NASA’s Next Mars Rover to Launch in 15 Days →

In 15 days we’ll be launching a car-sized robot at another planet 140 million miles away and it will be lowered to the surface by a rocket-powered crane. Science is awesome!

John Gruber linked to this piece critiquing Microsoft’s new future vision video:

Why Microsoft’s Vision Of The Future Is Dead On Arrival
What “future of” tech/design videos need is a little less Minority Report and a little more Alien. Director Ridley Scott famously told his production designers to make Alien’s spaceship and costumes look roughed-up, slightly messy, and above all, lived in. Otherwise, it just isn’t believable enough to see yourself in–which is a design problem that both horror movies and corporate promos need to solve. Microsoft’s film is probably going viral as we speak, but imagine how much more reach it would have if it dared to depict a guy stuck in a meeting that sucked, or using his smartphone in an airport that was full of noisy assholes and long lines, or searching his touchscreen-enabled smart refrigerator for a quick meal because his kids are bouncing off the walls and he’s bone-tired from a long day at work?

And while there are many things worth criticizing in Microsoft’s video, a future that is too pristine is not one of them. The video isn’t a movie, it’s a sales pitch and it exemplifies the purest form of advertising: the selling of an idea—the idea that Microsoft is a forward-looking company that intends to build tomorrow’s technology. The film needs to depict a perfect future because that’s the future that Microsoft wants its customers to yearn for. To suggest that they should have made that future rougher is to suggest that Apple should include iPhones with cracked screens in its commercials, or the frustration of having no cell service.

Movies require realism to be believed. Products need idealism to be desired.

Honestly, as much as I enjoyed the previous Future Vision video, this one is kind of a disappointment. It is beautifully produced, and there are a couple of interesting ideas, but ultimately It’s just more of the same. Instead of feeling like a vision of the future, the video feels like a vision of an alternate reality where Microsoft makes products that people actually want to buy (rather than the products they have now that people begrudginglyhave to buy). Instead of seeing these concepts as something slightly out of reach, I see them as bizarro copies of things that Apple and Google have already achieved. In the first scene I couldn’t help but think, “The car doesn’t drive itself? Google has self-driving cars now, why doesn’t Microsoft have them in the future?” And in the closing scene, the girl with her tablet I instantly thought, “Oh, she has an iPad,” not, “Oh a future tablet from Microsoft.” Where is Microsoft’s iPad competitor? Windows Phone 7 is barely out of the starting gate and apparently only for phones while Windows 8 won’t be released for at least another year.

It’s been 4 years, I think, since the last video, and you have to start to wonder, who is actually delivering this future? How many MS Office products are gesture enabled, designed for touch, optimized for mobile, enable remote collaboration, or have voice assistance? How about Google’s productivity suite, how about Apple’s? It’s pretty clear that this future, if it is that, won’t be delivered by Microsoft.

The Moral Landscape

Sam Harris makes a strong case for the use of science to vet and direct what would normally be called a moral judgement. Quite simply, he points out that just because the questions we have about morality are difficult to answer does not mean that there are not objective answers to those questions. And, in fact, if we frame moral judgements as answers to the question, “Does this promote human flourishing?” it becomes quite clear that science and all of its associated methods can be used to find objective, rational and meaningful results that will ultimately lead to improvements in the lives of conscious beings. Overall, the book is definitely worth reading, if a bit on the dense and dry end of the spectrum (not unexpected given that the book is based at least partially on his PHD thesis).

(Amazon.com)

How do I make it summer again?

"Good art is a kind of magic"

Another great quote, this one from David Foster Wallace in a letter to Harper’s Magazine in 1996:

Good art is a kind of magic. It does magical things for both artist and audience. We can have long polysyllabic arguments about how to describe the way this magic works, but the plain fact is that good art is magical and precious and cool. It’s hard to try and make good art, and it seems to me wholly reasonable that good artists should be concerned with their work’s cultural reception.

I would add that it can also be very hard to convey the challenges of making good art to someone who doesn’t do it regularly.

(Frank Chimero via Daring Fireball)