October 8, 2013
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”
Congrats to both Mr. Englert and Mr. Higgs for their contributions to science and mankind. I’ve been following news on the Higgs Boson particle for many years and this in a way completes it.
Nest Smoke and Carbon monoxide detector
There’s no ambiguous beeping or mysterious blinking LED on the Protect — the entire product is designed to more clearly communicate what’s actually wrong. When it senses rising levels of smoke, heat, or carbon monoxide, it simply says “heads up,” and tell you what’s wrong — Fadell says they picked a neutral phrase to avoid panic if you’re just burning the toast. If there’s something more serious going on, the Protect gets straight to the point and says “emergency” while sounding a horn. Voices include British, Canadian, and US English, as well as Canadian French and US Spanish, and they’re localized: the “heads up” warning is “please be aware” for the British voice, and “attention” in French.
This looks like an amazing product that majority of the population overlook. I need to pick up a couple of theses Nest Protect devices soon.
Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab
The BBC understands that during an experiment in late September, the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel – the first time this had been achieved at any fusion facility in the world.
Here’s to hoping for sustainable and affordable energy for all.
Why tablet magazines are a failure
When a magazine is organized as an app rather than as a website, its articles can neither be indexed or searched on the web. And even if they could, clicking the link in Google at best takes readers to an app store, not to the article itself — cutting the magazine out of the greatest traffic driver in today’s world.
The pattern is the same on social media. When you can’t link directly to an article, the urge to tweet or tell your friends about it drastically shrinks. And curators like Flipboard and Zite can’t look into, link or grab content from within magazine apps.
Also, each issue of a tablet magazine can be fairly large and bandwidth consuming. Most of the time, they are around 80-120MB.