• From Phil Plait’s awesome Bad Astronomy blog, Bill Nye (The Science Guy) contrives a sundial at Cornell University that glows when the Sun reaches its daily peak in the sky.
• SF Signal unearths a spiffy, vintage vid’ of Arthur C. Clarke on the challenges of predicting the future. (He would know!)
• Jeff Vandermeer interviews Mur Lafferty on her new Afterlife ebook novella series. (I’m a fan of Mur’s I Should Be Writing podcast.)
• Annabel Pitcher writes in defense of Dumbledore at The Guardian after Severus Snape is voted the most popular Potterverse character.
• Finally, via Io9, while the myth of the tongue taste map has been put to rest, is there another taste map — a real one — in your brain?

“If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run — and often in the short one — the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.”
— Arthur C. Clarke, The Exploration of Space, 1951

The Slick-Drip. Image links to Amazon.

I’d argue the key to a collapsable anything is that it collapses when you *want* it to, and not when you don’t. On that front, it seems to me the construction of this little dripper is pretty well suited to task… and in use the coffee grounds themselves further lend stability to the cone. More, its silicone construction means it’s hugely flexible (my read, packable, but you can simply consider it bouncy if you like) dishwasher safe, and unlikely to take on stale coffee flavors.

Time will tell. Meanwhile, it’s earned a spot in my coffee travel bag. Now if I could find a collapsable grinder…

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

— Steve Jobs, 2005 Commencement, Stanford University

Jobs submitted his resignation to the Apple Board of Directors today.

I’ve on occasion been labeled an Apple fanboy. I’m perfectly happy to wear that label. I for one find an uncompromising approach to user-centered design, and technology that delights its users, to be wholly admirable and laudable traits. While I rather suspect I might not have wanted to work for him, I’m grateful for the extraordinary efforts and remarkable results of Jobs’ relentless pursuit of not merely excellence, but of clarity, of sublimity, and of products that actually solve the wants and needs of the folks who use them. More, I’m grateful for the tremendous impact that Jobs has had on the technology industry as a whole, which is itself far better off for having elected him its chief iconoclast these many years.

Thanks, Steve. Best wishes. And, be well.

Attached hereto as Exhibit D is a true and correct copy of a still image taken from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In a clip from that film lasting about one minute, two astronauts are eating and at the same time using personal tablet computers.

2001: A Space Odyssey's Tablet Computer

Certainly there’s an Apple-esque minimalism at play here. Note the generous bezel around the screen, and the controls (teeny enough that you can’t actually see them in this image) reside at the bottom edge of the bezel. It’s a pity that in the only capture I can find it would appear that our intrepid astronauts are merely watching a video broadcast, and not, perhaps, playing Angry Birds (which is of course what they’d surely prefer to do, but voyaging through space is serious business.) More’s the pity that the tablet in the film bears the label, IBM.

Dune's Tablet Computer

But why stop there? Kubrick may have been the first, but his has hardly been the only on-screen vision of tablet computers. There’s the relatively bulky (by today’s standards, anyway) tablet that made its appearance in David Lynch’s version of Dune.

And of course, there’s the slim and styling tablet which saw regular use on Star Trek — TNG, DS9, take your pick — for which I would have at the time traded certain, let’s say vestigial parts of my anatomy. And for Gene Roddenberry’s sake, let us not forget the original series’ tricorder.

Star Trek's Tablet Computer

Harumph.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that SciFi has been used as the basis for prior art. Science Fiction giant Robert Heinlein described the attributes of a waterbed so precisely and thoroughly in his writings that the USPTO denied entrepreneur Charles Hall a patent in 1968, citing Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Other decisions haven’t been quite so decisive. Frederik Pohl described voice mail, voice dialing, virtual reality, online job searches and virtual keyboards in a single work, 1969′s The Age of the Pussyfoot, and none of his work has been successfully referenced as prior art. Such is the caprice of the  US Patent and Trademark Office.

All of this overlooks the very interesting aspect of Apple’s beef with Samsung, and that’s the pointed fact that if you look at Samsung’s telephones and tablet offerings before the iPhone and iPad, and look at them after, there’s a pretty spooky similarity each for the other in terms of  its look and feel, or its “trade dress.” And there’s no cinematic deux ex machina to help Samsung litigate that.

Before & After. AppleInsider Image -- www.appleinsider.com

“A perfect flatness quotient, in which no two points on a surface are at different levels, would be 1.0. The pancake was a surprisingly spiky 0.957, with both sharp spikes and an overall ‘lump’ in the center. Kansas, majestic prairie state that it was, left that pancake, metaphorically, in the dirt. It was an ultra-flat 0.9997, designated by the scientists as ‘damn flat.’ It had both less of an overall slope than the pancake and fewer small hills.”

It’s… science!

But wait… Wired is all about technology — and in particular all things digital — and the iPad is a digital platform. Shouldn’t they go together like peaches and cream? Pizza and beer? Like Wired Magazine and a freaking 21st century wireless multimedia tablet display? Well, yeah.

The New Yorker has some key demos on its side; it’s an uptown magazine that targets upscale readers, folks who can well afford to buy an iPad (and do, in droves.) More, it’s long enjoyed one of the largest renewal rates of any American magazine: 85% of its subscribers remain loyal readers year over year. It’s a readers’ magazine, literary and lush with long, expository articles, criticism, satire, fiction and poetry. Says author Tom Wolfe of The New Yorker’s writing style:

“The New Yorker style was one of leisurely meandering understatement, droll when in the humorous mode, tautological and litotical when in the serious mode, constantly amplified, qualified, adumbrated upon, nuanced and renuanced, until the magazine’s pale-gray pages became High Baroque triumphs of the relative clause and appository modifier.”

So where might a literary magazine place its focus in creating an iPad app? How about the wants of the reader! Says the Times:

The New Yorker, a magazine that has always been heavy on text, took a different tack from its peers. Instead of loading its iPad app with interactive features, the magazine focused on presenting its articles in a clean, readable format.

“That was really important to us: to create an app all about reading,” said Pamela Maffei McCarthy, the magazine’s deputy editor. “There are some bells and whistles, but we’re very careful about that. We think about whether or not they add any value. And if they don’t, out the window they go.”

Good on ‘em.