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How are patterns of thinking are hidden from each other.

"Yet although Silicon Valley has mastered the art of building technology companies, it hasn’t yet developed the moral compass to figure out which companies are worth building. There are simply too many talented entrepreneurs today building meaningless ventures. From advertising products that get people to buy things they don’t need, to social games that are designed to addict people to wasting their time, to “mobile-local-social” products that attempt to leverage the latest technological trends without giving much thought to the importance of the problem being solved. The unquenchable thirst for growth that fuels much of this wealth creation must be carefully watched; it could easily turn malignant and lead technology entrepreneurs to commit the same kind of economic atrocities as the financial sector."

Transformational Entrepreneurship: Where Technology Meets Societal Impact - Max Marmer - Harvard Business Review

"Everything got put on hold for a generation,” while civilization digested the Internet and figured out what it could be used for."

(Source: technologyreview.com)

More prosaically, the 15 years since the internet became a major part of our lives has been marked here in the U.S. — birthplace of the internet — by mostly disappointing economic growth. The only exception was in the late 1990s, when excitement over how much the internet was going to change everything spurred an investment bubble that briefly drove real growth. 

Maybe the true innovation is the increased connectivity and spread of ideas? And perhaps these will take some time to really change things.

How Geniuses Think

Leonardo da Vinci believed that to gain knowledge about the form of problems, you begin by learning how to restructure it in many different ways. He felt the first way he looked at a problem was too biased toward his usual way of seeing things. He would restructure his problem by looking at it from one perspective and move to another perspective and still another. With each move, his understanding would deepen and he would begin to understand the essence of the problem. Einstein’s theory of relativity is, in essence, a description of the interaction between different perspectives. Freud’s analytical methods were designed to find details that did not fit with traditional perspectives in order to find a completely new point of view.

(…)

The explosion of creativity in the Renaissance was intimately tied to the recording and conveying of a vast knowledge in a parallel language; a language of drawings, graphs and diagrams — as, for instance, in the renowned diagrams of daVinci and Galileo. Galileo revolutionized science by making his thought visible with diagrams, maps, and drawings while his contemporaries used conventional mathematical and verbal approaches.

Once geniuses obtain a certain minimal verbal facility, they seem to develop a skill in visual and spatial abilities which give them the flexibility to display information in different ways.

(…)

A distinguishing characteristic of genius is immense productivity. Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents, still the record. He guaranteed productivity by giving himself and his assistants idea quotas. His own personal quota was one minor invention every 10 days and a major invention every six months. Bach wrote a cantata every week, even when he was sick or exhausted. Mozart produced more than six hundred pieces of music. Einstein is best known for his paper on relativity, but he published 248 other papers. T. S. Elliot’s numerous drafts of “The Waste Land” constitute a jumble of good and bad passages that eventually was turned into a masterpiece. In a study of 2,036 scientists throughout history, Dean Kean Simonton of the University of California, Davis found that the most respected produced not only great works, but also more “bad” ones. Out of their massive quantity of work came quality. Geniuses produce. Period.

(Source: creativitypost.com)

The human eye and 48fps movies

The Hobbit will be released in a lot of different versions. One of them, the 48fps version draws some criticism.

Our eyes are not perfect machines. Apple’s latest display technology contains details which we cannot see. This is not really a problem, we just won’t see the details.

Moving images are a bit trickier. The eye and brain process about 10-12 fps, and they will create the illusion of movement.

Since the early days, frame rates in the movie industry have been gradually rising, creating more and more realistic images.

Question is how people will respond to this heightened realism. Will it break the illusion of the medium? Will movie makers need to dumb down? 

In certain human/computer interaction delays are put in on purpose to show that a state has been changed.

(Source: forbes.com)

"The bet Nokia made many years ago was that there would be a continuing, substantial business in the “low end”. And low end meant feature phones. This strategy was still in evidence last year under the moniker “the next billion” users. The decisions were not driven by whether the products would be hired for different jobs, but that they would hit different price points. In other words, segmentation of customers by their ability to pay for devices rather than categorization of the jobs they hired mobile devices to do."

How Samsung beat Nokia | asymco (via mfdaniels)

(via mfdaniels)

ex-genius:

NEWS: Space Shuttle Enterprise completes historic flyover of New York City on the back of a modified 747 before delivery to the intrepid museum. This is totally an actual photograph of what actually happened. 

"

We won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The paradigm shift rate (i.e., the overall rate of technical progress) is currently doubling (approximately) every decade; that is, paradigm shift times are halving every decade (and the rate of acceleration is itself growing exponentially).

So, the technological progress in the twenty-first century will be equivalent to what would require (in the linear view) on the order of 200 centuries. In contrast, the twentieth century saw only about 25 years of progress (again at today’s rate of progress) since we have been speeding up to current rates. So the twenty-first century will see almost a thousand times greater technological change than its predecessor.

Ray Kurzweil, American author, scientist, inventor and futurist, The Law of Accelerating Returns, KurzweilAI, March 7, 2001.

(Source: amiquote)

Building a long-term (space) business

Planetary Resources is already making money. Not yet by mining asteroids but they are building the road.

“We’re the first to admit this is a long term endeavour,” says Lewicki. “Despite the fact that we have the backing of wealthy funders, it’s irresponsible to just throw money away. We’re building a business, not performing a stunt.”

Rather than spend all on 1 shot tries, think Mars Pathfinder type of projects they want to make the robots they need to mine the asteroid into a commodity.

In space exploration, it has been the case that you build a machine fine tuned to a mission and just build one.  That has contributed to the cost. For our needs, though, we need to make swarms that travel to different asteroids. That means moving from a crown jewel that you have to touch with kid gloves to a commodity. I’d love to get to a place that they’re so common that our engineers have to move them off their desks to eat lunch.

So they have come up with a three part roadmap that will bring them there. Small overview:

Phase 1: Get cashflow going

Launch telescopes (Arkyd 100s) into low-orbit to scope out the skies for asteroids that can’t be observed from Earth.

Money:

• Sell these robots as a tool for private scientific research
• Limit costs by piggybacking on other launches
• Gather and sell data from these telescopes

Phase 2: Build on previous success

The Arkyd 200 will have a higher orbit, extra equipment to better track asteroids and a propulsion system to change course.

Business opportunities:
Build a better deep space communications network (The company aims to replace the current 50 year old NASA gear by developing a small, low power, optical communications infrastructure.

Phase 3: Mine asteroids

A robotic swarm of Arkyd 300s will use this network to determine ideal mining candidates. To accomplish this the company needs further research into the artificial intelligence and communications necessary for the robots to cooperate as a swarm.

These plans are for a decade into the future, so it’s obvious that things aren’t crystal clear yet. But the company is confident it can figure out whatever comes along. It’s nice to see this long-term vision. Especially since the consumer-tech type of businesses have a hard time planning a couple of years ahead, let alone ten.

The devil is in the details,” said Lewicki. “But at this stage, we’re not going to worry about it. We’re confident that we can work out the specifics, and recognize that there’s already a lot of research in this area. Our focus as a company is to develop low-cost solutions for the spacecraft we’ll need to determine how best to mine asteroids. While we’re doing that, we’re also focused on building a sustainable business.

(Source: forbes.com)