Ulysse Sabbagh

Is it better to walk or run in the rain? 

Is it better to walk or run in the rain? 

The lengthy, predominantly male queues outside Apple shops on launch days suggest that, contrary to received wisdom, not all men hate shopping. Yet the impression that they do periodically prompts retailers to try and re-invent the activity to appeal to the more retail-reluctant half of the population. The latest such ploy is a high-tech clothing chain called Hointer, which opened its first branch in Seattle last month selling jeans. Hointer has no over-solicitous sales assistants, no confusing piles of clothes and no endless lines at the tills. Instead, only one of each style of jeans is displayed on the shop floor. Shoppers use a smartphone app to scan items they wish to try on, and choose a size and colour.

The app sends a message over the internet to a robotic system in the stock room. This locates a pair in the correct size and uses tensioned cables to drop it into a basket in one of the shop’s six large dressing rooms. When Babbage tried it, the whole process took less than the time to walk to the fitting room, around 30 seconds. If the jeans fit, customers can simply put them in a bag, swipe their credit card through a reader and walk out the door without ever interacting with another person.

… will be like buying clothes online but in real life. 

The lengthy, predominantly male queues outside Apple shops on launch days suggest that, contrary to received wisdom, not all men hate shopping. Yet the impression that they do periodically prompts retailers to try and re-invent the activity to appeal to the more retail-reluctant half of the population. The latest such ploy is a high-tech clothing chain called Hointer, which opened its first branch in Seattle last month selling jeans. Hointer has no over-solicitous sales assistants, no confusing piles of clothes and no endless lines at the tills. Instead, only one of each style of jeans is displayed on the shop floor. Shoppers use a smartphone app to scan items they wish to try on, and choose a size and colour.

The app sends a message over the internet to a robotic system in the stock room. This locates a pair in the correct size and uses tensioned cables to drop it into a basket in one of the shop’s six large dressing rooms. When Babbage tried it, the whole process took less than the time to walk to the fitting room, around 30 seconds. If the jeans fit, customers can simply put them in a bag, swipe their credit card through a reader and walk out the door without ever interacting with another person.

… will be like buying clothes online but in real life. 

Quora aims to allow anyone to easily share their knowledge and in the process to dramatically increase the total amount of knowledge available to the world. As we grow, we will be able to provide larger and larger audiences to writers, cover more and more topics, and have greater and greater impact on the world. We hope to become an internet-scale Library of Alexandria, a place where hundreds of millions of people go to learn about anything and share everything they know. To do that we are going to have to expand. Today Quora is largely questions and answers, but that is not the ideal format for all knowledge. Other formats will gradually be added as we scale up.

This is what Adam d'Angelo, CEO of Quora had to say about his company’s future. 

Quora is moving away from focusing solely on Q&A. Wild guess: big redesign in the first half of 2013, bigger emphasis on Quora Boards, (d'Angelo created one that he calls his blog) arguably the best feature of the service. 

This is a microscopic landscape constructed using incredibly small chemicals:

A multiple (5) exposure of liquid crystalline DNA (the foreground), liquid crystalline xanthan gum (the mountains), liquid crystalline polybenzyl-L-glutamate spherulites (the stars), the microscope field diaphragm defocused with a yellow filter (the moon), and the same diaphragm moved to the lower section of the micrograph through a diffraction grating (the reflected moon).

Check out more of these landscapes over here.

An estimated 95% of all technologies coming out of universities never make it to the real world. Marblar, which was launched in September by a bunch of PhD students in Britain, aims to harness the collective imagination to prevent such waste. Other ongoing competitions invite people to come up with uses for a new kind of foam, a probe inspired by a wasp sting or paint-guns to squirt layers of paint just few molecules across.

And how does it work?

The original inventors pay a small fee to post a challenge on Marblar’s website, using videos and slideshows to explain in plain English how their technology works. Geeks of all ages then submit their ideas about what it might be used for. Other users rate these before the inventors themselves pick the winner, who typically receives a cash prize of about £500 ($800). In future, says Daniel Perez, one of Marblar’s co-founders, winners may be invited to partner with the inventors and gain a stake in the commercialisation of their joint intellectual effort.

This is simply a brilliant idea, be sure to check out the website, Marblar. 

An estimated 95% of all technologies coming out of universities never make it to the real world. Marblar, which was launched in September by a bunch of PhD students in Britain, aims to harness the collective imagination to prevent such waste. Other ongoing competitions invite people to come up with uses for a new kind of foam, a probe inspired by a wasp sting or paint-guns to squirt layers of paint just few molecules across.

And how does it work?

The original inventors pay a small fee to post a challenge on Marblar’s website, using videos and slideshows to explain in plain English how their technology works. Geeks of all ages then submit their ideas about what it might be used for. Other users rate these before the inventors themselves pick the winner, who typically receives a cash prize of about £500 ($800). In future, says Daniel Perez, one of Marblar’s co-founders, winners may be invited to partner with the inventors and gain a stake in the commercialisation of their joint intellectual effort.

This is simply a brilliant idea, be sure to check out the website, Marblar. 

Facebook’s interns make between $5,600 and $6,300 per month – the equivalent of $65,000 to $75,000 per year.

That sure seems very reasonable.

Facebook’s interns make between $5,600 and $6,300 per month – the equivalent of $65,000 to $75,000 per year.

Behind this obscure title lies a treasure of information and data concerning religious groups in the world. Conducted by the Pew Research Center, here are some of the most interesting findings:

About one of every six people worldwide has no religious affiliation. This makes the “unaffiliated,” as the study calls them, the third-largest group worldwide, with 16 percent of the global population — about equal to Catholics.

The study also found a wide disparity in the median age of religious populations, with Muslims and Hindus the youngest, and Buddhists and Jews the oldest. The median age of the youngest group, Muslims, was 23, while the median for Jews was 36.

Over all, Christians (including Catholics) are the largest religious group, with 2.2 billion people, about 32 percent of the world’s population. They are followed by Muslims, with 1.6 billion, about 23 percent. There are about one billion Hindus, about 15 percent of the global population, and nearly half a billion Buddhists, about 7 percent.

Behind this obscure title lies a treasure of information and data concerning religious groups in the world. Conducted by the Pew Research Center, here are some of the most interesting findings:

About one of every six people worldwide has no religious affiliation. This makes the “unaffiliated,” as the study calls them, the third-largest group worldwide, with 16 percent of the global population — about equal to Catholics.

The study also found a wide disparity in the median age of religious populations, with Muslims and Hindus the youngest, and Buddhists and Jews the oldest. The median age of the youngest group, Muslims, was 23, while the median for Jews was 36.

Over all, Christians (including Catholics) are the largest religious group, with 2.2 billion people, about 32 percent of the world’s population. They are followed by Muslims, with 1.6 billion, about 23 percent. There are about one billion Hindus, about 15 percent of the global population, and nearly half a billion Buddhists, about 7 percent.

Typography patron saint Jonathan Hoefler remixes a vintage teacher’s aid chart titled “The Child” with Milton Glaser’s iconic Dylan poster.

This is Stevie Ray Vaughan at the 1985 Montreux Jazz Festival. Open Culture has some interesting information about this gig:

In the 1980s, Stevie Ray Vaughan tore through the international music scene like a Texas tornado. His amazingly fluid and dexterous guitar playing on a series of platinum albums established Vaughan as a household name and helped spark a blues revival. But in the summer of 1990 a helicopter he was riding on crashed into a hill in Wisconsin, and the whirlwind had passed.

In 1982, he went to play at Montreux but, since him and his band were virtually unknown outside of Texas, he was booed. Stevie was shaken. But among the boos, Stevie showed the world he existed and this was more important:

David Bowie was in the audience, and he made a point of meeting Vaughan and his manager in the after-hours lounge. John Paul Hammond, the son of record producer John Hammond, also saw the show and asked for a tape of the performance to give to his father. Jackson Browne caught the band’s performance in the after-hours lounge, and he sat in with the group until early the next morning. Within the next few months, Browne invited Vaughan and Double Trouble to his L.A. studio to record a demo, Bowie asked Stevie to appear on his next album [Let’s Dance], and John Hammond, who helped develop the careers of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, helped the band sign a deal with Epic Records and offered to produce their debut album. The rest, as the cliché goes, is history

He came back to Montreux in 1985 and the show was on. 

www.youtube.com/watch

This is Stevie Ray Vaughan at the 1985 Montreux Jazz Festival. Open Culture has some interesting information about this gig:

In the 1980s, Stevie Ray Vaughan tore through the international music scene like a Texas tornado. His amazingly fluid and dexterous guitar playing on a series of platinum albums established Vaughan as a household name and helped spark a blues revival. But in the summer of 1990 a helicopter he was riding on crashed into a hill in Wisconsin, and the whirlwind had passed.

In 1982, he went to play at Montreux but, since him and his band were virtually unknown outside of Texas, he was booed. Stevie was shaken. But among the boos, Stevie showed the world he existed and this was more important:

David Bowie was in the audience, and he made a point of meeting Vaughan and his manager in the after-hours lounge. John Paul Hammond, the son of record producer John Hammond, also saw the show and asked for a tape of the performance to give to his father. Jackson Browne caught the band’s performance in the after-hours lounge, and he sat in with the group until early the next morning. Within the next few months, Browne invited Vaughan and Double Trouble to his L.A. studio to record a demo, Bowie asked Stevie to appear on his next album [Let’s Dance], and John Hammond, who helped develop the careers of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, helped the band sign a deal with Epic Records and offered to produce their debut album. The rest, as the cliché goes, is history

He came back to Montreux in 1985 and the show was on. 

A magnificent design for the package containing Led Zeppelin’s 2007 concert, Celebration Day. By Shepard Fairley.