How Google and Apple's digital mapping is mapping us
Digital maps on smartphones are brilliantly useful tools, but what sort of information do they gather about us - and how do they shape the way we look at the world?Oliver Burkeman ( Read more... )

[From Facebook:]

The nieces were strangely complaint as I made them turn off their insipid Disney Channel shows (the latest rage) and shuffle off for bed. Then I realized they were watching the shows on their iPods with headphones on. Nice!

And now they're up there (they're all sleeping together in the playroom) singing these Austin & Ally ( Read more... )

Lots of things going on in the last week.

I had a kind of fabulous academic exchange with Mike Harris on the Odes of Solomon based off of my recent entry, and tying into the chapter he is currently writing for his dissertation, which partially deals with the Odes. He got an advance copy of my article "The Odes of Solomon as Apocalyptic ( Read more... )

Ah, swoon. I remain thoroughly smitten with my nieces, and tonight was a bit of a wonder in conversation with them. Grace had purchased (from her own savings!) a new iPod Touch, and had decided (with a little encouragement from her gadget-enthusiast father) to experiment with the "FaceTime" feature and to try to initiate a live video conference ( Read more... )

R.I.P., Steve Jobs: you had a gift for making everything I hoped for from a computer come to life in the best tools since the wheel, the hammer, or the printing press.

And he did it while remembering that computers were supposed to make things easier. So many manufacturers seem not to get that.

Apple's Steve Jobs, father of Mac, iPhone, dies ( Read more... )

April 12th: I just looked at the calendar and realized that today's the 50th anniversary of manned space flight, from Yuri Gagarin's single, solo orbit around the Earth. The Americans made much of him being "just a passenger," and that the following month Alan B. Sheppard, Jr. actually did stuff during his 15-minute sub-orbital lob off the Florida ( Read more... )

The vestigial science geek in me was particularly geeked by this news story the other day. I remember when this was sci-fi: in fact, I think Andy Griffith starred in the one-season TV show about a private space enterprise, which must make it classic television from the classical era.... I did think it was curious, though, that this didn't make a ( Read more... )

Had some good moments today. While giving my first exam to my Catholicism students (rated "fair" and "hard" from the students who spoke to me afterward), I received a text message from a three year-old. To be accurate, I had during the first session of Catholicism sent a text message to Sophie via Leslie, figuring that Sophie was with her all day ( Read more... )

I've decided to leave academia, because it's just too obvious that there are fortunes to be made in the shipping business. I mean, seriously, people: check out what I've just discovered when I looked up the tracking number of something I ordered from Apple a few weeks back. Somewhere, somehow, this makes sense for some system that's trying ship ( Read more... )

Got a futzy connection on an incoming phone call late this afternoon around dinnertime as I was exploring a little bit of the campus, eyeballing where my new classrooms were so that I wouldn't get lost on Monday when classes start. "Dr. Novak," the voice said, "This is Arthur Bainton." I explained that I was at that moment deep in the inside of a ( Read more... )