Roger Fidler was a head of innovation for Knight-Ridder who convinced his company to let him set up a lab in the early 1990s to explore the creation of tablet computers. They were next door to a lab owned by Apple:
Fidler smiles through a scruffy gray Jobsian beard. He has known the answer for a long time. In 1994, while running a lab dreaming up the future of newspapers, Fidler starred in his own video demonstrating a prototype he cooked up that was remarkably like the iPad — black, thin, rectangular, with text and video displayed on-screen.
A narrator described technology that at the time sounded like science fiction: “Tablets will be a whole new class of computer. They’ll weigh under two pounds. They’ll be totally portable. They’ll have a clarity of screen display comparable to ink on paper. They’ll be able to blend text, video, audio and graphics together. . . . We may still use computers to create information but will use the tablet to interact with information — reading, watching, listening.”
Roger Fidler was a head of innovation for Knight-Ridder who convinced his company to let him set up a lab in the early 1990s to explore the creation of tablet computers. They were next door to a lab owned by Apple:
“Fidler smiles through a scruffy gray Jobsian beard. He has known the answer for a long time. In 1994, while running a lab dreaming up the future of newspapers, Fidler starred in his own video demonstrating a prototype he cooked up that was remarkably like the iPad — black, thin, rectangular, with text and video displayed on-screen.
“A narrator described technology that at the time sounded like science fiction: ‘Tablets will be a whole new class of computer. They’ll weigh under two pounds. They’ll be totally portable. They’ll have a clarity of screen display comparable to ink on paper. They’ll be able to blend text, video, audio and graphics together. . . . We may still use computers to create information but will use the tablet to interact with information — reading, watching, listening.'”
A selection of all-time favourite articles from Wired contributing editor, former Slate and New York Times columnist, and the author of 2 excellent books, Brendan I. Koerner:
The Hunger Warriors by Scott Anderson – The story of Turkish women starving themselves to death for the most head-scratching of causes. Behold the sinister power of peer pressure.
Does a Sugar Bear Bite? by Lynn Hirschberg – A classic profile of Suge Knight at the zenith of his power. Maybe the best intro scene of any celebrity profile in history.
Pat Dollard’s War on Hollywood by Evan Wright – Rob Capps, my editor at Wired, turned me onto Wright’s work. This is my personal favorite—a portrait of a man blessed with bottomless energy and ambition, though only the smallest trace of empathy for his fellow man.
Reefer Madness by Eric Schlosser – A master class in narrative contrarianism. Deeply and elegantly reported, with a real human tragedy at its core.
A Better Brew by Burkhard Bilger – Perhaps the best story ever by one of my favorite writers. (His piece on cockfighting from several years back is a classic, too.) Bilger does a tremendous job of creating real tension, while never losing sight of his primary duty as an explainer of business and science.
And a few you’ll need a subscription to read:
Rock is Dead by David Samuels – This is what it felt like to be young in the ’90s. A terrifying portrait of morality adrift in a sea of excess.
Gangland by Jon Lee Anderson – There is no more badass reporter working in journalism today. No one else could have set up an interview with the most violent (yet complex) gangster in all of Rio’s slums. Truly intrepid reporting.
After Welfare” by Katherine Boo – The story that got me into Boo’s now much-heralded work. Still haunted by the scene of the two kids eating ramen and boiled eggs.
For more from the man himself head over to his blog or sign up for updates via Twitter.
For years, doctors attempted to create artificial hearts that mimicked the real heart—using methods that recreate blood pumping. Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier instead developed a continuous-flow device that has worked on calves and some humans, including patient Rahel Elmer Reger:
The little quilted backpack held two lithium-ion batteries and the HeartMate II’s computerized controller, which are connected by cable through a hole in Reger’s side. Needless to say, she has never left her backpack on a bus. “My cousin once disconnected me, though, by mistake,” she said. “I was showing her how to change the battery. She disconnected one, and then—I was distracted for a second—the other. I yelled, ‘You can’t do that!’ and then passed out. The device blares at you. She reconnected it, and I came back. I was probably out for 10 seconds. She was completely freaked out.”
What happens when your teenage son is obsessed with nuclear research and wants to experiment in the backyard? How 17-year-old Taylor Wilson found support from his family and a group of scientist mentors:
Kenneth and Tiffany agreed to let Taylor assemble a “survey of everyday radioactive materials” for his school’s science fair. Kenneth borrowed a Geiger counter from a friend at Texarkana’s emergency-management agency. Over the next few weekends, he and Tiffany shuttled Taylor around to nearby antique stores, where he pointed the clicking detector at old radium-dial alarm clocks, thorium lantern mantles and uranium-glazed Fiesta plates. Taylor spent his allowance money on a radioactive dining set.
Drawn in by what he calls ‘the surprise properties’ of radioactive materials, he wanted to know more. How can a speck of metal the size of a grain of salt put out such tremendous amounts of energy? Why do certain rocks expose film? Why does one isotope decay away in a millionth of a second while another has a half-life of two million years?
What happens when your teenage son is obsessed with nuclear research and wants to experiment in the backyard? How 17-year-old Taylor Wilson found support from his family and a group of scientist mentors:
“Kenneth and Tiffany agreed to let Taylor assemble a ‘survey of everyday radioactive materials’ for his school’s science fair. Kenneth borrowed a Geiger counter from a friend at Texarkana’s emergency-management agency. Over the next few weekends, he and Tiffany shuttled Taylor around to nearby antique stores, where he pointed the clicking detector at old radium-dial alarm clocks, thorium lantern mantles and uranium-glazed Fiesta plates. Taylor spent his allowance money on a radioactive dining set.
“Drawn in by what he calls ‘the surprise properties’ of radioactive materials, he wanted to know more. How can a speck of metal the size of a grain of salt put out such tremendous amounts of energy? Why do certain rocks expose film? Why does one isotope decay away in a millionth of a second while another has a half-life of two million years?”
Scientist Tyrone B. Hayes discovered a link between the herbicide atrazine and male frogs developing female body parts. His work led to a bizarre battle with atrazine manufacturer Syngenta, in which the two taunted each other over email:
When a batch of these emails became public in 2010, Hayes’ supporters and critics alike were stunned. Here was one of the top scientists in his field, provoking one of the world’s largest agrichemical companies with crude sexual innuendos and LL Cool J-inspired raps:
tyrone b hayes is hard as hell
battle anybody, i don’t care who you tell
you object! you will fail!
mercy for the weak is not for sale
“It hasn’t been productive in the debate, and it hasn’t helped him,” Skelly says. “I mean, why do that?”
The early origins of separation of church and state in America. Williams was a Puritan minister, banished from Massachusetts, before creating the settlement Providence:
He bought the land from the Narragansett Indians and wrote that “having, of a sense of God’s merciful providence unto me in my distress, [I] called the place PROVIDENCE, I desired it might be for a shelter for persons distressed for conscience.”
By “conscience” he meant religion. His family and a dozen or so men with their families, many of them followers from Salem, joined him. Few as they were, Williams soon recognized the need for some form of government. The Narragansetts had sold the land solely to him, and in all English and colonial precedent those proprietary rights gave him political control over the settlement. Yet he drafted a political compact for Providence, and in it he demonstrated that his thinking had taken him into a new world indeed.
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