iPhone

The New York Times Styles Section giveth. The New York Times Styles Section taketh away. Last week, The NYT Styles Section published an excellent deconstruction of the pseudoscientific activities of Vani Hari, a.k.a. The Food Babe, by Courtney Rubin. Although skeptics might think that it was a tad too "balanced" (as did I), by and large we understand that this was the NYT Style section, and seeing a full-throated skeptical deconstruction of The Food Babe's antics in such a venue is just not in the cards. That's what I'm there for (not to mention other skeptics like Steve Novella), such as…
Two months ago, one of the strangest stories ever to be flogged by antivaccine activists was insinuating its way throughout social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and everywhere else, where antivaccine activists were engaged in a frantic effort to get the attention of mainstream media regarding their belief that there was a "CDC whistleblower" who had revealed a "cover up" that results from a CDC study looking at age of receiving MMR vaccination was studied as a potential risk factor for autism had shown that African-American boys showed a more than three-fold increased risk due to MMR…
Orac post-publication note: There is reason to believe that one point I made below could well be incorrect. However, even leaving that point out, there are still many reasons to doubt the authenticity of the text exchange I discuss below. See the first 10 comments for a discussion. Unlike AoA and other antivaccine groups, if I am wrong about something, I will admit it and discuss what might have led me to an incorrect conclusion. Oh, and I missed something obvious (see comment #11). D'oh! There’s something that’s been bothering me the last couple of days. I tried not to blog about it, but the…
Windows takes a lot of crap from fanboys, and Apple products do the same, but while our prejudices can be well-founded it's always worth taking an honest look at the opposition.  With its Windows Phone mobile OS, Microsoft has built a very fun and functional platform that in some ways exceeds the user experience of Android and iOS. Microsoft's presence on mobile platforms somewhat changes its historical relationship with hardware.  In the days when you were a PC person or a Mac person, one advantage of the personal computer was an open hardware standard, allowing not only for custom computer…
Mac Users Guide Flickr Photostream As a technophile, I do love my iPhone and iPod as portable portals to new media, the web and entertainment. But everything comes at a price. I was reminded of this, starkly, by a brilliant commentary by Mike Daisy, featured recently on NPR's This American Life. That sausage may be delicious, but few of us want to be reminded of how it came to be. So it goes for iPhones, even for something as mundane as to how their screens are cleaned in the factory. From This American Life broadcast, "Mr. Daisy and The Apple Factory:" Mike Daisey performs an excerpt…
Another day, another grant. Well, not exactly. We have a visiting professor in town, and I have to give a talk at our department research retreat today. Between going out to dinner, working on the talk, and working on the grant, another day has passed without new Insolence. Bummer. But that pales in comparison to having learned last night while at dinner that Steve Jobs has passed away. Apple fanboy I may be, but I was surprised at how much the news saddened me. It did, however, make it easy to figure out what post(s) I would rerun today. In 2008 and 2009 I did a series of posts about…
Last night we went to see "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" by Mike Daisey. Two hours vanished as we sat riveted and listened to interspersed stories of Apple and Shenzhen. Mike spoke of Apple and computers as a lover, familiar with the details, and knowledgeable in the special language of geeks and engineers. He was hysterically funny. And we all understood. After all, the night at the play was organized as a spring celebration by the Washington Technology Industry Association, a group intimately familiar with the ways of tech. From the music preceeding the show, to Mike's…
Let's play a game. I think this will be fun. So, a couple of years ago I had the duty of organizing the physics demo room (well, "demo" is maybe not the best term). This room is quite large and there is a whole bunch of stuff in here, some of the items are very old. There were lots of items that I knew exactly what they were. But, there were other items that made me go 'huh?'. So, here I will post an item. You post a comment regarding what you think it is and what it is used for. Some of these items I know the answer to, some I do not. Some of these pictures might just be part of a…
There is this commercial that has been coming on lately showing some people reading the Kindle at the beach. Why is this a selling point? It has to do with the way the Kindle works compared to something like the iPad. I would take a picture, but I have neither of these devices. Instead, I will make a diagram. Maybe you can't tell from my diagram, but I am using the black rays to represent light reflected from the Kindle and red rays to represent light produced from the iPad. And that is the key. The Kindle does not have a light source, it is very similar to a piece of paper. The iPad…
Dandelion through the eyes of a macro-adapted iPhone 3G Nothing warms the heart of a blogger more than birthing a meme. A couple weeks ago I posted a short article on how a hand lens can enable a cell phone to do macrophotography. Other bloggers have taken to the idea and have been posting their results. Here are some of them: Microecos Highly Allochthonous Mountain Beltway Looking for Detachment
You see in my experimental determination of the location of the accelerometer in an iPod, I used two different iPhone apps. Let me briefly mention some of the free iPhone apps that give you acceleration data. AccelGraph: This is one of the apps I actually used. What do I like about it? Well, it can record x, y, and z acceleration data and then you can email it to yourself. What could make it better? How about a timed start to record (like start recording in t seconds) and a preset record time. This would allow you to set up your experiment and get your iPod set up before you start. As…
There are several free iPhone-iPod Touch apps that let you look at the acceleration of the device using the built in accelerometer. I was planning on reviewing some of these free apps, but I didn't. When I started playing around with them, it was clear that I needed some way to make a constant acceleration. There are two simple ways to do this - drop it, or spin it in a circle. I decided to go with the circular motion option because I like my iPod and because Steve Jobs told me to. While playing with this, I realized that the acceleration depends on the distance of the sensor from the…
Polistes dominula, the European Paper Waspcaptured with an iPhone As an insect guy, the first question I ask about any camera is: Can I shoot bugs with it? To my great disappointment, the answer for most cell phones is no. Cell phone cameras are normally fixed to focus at distances useful for party pictures and street shots. Fixed-focus simplifies the mechanics of the onboard camera, but it also makes close-ups of small subjects impossible. Even Apple's iPhone 3GS- which has variable focus- doesn't focus quite closely enough do anything but the largest insects. So when an aphid plague…
Congrats to OneBusAway, winners of the 2010 WTIA Industry Achievement Award for "best use of technology in the government, nonprofit or education sector". OneBusAway was started by University of Washington students and provides real time access to transit information here in the Seattle area. I know it best through it's iPhone app, which is by far my most regularly used app (sure I probably use email more, but the iPhone app I use every weekday nearly without exception.) Yeah, yeah I know you fancy European cities will scoff at our backward nature, but I will tell you that the iPhone app is…
You knew it was coming. You knew from many previous incidents that it was inevitable: Who knew Hitler was such a Mac geek? Personally, although I think the iPad looks like a really cool device, I'm really not sure where it would fit into my life. I already have an iPhone, which I love, and I already have a MacBook Pro, which I also love. Given that, I just don't see the need for the iPad, at least not for me. However, I also know that I'm not the sort of person for whom the iPad was designed.
Apple's Game Changer, Downloading Now: The way the industry once operated, "Each handset company would come up with its latest iterations and maybe have the hottest device of the season or not," says Ms. Huberty, the Morgan Stanley analyst. "Enter apps into the equation, and that changes. It goes from being a product cycle game to a platform game." "People will look back on the iPhone as a turning point in the industry," says Craig Moffett, a telecom analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein. "The iPhone will be remembered as the first true handheld computer.
Update 10/13/09: corrected for ice cream flavor and location, thus merging two related universes. There is a story about Richard Feynman that while he was at Princeton MIT he had a hard time with dessert. Apparently they always served either chocolate or vanilla ice cream and Feynman would agonize over which he wanted that night. Then one day he decided that he was wasting his time making this decision and so he would solve this by only choosing vanilla chocolate and from that point on in life that is what he did. He no longer wasted time choosing, and, apparently, ate a lot of vanilla…
tags: iPhone, technology, Apple, comedy, humor, funny, streaming video Apple's iPhone ads tell you that whatever you want to do, "there's an app for that." But what if you're trying to solve problems with the iPhone itself? Here's a ad spoof that addresses this, too.
I Am Poor, the $0.99 iPhone app:The mac & cheese, Ramen noodles, and tuna is my artistic rendition of what poor college students eat with their limited funds. The icon on your iPhone or iPod Touch always reminds you (and others when you show it to them) that you were able to afford this. But, we all would like to get a little richer so tapping on the info button will let you read on old classic by P.T. Barnum called 'Art of Money Getting' to give you some sage advice to help you increase your wealth. Barnums "Golden Rules for Making Money" found in 'Art of Money Getting' will pay for 'I…
ArXiview, my arXiv browsing iPhone app, has been updated for the new iPhone OS 3.0. New features include: Search fields now accept boolean queries and exact phrase queries. Touch the little (i) icon to get info on this feature from the search page. Search by identifier has been added. There is now an in application emailer. So when you want to email yourself a reference the program doesn't quit out of the app. Added the cond-mat category for quantum gases. The app now sorts resorts in reverse chronological order. A bunch of bug fixes (search by category in particular was acting buggy.)…