Favorite iPad photo so far today: Apple’s Phil Schiller appearing to get licked by a giant dog while talking about the device’s built-in camera.
(Photo: Reuters/Robert Galbraith)
I started to carry chalk around with me. I ride my bike a lot, so, I’d ride my bike over to people’s houses and leave them messages in chalk on their sidewalk. I set up a couple of systems with people where, when they got home, they would put something in the window, like a stuffed dog, or put a pumpkin up on the ledge that meant ‘Hey, I’m here. Come talk.’ I started having fun trying to dream up different ways to get people’s attention.
“
| — | Jake Reilly, a 24-year-old college student who gave up his cellphone, email and social media for 90 days. He says that, among other things, the experiment taught him that some people he thought were close friends really weren’t that close after all, and he thinks it helped him get back together with a girlfriend. Read our whole interview with him. |
Hedy Lamarr: heartbreaker, actress, mother of wireless technology:
A new biography from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes explains how former actress Hedy Lamarr, once considered “the most beautiful woman in the world,” was actually a prolific inventor, providing the U.S. Navy with the blueprints for the wireless technology behind cell phone networks and GPS.
Rhodes told NPR that Lamarr was bored by the Hollywood social scene and had set up a drafting table in her house and launched a sideline as an inventor. When German submarines began attacking civilian passenger cruise liners, Lamarr and her co-inventor George Antheil, came up with the idea of “spread-spectrum radio” to remotely control torpedoes:
“She understood that the problem with radio signals was that they could be jammed. But if you could make the signal hop around more or less randomly from radio frequency to radio frequency, then the person at the other end trying to jam the signal won’t know where it is,” he says. “If they try to jam one particular frequency, it might hit that frequency on one of its hops, but it would only be there for a fraction of a second.”
Lamarr and Antheil received a patent for their idea in 1942 but the Navy was lukewarm to the idea, leaving it untouched for years.
(Photo via Wikipedia)
Castillo’s account is not exactly on message for Netflix. His Twitter avatar is what you might correctly describe as “Stoned Elmo”; his last formal tweet, on June 23, states: “Bored as shyt wanna blaze but at the same time I don’t ugh fuck it where’s the bowl at spark me up lls.”
Was Steve Jobs really Apple’s editor-in-chief?
Dylan Stableford looks back to a 2007 interview:
During a 2007 joint interview with Bill Gates at the All Things Digital conference, Jobs described his role in those terms.
“People are inventing things constantly,” Jobs said while discussing how Apple determines features for new products, like the iPhone. “The art of it is deciding what’s on and what’s not on there—the editing function.”
“He doesn’t market-test anything,” Deutschman said. “It’s all his own judgment and perfectionism and gut.”
Judgment, perfectionism, guts—those sound an awful lot like the qualities of a great editor.
“The editing function,” Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg wrote in a blog post about the 2007 All Things Digital conference. “More than his quickness with a riposte or his ‘reality-distortion field’ self-confidence, that is Jobs’ edge.”
