Can a place be "undiscovered"? Wrap your brain around this: for the past few days geographers, Internet speculators and conspiracy theorists have been making much ado about a place that scientists exists according to Google, even if scientists who ha…
Right now in the space of a few clicks, I as just some jerkoff with a checking account and poor judgement, could purchase shares in the likelihood that the US or Israel will attack Iran before the end of the year on InTrade. After another cup of coff…
Throwing an "art party"? Looking for a real challenging, jaw-dropper installation to greet your hordes of relevant guests? Yeah? Why not rent the tragic sport-utility vehicle from the slowest, most anticlimactic celebrity car chase in history?
Facebook has been getting a lot of flack lately over EdgeRank, its algorithm that decides who will see your latest post show up in their Newsfeed. After the formula was rejiggered in September, some have seen their reach plummet as much as 50 percent…
Here's a quick, somewhat obvious thought: musicians as a body (imagine it exists) let technology dictate itself. Not like production and sound technology, but all of the other stuff -- the websites and blogs and streaming services. All of this other
In the lower level of the American Museum of Natural History, I was having trouble paying attention to the First Deputy Mayor Patti Harris. My mind wandered to the press conference-y backdrop behind her, which covered the entrance to the “Hall of Pla…
Here's the thing with regard to relative coolness: it's good to be cool and it's hip to be square; no one likes to party with losers and if you'd like to have a say, it's important to stay on top of trends. Being cool is different than being "popular…
Ai Weiwei, the dissident artist, comes in for lots of criticism, from the government and from many of his fellow artists. Now he's taking flak from everyone, not for his politics but for his weak parody of Gangnam Style, a video he calls 草泥马 Style, o…
From zero to hero, the freshly minted public company just had its best day ever, beating estimates with its third quarter earnings report sending its stock price soaring over 20 percent to heights not reached since July. Much of the hoopla hung on th…
“Make no mistake about it. This is the year for Windows,” Steve Ballmer "said in New York in September":http://www.forbes.com/sites/connieguglielmo/2012/09/05/microsofts-ballmer-touts-the-year-for-windows-says-its-greatest-opportunity-for-developers/…
Walking through an urban college campus can be an extremely claustrophobic experience. With ever-increasing enrollment are one factor, there are the young and eagerly participatory students, destined to have you join a club or support a cause. "Buy a…
Nobody likes Internet trolls. These faceless bullies get a kick out of lurking around forums or comment threads waiting for some unsuspecting user to say the wrong thing only so they can pounce on them and rain down insults. The topics been in the ne…
By tracking the movements of cell phone users in Kenya for nearly one year, between 2008 and 2009, scientists fleshed out travel patterns of a disease that killed about 665,000 people the following year – "mostly in Africa":http://www.who.int/mediace…
If ever in an intimate moment of self-reflection you have considered just what is going on in your head when you wonder why you think, feel and act the way you do, then you should be here in New Orleans. At the annual conference for the Society for N…
It's been exactly a year since California Governor Jerry Brown declared "October 16 to be Steve Jobs Day":http://mashable.com/2011/10/15/steve-jobs-day-california-october-16-stanford/. It apparently was a one year-only holiday, but it still stands as…
Steve Jobs loved being first. Throughout his life, he generally had the vision and capacity to make that happen. It’s no surprise then that his fingerprints are all over the brewing patent war, the one that has engulfed tech firms around the world, c…
What's striking is just how natural the "reply girl" phenomenon is. Some video becomes popular -- could be a way-cool internet cat, music video, or the video below, produced by Motherboard's Vice big sister, about said phenomenon -- and it's garnerin…
The answer is 10 percent, according to a new 20 month study from web ad company Solve Media. Ten percent of all online traffic comes courtesy of bots, not humans. Which is mostly interesting in that not only is it not terribly surprising -- particula…
Here I am, in present day Astoria, Queens, on my landline. There are no tricks in this image, no filters, only a bit of cropping. I'm on my "AT&T trim-line 210":http://www.amazon.com/AT-Corded-Phone-Black-Handset/dp/B00005MITU/ref=pd_cp_e_0. It's no
A few months ago, I received a call from Johnny Carson, a man for whom I was once privileged to work. There was no doubt that it was Johnny because as my iPhone trilled its canned, bluesy theme, the screen lit up with the contact photo I had once ass…
There couldn't be anything more satisfying than being Greg Packer last Friday, the first to walk away from Apple's 5th Avenue store with a fresh iPhone 5. Opening that box, I imagine a small string of Packer's drool collecting in a puddle on the devi…
I guess this is what happens when you go around pissing people off. Now that 100 million iPhone and iPad users "have updated":http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/24/3381840/iphone-5-sales-five-million/in/3081013 to the new iOS 6 operating system (an incre…
Apple sold five million iPhones over the weekend, a record breaking number that eclipsed the 4S sales record by a solid million phones. But for the largest company in the world, breaking old records is no longer enough. Indeed, for many, the weekend
