s not like there isn’t a damn good source that suggests Apple’s plans for K-12 textbooks are anything short of ambitious and transforming. I’m guessing Apple’s pitch to the textbook companies is something like this: “Digital transformation of your industry is inevitable. Here’s our plan; we’d like you to come along for the ride. But if you choose not to, we won’t hesitate to leave you behind.”

One potential byproduct of an Apple foray into textbooks? The much needed diminishment of Texas’ influence in the content of curricula across the country.

Additionally, i imagine as we roll out ciruccula for say, a teen dating violence program nationwide, we’d neeed to be on the cutting edge of these tools to remain relevant, especially if we have any hope of engaging a youth audience.

…About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that’s mysterious — clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds.

Q:  If a taco and a burrito are traveling near the speed of light and collide, will the result be delicious? 

A: The result would be an explosion large enough to destroy a small village.  high speed collisions do that, whether or not they are made of Mexican food.

Neil deGrasee Tyson AMAs on redditt

This conversation began as a debate one whether Pinero had been beat boxing/humming (or whatever the hell it is that he does) to the Airwolf Theme, or the some mangled mashup of Magnum and Sanford and Son. (It was Airwolf, spot on).

This entire scene can be supplementally overlaid on our tiny call center, where in 36 hours we’ll be launching a 24-hour service line for young adults in abusive dating relationships. This timeline has been somewhat accelerated, so we are of course scrambling. The focus of our efforts is on mine and Brian’s pet project of adding a SMS/text component to the hotline, a channel we hope will not only be more comfortable for clients in crisis, but also cross some digital divide issues, giving lower-soci0-economic demographics, who may not have access to a computer (but may have pay-as-you-go phones with texting) a way to connect. It would allow them to ask basic questions about the health of their relationships without the scary crisis levels of calling the hotline (thus also saving us valuable resources by allowing us to triage incoming calls). It would be the first-of-its kind human services texting helpline in the country and would be announced on national television the next day.

And as of the Airwolf conversation, it did not work. The timeline had left us flat-footed. Our IT support was on vacation, and Brian and I were left staring at stalled status bars for the install of our new miracle chat, as it fought for space on our inadequate internet connection. This wouldn’t be a crisis in itself, except the helplines computers are old (like first-term-W old), and the chat client was disappearing from the system every time the machine was shut down (which needs to happen, else they start melting). This forced the advocates to reinstall every single time, doing god knows what to the systems, and slowing down the internet to a damn near inoperable degree.

“So what if we just leave them on and logged in till we can figure this out?” Brian suggests.

“I really think that might melt them. Or at the very least cause some serious issues…”

“What if we buy a fan, crank the AC and if they crap out, maybe we get a new computer or two?”

I shrug. “Tell your folks to bring blankets and jackets”

As much as this sounds like Doc Brown holding the cables to together while the Delorian blasts down main street as lightning simultaneously strikes the clock tower and sends Marty back to 1985, it was the best solution we had. On to the next crisis.

As a side note, the fact that Brian and I are heading up this project is two steps shy of mildly psychotic. Neither of us have degrees in IT-related fields, and in college Franzia on the couch before class in the morning, happened more than once. Yet here we were heading up project that actually meant a damn and could make a difference in peoples lives.

I’ve made a point to never write about work on this site (which explains the decrease in posting of late, as so much of my life is about work), but we’re making an exception here. One this was important and had the potential to change the direction of how these types of services are offered. Two: not everything went exactly to plan (in fact nothing went to plan) but we pulled it off – Brian, and my absurdly small communications team hit the mark and in doing so crossed some invisible threshold into being more than just a job, but something we could be proud of.

At that moment back on my side of the building, the official panic level on the whiteboard was climbing from “take cover” to a midpoint between “…Imperial troops have entered the base…” and “Fast Zombies”

In addition to taking on a new service provision we war also launching a new website with our partner project in California. As with these things, I’d assumed the website would be the impossible task and the chat the easy one. It turned out to be quite the opposite in fact, with the website kicking along quite smoothly and the cant being an epic clusterfuck.  Still, any website is an effort similar to counting grains of sand on a beach – reading back through content, checking links, tweaking styles, uploading file after file after file…how many times our stylesheets have made the virtual trip from our desktops to the data center in Kansas in the past 48 hours – the distance numbers would get us to the moon at least.

The really stunning thing is, in hindsight it all works out somehow. It’s not perfect, but we did something new, something a bit epic on a ridiculous time frame that no one thought possible. Our announcement had a few hitches, but at the end of the day we have something unique. Something we can be proud of.

Kids write their own manuals in a new language made up of the things we give them and the things that derive from the peculiar wiring of their heads. …When he was still a toddler, Abraham liked to put a glow-in-the-dark bedsheet-style Lego ghost costume over a Green Goblin minifig and seat him on a Sioux horse, armed with a light saber, then make the Goblin do battle with Darth Vader, mounted on a black horse, armed with a bow and arrow. That is the aesthetic at work in the Legosphere now–not the modernist purity of the early years or the totalizing vision behind the dark empire of modern corporate marketing but the aesthetic of the Lego drawer, of the mash-up, the pastiche that destroys its sources at the same time that it makes use of and reinvents them.

That is the brilliance of the system, and something i feel we really miss out on as adults – seeing what can be made when we actively set aside the instruction manuals, an act we are not prone to, due to the inherent risk (money wasted, a drive back to IKEA, electrocution, possible firing).

Thankfully, George Lucas was available to once again crush the hopes and dreams of his fans.

On Facebook, you’re supposed to connect with close friends. Becoming friends with someone means he or she gets to see your content, but you also get to see his or her content in return. On Twitter, that’s not the case: you choose what information you want to receive, and you have no obligation to follow anybody. Facebook emphasizes profiles and people, while Twitter emphasizes the actual content (in its case, tweets).

The result is that the stream of information is simply different on both services. You’re more likely to talk about personal issues, happy birthday wishes, gossip about a changed Facebook relationship status, and postings about parties on your Facebook News Feed. On Twitter, you’re more likely to find links and news, and you’re more likely to follow brands, news sources and other entities outside of your social graph. In fact, Twitter tells me that one out of every four tweets includes a link to some form of content.

More…

Courtesy of Mr. Pinero..

I can’t even begin to imagine how many takes this took.