Gruber’s title IS better – “Things Tech Nerds Believe Make the iPhone Inferior But Which in Reality Don’t Matter in the Mass Market”

by brittgow

International Business Times: ‘10 Reasons Why iPhone 5 Doesn’t Stand a Chance Against Motorola Droid Bionic’
[Via Daring Fireball]

Ignore the hyperbolic headline. Forget about just how jackasstic it is to compare a just-released Android phone against an iPhone that is nothing more than a rumor. The whole thing is click-bait, sure. But what I think is interesting is that if you just took this list of 10 items, you could use those same items to write a real article headlined, “Things Tech Nerds Believe Make the iPhone Inferior But Which in Reality Don’t Matter in the Mass Market”. Flash Player, Google-style “openness”, RAM, expansion card slots. Come on.

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Beside being an attempt at drumming up clicks – nothing brings in the fanbois like a title this article has . This is all about measuring which specs gives tech nerds more wood.

It lines up all these technical reasons – for an iPhone that has not been released yet – but actually does little with regard to what most people want or use.

Nothing about the user experience. How well does the GUI work with finger manipulation? Can it get me what I need quickly?

In fact, the big tell is battery life. Almost every one of the things the Driod beats the iPhone at drain batteries like crazy – faster, bigger processors; Flash; 4G LTE; display size. It is always the first thing I look at – can the phone make it through a day without recharging.

And finally, it is not supported by the iPhone/iPad/Mac OS X ecosystem.

Could the virus in Contagion actually be about a global economic meltdown?

This looks like it comes the closest yet to accurately looking at the effects of a novel viral outbreak. This is what researchers were afraid of with the swine flu or with the Spanish Flu or with the bird flu or with the SARS coronavirus – a Black Death sort of plague.

Laurie Garrett wrote about this sort of scenario in the Coming Plague.

The Bubonic Plague completely remade Europe and European economics. This movie looks at what a similar meltdown could accomplish in an era of global connectivity.

I wonder if the movie is supposed to be a metaphor of a possible global meltdown due to economic factors, rather than viral? Unseen agents out of our control destroy the world for their own purposes. Conspiracy theories and panic bloom as society falls apart?

It could fit.

I wish I was still in college. This would make a killer topic for a term paper.

My human origins theory – maybe we just screwed every other hominin

from Wikipedia

by flowcomm

Origin story: New papers claim A. sediba as human ancestor
[Via Ars Technica]

Although those who study human evolution would agree that the ancestor of the Homo genus was an Australipitheus, it’s been hard to get them to agree on which of the species in that genus actually gave rise to ours. The situation was complicated further by the fact that the three earliest species of Homo, H. habilis, H. rudolfensis, and H. erectus, all appeared at roughly the same time. Fragments of earlier skeletons have been assigned to each of these species, but it’s difficult to say anything definitive.

That situation was shaken up last year by the discovery of Australipitheus sediba in South Africa. Although initial dating placed it as very close in age to the first unequivocal Homo fossils, it contained a compelling mix of features that left some arguing over which of these two genuses it belonged in. Now, A. sediba is back in the news, as a set of papers pushes the date of the fossil back and strengthens the case that this was an ancestor of our genus. If that turns out to be the case, it may change some of the things we had thought about human origins.

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This is exciting stuff but the confusion comes from the fact that the three earliest members of Homo – erectus, habilis and Rudolfensis – all have some modern traits but only erectus really has all of them.

All the other species we have found only have bits and pieces of what make humans human. So it is hard to put together a family tree.

Now an earlier form has been shown to have some traits found in humans.

Since recent data indicates that modern man interbreed with other species – such as Neanderthal (about 100 thousand years ago) or even earlier African species (about 700 thousand years ago) – perhaps our earlier forms also did something similar.

So, just as Homo sapiens gained some important aspects from the Neanderthals, perhaps Homo erectus gained important aspects from other hominins around at the time.

As one of the authors mentioned, the early fossil record for Homo is a mess. Perhaps that is because what we call Homo sapiens  or perhaps even Homo erectus is simply an amalgam of several other species that we interbreed with.

This would indicate that our obsession with sex is much older than the other things that make us human. We really would screw just about anything, perhaps even then, 2 million years ago.