David Galbraith on the problem with Google Glass →

Most of the things people wear are anachronistic. Jeans are 19th century workwear, suits are 18th century hunting gear, and even the modern day business atire of button down oxford shirts and chinos comes from pre-war Yale students. And for glasses, Ray-Ban’s shapes from the 50s are considered classic.

For sports we wear modern clothing, because of the functional requirements. On the basketball court people wear innovative footwear, but Converse still make most of their money from designs that are half a century old. Wax Barbour jackets are worn as fashion, while people who actually brave the elements prefer 21st century breathable fabrics.

Looking futuristic is cool if you are a spaceman but not for hanging out in Williamsburg.

Good point.

So how could Glass be more ‘fashionable’? Striking a partnership with Warby Parker is a good place to start, but it’s still a computer on your face.

How do you solve that?

(Here’s one idea: Get that computer off of your face and onto your wrist.)

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Best tidbit from Tim Cook’s latest earnings call

Missed this while on vacation:

We will continue to focus on the long term, and we remain very optimistic about our future. We’re participating in large and growing markets. We see great opportunities in front of us, particularly given the long-term prospects of the smartphone and tablet markets, the strength of our incredible ecosystem which we plan to continue to augment with services, our plans for expanded distribution, and the potential of exciting new product categories.

Nothing promised, but I’d be damned if I didn’t find it be interesting to see which new product categories (this is not just a new iPhone/iPad) they come up with.

Especially if they did something for the emerging markets.

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Flexible screens

There’s just something about this photo from a Quartz article:

Multiscreens!

First I figured it’d be cool with six screens, but what if instead you just had a flexible screen you could bend as you wanted.

Then I found this:

Bent screen

Bent screen

Using the whole table as a Wacom board would be quite something.

This is pretty cool too, if you don’t want your colleagues to look at what you’re “working on”:

Samsung patent for flexible screen

Anyway, Wacom’s Cintix tablet might be the closest thing right now, and it’s a pricy one:

Boomwacom

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What’s it like to be a banker? →

How do you know if a job in finance is something you should be doing? Can you know before you go and try doing it?

Not only can’t you know before you try it, you often can’t know for the first few years of doing it. It’s a weird industry in that junior investment bankers spend 100 hours a week making spreadsheets and formatting client presentations; the main skills required are attention to detail, cheerful obedience, and the ability to add two-digit numbers in your head. After a while, though, you graduate into a more senior role where you spend 70 hours a week flying to the Midwest to shake hands with a corporate treasurer and ask him how his kids are doing in school. The main skills required there are a firm handshake, a facility with small talk, and a good but not too good golf game.

I knew it!

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Sending links to Mars →

Wired: What are the challenges with working and making a communications network in space as opposed to a ground-based internet?

Cerf: Among the hard things, first of all, is that we couldn’t use the domain name system in its current form. I can give you a quick illustration why that’s the case: Imagine for a moment you’re on Mars, and somebody is trying to open up an HTTP web connection to Earth. They’ve given you a URL that contains a domain name in it, but before you can open up a TCP connection you need to have an IP address.

What did you work on today? I certainly didn’t work on anything as cool as figuring out how to click a link on Mars.

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“When I’m ideating”

We spend hours every day in front our computers, pushing the mouse around, but when we really want to think, when we really want to be creative, we switch to pen and paper. We think we can change that. And, I’m here to say that we have changed that, for the past year, I haven’t been using pen and paper anymore.

Sure, that’s a nice stylus (and app and ruler(!?!)), but no, it’s not a substitute for pen and paper.

Just look how slowly he works, and how he seems to be afraid to scratch the glass. Scratching the paper is the whole point.

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