100 followers for every leader

by Tom Purves

101 iPad wannabes
[Via Brainstorm Tech: Technology blogs, news and analysis from Fortune Magazine » Apple 2.0]

The most complete list we’ve seen of the tablets unveiled at CES last week

Below the fold, the names and rough specs of 101 tablet computers unveiled at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, courtesy of CES director of research Shawn Dubravec. It came to us via the Boy Genius Report.

It is likely that none of these devices would have been built were it not for the success of Apple’s (AAPL) iPad which, as it happens, was unveiled by Steve Jobs a year ago this Thursday. 

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Not only would none of these be even demonstrated this year if not for Apple last year but you can almost imagine that the vast majority will even look like the iPad.

The other point is that Apple was selling the iPad with a very short time – Steve even announced when the date would be. For most of these, only prototypes have been discussed, some only have pictures and hard shipping dates are few.

And how will these 100 tablets differentiate themselves from the field? When given too many similar choices, most people just go with the most popular.

First they came for Brontosaurus; then they came for Pluto; could Triceratops still win out?

by Enokson

Triceratops: Not quite dead yet
[Via Boing Boing]

Have faith, o ye lovers of Triceratops. For the battle over dinosaur taxonomic delineation has only just begun to rage.

Last summer, many of you expressed dismay when a team of scientists at Montana’s Museum of the Rockies published research suggesting that Triceratops were actually just juvenile Torosaurs. In your sadness, ye cried out, and Andrew Farke of the Raymond Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, California, saw your suffering and took pity upon you.

Farke reanalyzed the same set of fossils, and came to a different conclusion than the Museum of the Rockies team. The key was a skull that’s long been classed as a third genera—called Nedoceratops hatcheri.

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Brontosaurus became Apatosaurus after more science revealed they were the same creature. Pluto no longer is classified as a planet.

As science progresses, it often discovers that previous names no longer apply. So they make the changes, which often gets the public upset because they do not expect there to be such will-nilly changes in what is ‘real.’

Now we have the possible loss of Triceratops as a distinct animal. Torosaur just does not sound correct or as cool. But there may be hope.

Essentially, we have other scientists disagreeing. This is the normal course of science as we gain greater knowledge we realize that certain distinction that we used in the past may no longer apply. We have to recognize the changes in our knowledge which we do by altering the nomenclature.

But this sometimes causes consternation because so many people are taught that science is unchanging rather than sometimes tentative. Almost anything in science can be changed with the incorporation of new data.

Science simply represents our best guess model of the real world. Using the best data we have, we try to construct a model that is explanatory and rational. But if the data changes, then many times the underlying model must change.

Here, new understanding of the world around use resulted in the alteration of what we call some things. It may be tough for us to accept but that is how science moves ahead.

To not recognize the alterations that new data can wreck on our understanding of the world is to begin the descent into denialism.