The drink is $23.60 It has lots of caffeine.

Here's a short video that's supposed to display every Apple/Mac design ever offered for sale. It's a quick romp down memory lane.

This is amazing photography. It shows pollination up close in slow motion. It's another and more beautiful way to see what's happening all around us.

This is what Night Guy has to do to wake up Day Guy after a big night of partying, sequential alarms with appropriate labels.

A teacher responds to a student's inquiry about a low grade.

I experienced one of these "random acts" about two years ago while having lunch at a Chic-fil-A restaurant here in Macon. It was a truly uplifting experience.

Here's your first taste of 2011 holiday joy.

A beautiful short story with a timeless theme.

I should start a healthy diet.

Can this be true?

This is very useful collection of tip for astronomy enthusiasts.

In the first place, there is what you might call Blue Inequality. This is the kind experienced in New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, Houston and the District of Columbia. In these places, you see the top 1 percent of earners zooming upward, amassing more income and wealth. The economists Jon Bakija, Adam Cole and Bradley Heim have done the most authoritative research on who these top 1 percenters are.

Roughly 31 percent started or manage nonfinancial businesses. About 16 percent are doctors, 14 percent are in finance, 8 percent are lawyers, 5 percent are engineers and about 2 percent are in sports, entertainment or the media.

If you live in or around these big cities, you see stores and entire neighborhoods catering to the top 1 percent. You see a shift in social norms. Up until 1970 or so, a chief executive would have been embarrassed to take home more than $20 million. But now there is no shame, and top compensation zooms upward.

You also see the superstar effect that economists have noticed in the income data. Within each profession, the top performers are now paid much better than the merely good or average performers.

If you live in these big cities, you see people similar to yourself, who may have gone to the same college, who are earning much more while benefiting from low tax rates, wielding disproportionate political power, gaining in prestige and contributing seemingly little to the social good. That is the experience of Blue Inequality.

Then there is what you might call Red Inequality. This is the kind experienced in Scranton, Des Moines, Naperville, Macon, Fresno, and almost everywhere else. In these places, the crucial inequality is not between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent. It’s between those with a college degree and those without. Over the past several decades, the economic benefits of education have steadily risen. In 1979, the average college graduate made 38 percent more than the average high school graduate, according to the Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke. Now the average college graduate makes more than 75 percent more.

Moreover, college graduates have become good at passing down advantages to their children. If you are born with parents who are college graduates, your odds of getting through college are excellent. If you are born to high school grads, your odds are terrible.

In fact, the income differentials understate the chasm between college and high school grads. In the 1970s, high school and college grads had very similar family structures. Today, college grads are much more likely to get married, they are much less likely to get divorced and they are much, much less likely to have a child out of wedlock.

Today, college grads are much less likely to smoke than high school grads, they are less likely to be obese, they are more likely to be active in their communities, they have much more social trust, they speak many more words to their children at home.

Some research suggests that college grads have much bigger friendship networks than high school grads. The social divide is even starker than the income divide.

These two forms of inequality exist in modern America. They are related but different. Over the past few months, attention has shifted almost exclusively to Blue Inequality.

That’s because the protesters and media people who cover them tend to live in or near the big cities, where the top 1 percent is so evident. That’s because the liberal arts majors like to express their disdain for the shallow business and finance majors who make all the money. That’s because it is easier to talk about the inequality of stock options than it is to talk about inequalities of family structure, child rearing patterns and educational attainment. That’s because many people are wedded to the notion that our problems are caused by an oppressive privileged class that perpetually keeps its boot stomped on the neck of the common man.

But the fact is that Red Inequality is much more important. The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it’s not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent.

If your ultimate goal is to reduce inequality, then you should be furious at the doctors, bankers and C.E.O.’s. If your goal is to expand opportunity, then you have a much bigger and different agenda.

As always, nothing is as simple as it seems.

suntimes

RIP Steve Jobs — a man who truly changed the world

By ANDY IHNATKO

ai@andyi.com

Last Modified: Oct 5, 2011 11:16PM

The last rumor to be addressed on Monday night, the night before Apple’s iPhone event, was, “Will Steve Jobs make an appearance?” Tim Cook, his successor in the CEO’s office, had been announced as the host of the event. But some people believed that plans were in place for Steve to do a walk-on, or at least be in the audience and receive the acknowledgment of the crowd.

It seemed like a long shot, really, and the reasons why I dismissed the rumors had nothing to do with Mr. Jobs’ health. Through everything he did during his nearly four decades as one of the most — arguably the single most — influential visionaries in technology, Steve Jobs was all about focus and eliminating distractions.

And his presence there would have been one hell of a distraction.

He was loved way, way too much and there were way, way too many people in that room who wanted to see how he was doing. His presence would have made everybody enormously happy, as it would have been a sign that maybe he had found a way out of what looked, from an outsider’s perspective, like an impossible situation. The product could have been an iPhone 8 that could unfold into a towel-sized multitouch display and then, when you’re done with your work, be flipped over and ridden home as a hoverboard and it would have made no difference.

The lead paragraph in every print and online piece would have been: “Steve was there.”

And now Steve is gone.

Right now, I’m thinking about the revolving door of CEOs at HP, and the revolving door of “revolutionary, game-changing projects” at Google. How un-Steve can you get? On an evening when most geeks are thinking about Steve Jobs, it’s impossible to imagine the concept of a tech company headed by someone who’s just in the gig for a few years of kicks and then an eight-figure buyout before they move on to whatever the next vacant seat is. It’s impossible to imagine a CEO who doesn’t feel passionately, with utter commitment about the company he runs. It’s impossible to imagine a company introducing a product that has every necessary component of success except the full, enthusiastic faith — bordering on arrogance — of a CEO who believes that this product or service will change the world and if the world isn’t on board with that truth right away, then this CEO has to just stick to his guns until the world catches up.

That’s what I think of when I think of Steve.

I think of the stories. Yes, the funny ones (grifting Woz out of his fair share of the fee Atari paid for creating the electronics for the “Breakout” game, parking in handicapped spots) but those are overcrowded by the stories I’ve heard about him from Apple employees who’ve worked with him directly.

Steve, freshly installed as the savior of Apple, calling all the staff from all of the teams that worked on all of the Apple products and projects that made no sense to him. There was yelling from his side of the auditorium and much cowering, anger and hurt feelings on the other side.

But all he really wanted was to locate the people who were just as focused and passionate as he was. One manager in particular stood his ground and went toe-to-toe and defended his project, point for point, with the same bluntness and force with which Steve had attacked it.

Steve was quiet for a second or two. “OK, then,” he said, nodding, and then he moved on to the next item on the list.

The story of the engineer who was scared green at the prospect of pitching an idea to Steve himself. He had prepared for this meeting as though he were defending a doctoral thesis in front of a board of proctors who had already announced a desire to have him killed. It was a very technical concept he needed to put across, and he had planned 15 to 20 minutes just to explain the discrete theory behind it.

Steve cut him off just a few minutes in, with a wave and a half-smile. “Yup, good . . . I get it.” And then he correctly extrapolated every direction the engineer was about to go with this and summarized the whole project in less than three sentences, far better than the engineer could have.

My own interactions with Steve were sorely limited and of no value to a memorial like this. But I was present when Steve encountered a book on an Apple product that he really, really liked. He got more and more excited with every random page he read. It’s as impossible to imagine Steve Jobs blowing smoke up a writer or publisher’s skirts as it is to imagine him eating a whole side of beef — Steve was a vegetarian — so this was genuine enthusiasm. It seemed so clear to me: When his team at Apple had created and built this software, Steve was terribly excited about what it could be and what it could mean to its users, and proud of the results.

His reaction to this book was that of someone who had once seen a UFO and had just now encountered someone who had seen the exact same thing. That was my clear impression: that he was energized by the knowledge that at least one other person had truly gotten what the company had been trying to achieve.

Some of you have no doubt noted my lack of personal pronouns in that story and wonder if I’m simply too modest to talk about how excited Steve Jobs was about one of my books. This is not the case (my modesty and the identity of the author). But I emailed the author and told him the story. He replied almost immediately and, given the circumstances, I can forgive him for writing two paragraphs in all-caps.

I think I can also confidently explain the author’s reaction. It’s true that if Steve Jobs thought your book was the most fantastic thing ever written, this would bode well for your chances of being given a prestigious endcap marketing space in every Apple Store.

But this couldn’t have mattered less to the author. Steve’s reaction was like your Dad telling you how proud he was of you and the work you’ve done.

Most of us who are old enough to have seen any of the original three “Star Wars” movies during their first theatrical run, and who are honest, will admit to having had that kind of wholly unreal relationship with Steve Jobs. Along with Steve Wozniak, he was one of the original Geeks Who Made Good. Like a father, he’s the grownup version of us, or at least an extremely encouraging sign that somebody could be a child with the most dreadful social handicaps (a desire to work, learn, read and explore) and still become a successful adult.

My most meaningful interaction with Steve was one that maybe never actually happened.

NeXT was Steve’s next big thing after Apple. It’s often named as his one failure, but was it, really? It’s true that NeXT computers are now museum pieces (and in many geek homes, end tables) rather than a going concern. But if you leaf through the brochure for the NeXT Cube, the company’s first computer, you see a catalog of all of the features that were unheard of in any computer in 1990 but would be standard equipment in every PC and Mac made five years later. And the OS that ran the NeXT Cube is fundamentally the same OS that runs every Mac today.

I desperately wanted one.

At the time, a NeXT Cube cost $6500.

At the time, I had made, I think, about as much as that throughout my lifetime. Or not much more, anyway. At that point, I had never had a real job.

So I did the only thing someone in my position could do: I wrote Steve Jobs a letter and asked him for one.

I explained that I was only a poor impoverished student. But I promised that if he just up and sent me a NeXT Cube, he would one day look back on his career and identify that decision as the one that really sent the company up to the next level of success. I closed the letter by citing a recent (extremely minor, enough to startle a sleeping dog but nothing more) earthquake in the Bay Area, and suggested that his insurance company would totally believe that a fissure had opened in the ground beneath NeXT’s warehouse, that a NeXT Cube had tumbled down to the earth’s core, beyond any hope of retrieval, and thus would probably even pay out the $6500 so it’d all work out even.

Two weeks later, I came home from school and my Mom idly said something that froze my feet to the kitchen floor.

“You got a call today.”

(Kids, this was when a family had only one phone and one phone number. And Mom was probably your voice mail.)

She continued. “Someone next? Next somebody? I couldn’t really understand. He asked for you, and then I asked if he wanted you or your father.”

(My Dad’s name was Andy, too.)

I instantly parsed it out: someone from NeXT — maybe even Steve himself; it was a small company at that time — had called this house.

Mom had already moved on to the next thing in her day and so her memory of the conversation wasn’t clear. What did he say? What did she tell him? Were they going to call back? What? What? WHAT?!?

She couldn’t really recall.

There was no follow-up call. In my worst nightmares, to this day, the caller was Steve Jobs and my Mom had given him the impression that the letter had been written by a deceptive engineer in his late forties with a wife and kids and not an impoverished student.

(I still can’t laugh about it.)

Still, it cheered me for days to think that something I wrote had been read, and responded to, by Steve Jobs.

I got older, and became a professional something, and my respect and love for Steve became (quite appropriately) professional.

Still: Yesterday, I lived in a world with a Steve Jobs in it. Tonight, I don’t. That’s truly how I feel right now.

We need people in technology with focus and passion who think ahead and see what’s possible, if only the right pieces can be pushed into place and clicked together. He wasn’t the guy at Apple who came up with those ideas, but he was the guy who created an environment that encouraged, even demanded, that kind of thinking, and the guy who would put the full might and authority of an enormous company behind you and your work if he thought you were right.

To adapt a line from “My Favorite Year”: “I need Steve Jobses as big as I can get them.”

The world can say the same.

Copyright © 2011 — Sun-Times Media, LLC

Andy Ihnatko is one of my favorite tech columnist. He is well informed, witty, and insightful. This tribute to Steve Jobs is all of those thing.

• Photo - Permalink

News is never a 9 to 5 job. 

Wednesday evening, with the news that Apple visionary Steve Jobs had passed away from pancreatic cancer, TIME managing editor Rick Stengel (center) decided to stop the presses on the issue the staff had just finished earlier that afternoon. Staff members poured back into the TIME offices for an emergency edit meeting, which left us just over three hours to produce a new issue, many of us working on the very Apple devices that Jobs created.

Thursday, we’ll announce our latest issue featuring Jobs on the cover for the eighth time. 

Posted by Yes, So on and so on

Source

I suppose the cry of "stop the presses" will not be heard for many years longer. But once again, here it is, marking an important technological and cultural moment.

A utility tool for the ages.

Once again, "A picture is worth 1000 words." From Boing Boing

Here's another crazy marriage proposal. It's insane for it's risk, but otherwise bound to be memorable.

Father and son together at the first and last Space Shuttle launch.