Kathleen Charters and Lawrence Charters
Explorations large and small
I was just alerted to a new site, ackuna.com, that is promoting their crowd-source translation capabilities by showing how bad machine translation can be. To illustrate this, you type in some text, and their “Bad Translator” feature runs it back Continue reading Automatic translation
What happens when a high-tech urinal crashes? It no longer flushes, but it does flash an indicator light and occasionally beeps. No, it was not made by Microsoft. The beep sound occurs only about once every ten seconds. This is Continue reading When plumbing fails
Apple touts Time Machine, their backup technology, as a marvel. But there are other forms of time travel. (The moiré pattern is a result of taking a photo of a laptop screen; the laptop was rather busy at the time.) Mac Continue reading Time travel in Mac OS X
Seems suspicious. Don’t believe me? Try it yourself. Siri conspiracy (full size).
Humans can not only put people on the moon, we can also send poems to space. On Thursday, September 20, 2012, a large helium-filled balloon was launched from Weston Park, west of the University of Sheffield in Sheffield, England. Equipped Continue reading Send your poem to space
Apple had billions of dollars worth of free pre-release advertising for the iPhone 5, ranging from publicity on news programs to slick ads produced by various mobile phone vendors and resellers. And then there was this Radio Shack store in Continue reading Do-it-yourself iPhone 5 advertising
For most of human history, people had only their own memories for storing information. Most people who have lived did not know how to read or write, and if they wanted to remember something, they had to memorize it. Stories Continue reading Poor memory management
After years of research and development and billions of dollars in investments, the Chevy Volt finally started appearing on roads. Initially, sales were modest, but they’ve picked up over the past couple of years. Also picking up are placement of Continue reading Getting charged up for the road
Apple is very fond of naming Mac OS X after the top predator in North America. So fond, in fact, that they did it more than once: Mac OS X 10.1 (Puma), Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion). Apple also Continue reading Who can resist a cute kitten?