RICHARD FEYNMAN, Nobel laureate and physicist extraordinaire, called it a “magic number” and its value “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics”. The number he was referring to, which goes by th
News Analysis Don’t Be Evil, but Don’t Miss the Train Credit... James Yang BACK in 2004, as Google prepared to go public, Larry Page and Sergey Brin celebrated the maxim that was supposed to define th
Features Sociobiologist E.O. Wilson on the evolution of culture The human urge to create art appears magnificently in the Paleolithic paintings from roughly 30,000 years ago at Chauvet Cave, in southern France. Here, the Panel of the Horses. Photographs courtesy of the French Ministry of Culture and…
Font Bureau is a digital type studio and one of the leading foundries for typeface design. For over twenty-five years, Font Bureau has designed custom typefaces for almost every major American publica
The first commercial product that I worked on after going on leave of absence from Apple in March 1984 (see Leave Of Absence ) was a low cost, high resolution scanner for the Macintosh called Thunders
Three years ago, I started MacStories because I didn’t have a job. Along the way, the “hobby” became a new job in itself, and it now allows me to run a site read by millions of people every month. Mor
[ ](http://c276381.r81.cf1.rackcdn.com/dark-sky-1.jpg) Before I started writing this post I thought it would be neat to tally how many weather apps I have tried for iOS, then I realized how many that
A magnetogram recorded at the Greenwich Observatory in London during the Carrington Event of 1859. Photograph by British Geological Survey Noon approached on September 1, 1859, and British astronomer
In January 1961, the pieces of the manned spaceflight puzzle were slowly coming together. NASA had a capsule, astronauts to ride inside it, and rockets to launch it. The capsule had even successfully
The case of the 500-mile email Read the FAQ about the story. The following is the 500-mile email story in the form it originallyappeared, in a post to sage-members on Sun, 24 Nov 2002.: From trey@sage
I’m so sad this evening—as millions are—to hear of Steve Jobs’s death. Scattered over the last quarter century, I learned much from Steve Jobs, and was proud to consider him a friend. And indeed, he c
Apple's Org Chart (Old…) Not so fast. Until the last sinew, the last synapse gives up, Steve will continue to influence the company he co-founded and later recreated. Seeing he could no longer ‘‘ meet [his] duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO ’’, Jobs kicks himself upstairs and becomes Chairman,…
A Genius of the Storefront, Too Apple's glass-filled stores, like one in Hamburg, Germany, show Steve Jobs's touch. Credit... Angelika Warmuth/European Pressphoto Agency WHEN the architect Peter Bohli
(and a couple things about you, me, and a metaphorical horse) Yes. Long. Again. Deal. Thanks. 1. Instapaper’s Story I’ve got to be one of the most voracious users of Marco Arment ’s Instapaper site/bo
When I was a kid, I had a picture of the original Macintosh team on my bedroom wall. It showed a hundred or so Apple employees standing in front of an office building . Some people on the left were ho
Community Corner His legacy is more than what we see In the headlines. Posted Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 1:48 am PT | Updated Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 10:32 pm PT My neighbor, Steve Jobs, has been in the news la
[image via ] We all knew today’s news of Steve Jobs resigning as CEO of Apple was coming. Sooner or later, we – geeks, Apple watchers, fans, journalists, the Apple community as a whole – knew that App
A peek behind the Gatekeeper 1Password 3.8.19 for Mac is now available and it contains a number of improvements, and I’d like to provide a brief run down of those before getting into the meat of this
Published in Monday Note · 5 min read · Apr 29, 2012 -- In the weeks preceding the April 24th release of Apple’s quarterly earnings, a number of old canards sent the stock down by about 12%: Carriers
Chicago Mastering Service engineer Jason Ward loads up songs to compare in the mastering room. Photograph by Chris Foresman Apple's push to increase the quality of songs distributed via iTunes has bee
A reader writes: The Oatmeal recommends sites get more traffic and Facebook likes by writing an epic love story involving cage-fighting nuns and tanks, or if that is not possible, explaining why the s
At 11:22 in the morning on Friday November 14, 1969, Apollo 12 launched from Kennedy Space Centre towards the Ocean of Storms on the near side of the Moon. It was a nominal launch, at least for the fi
Last Tuesday, the future finally sounded like the future. A coalition of willing billionaires, spaceflight professionals, and scientific advisors under the banner of Planetary Resources announced thei
My Mac setup used to consist of a Mac Pro and a MacBook Pro. When I realized that the laptop was plenty powerful to serve as [my only computer](http://shawnblanc.net/2008/03/review-macbook-pro/) I sol
Had Narrative Science—a company that trains computers to write news stories—created this piece, it probably would not mention that the company's Chicago headquarters lie only a long baseball toss from
It all started with Snow Crash . If I hadn’t read it and fallen in love with the idea of the Metaverse, if it hadn’t made me realize how close networked 3D was to being a reality, if I hadn’t thought I can do that , and more importantly I want to do that , I’d never have embarked on the path that…
Like many others , I was disappointed by how Walter Isaacson’s official biography of Steve Jobs turned out . With the kind of access that Isaacson had to Jobs’ information, photos, close friends and c
Credit: Our annual destination conference, Mashable Connect, brings our community together for three days to connect offline in an intimate setting at the Contemporary Resort at Walt Disney World®. Re
Out There There’s More to Nothing Than We Knew MULTIVERSE PROPONENT The cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss Credit... Joshua Lott for The New York Times Why is there something, rather than nothing at all?
Now that Discovery is safely delivered to the Smithsonian, I think I can tell the story of how we nearly lost her in July of 2005, and how well-intentioned, highly motivated, hard-working, smart peopl
One way to judge the scope of an app is to think about how much time you’re intended to spend using it. There’s plenty of room for apps you use here and there for a few minutes at a time, or which you
Coda is a text-editing, CSS-styling, WebKit previewing, file-managing, FTPing, terminal-accessing, web-site-building and publishing application for the Macintosh. And, Coda has no duct tape. All Inclu
This bad article , nicely rebutted by John Gruber , uses a common argument against Apple: that, inevitably, other hardware manufacturers will figure out why Apple products are so popular, create their
[Federico Viticci venting on his personal blog about writers that condemn services because they are free](http://ticci.org/condemning-free-on-principle): >There is a shared sentiment among independent
For most of my life, I’ve struggled to quantify what constitutes an enticing interface. There are certain basic aims from which you can take your pick - intuitiveness, attractiveness, clarity, simplicity, consistency, and more - but those are general guidelines. I’ve had trouble defining what an…
Latest posts Open source Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm Infrastructure How we scaled Reads On the Twitter Users Database By on Thursday, 23 February 2023 Infrastructure Kerberizing Hadoop Clusters
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