Suspensed Posterity

This is among the coolest things I have ever seen. Smooth speed changes, even with heavy loads; and a simple system. I only regret the lack of informations about how the wheel is rolled. I just don't get it D:

Some extremely beautiful and creative moments captured from various authors.

The first thought for some of these is : how the Hell was it taken?!?

Internet Explorer Falls Below 50% Global Market Share. Chrome on the rise

So it’s happening. IE’s reign truly appears to be coming to an end.

According to Stat Counter, Microsoft’s browser has officially fallen below the 50 percent market share mark to 49.87 percent. Firefox holds relatively strong at 31.5 percent and Chrome is soaring with 11.54 percent having only launched just over a year ago.

In Europe, IE market share has fallen to 40.26% in September this year from 46.44% in September last year. While in North America IE is still above 50% at 52.3% followed by Firefox at 27.21% and Chrome at 9.87%. The rise of Google Chrome in North America has also been impressive and in June it overtook Safari for the first time.

Expectedly it’s the geeks and early adopters that appear to be driving Chrome’s growth. Of the many early adopter communities, it’s a Hacker News reader that highlights the level of IE exclusion – out of 55,000 visitors to the developer’s site from Hacker News, there wasn’t a single IE user.

StatCounter’s figures come from data it collects on a sample exceeding 15 billion page views per month from more than 3 million websites.

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Finally!

Apple Retina Display

By now it seems that most people on the planet have heard of Apple’s latest iPhone, the iPhone 4 which was released today.  One of the many compelling features of the new phone is the Retina Display.  When Steve Jobs first invoked this term at the WWDC, my eyebrows were raised.  Being a retinal scientist, I was immediately skeptical of just what he meant by “retinal display”.  My mind immediately raced and I wondered if it might have been some of the interesting technology I got to see on my last visit to one of Apple’s technology development labs.  I will not say anything about that visit, but this Retina Display, a super high resolution display was new technology that I had not seen before.  Essentially it is an LED backlit LCD display with a *326* pixel per inch (960×640) display (John Gruber of Daring Fireball called this resolution display back in March) where each pixel measures a scant 78μm.    Though as you can see from these images of the displays I captured under a microscope, these pixels are not square.  Rather they are rectangular and while the short axis is 78μm, the long axis on the iPhone 4 pixel is somewhere in the neighborhood of 102μm.  I am including images below of the iPhone 1G, the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 4G and the iPad to show some perspective on pixel sizes.  The scale bar and my measurements are approximate as I was having a tough time in the lab tonight finding an appropriate calibration.  Nevertheless, this should serve as a useful metric for examining the relative pixel sizes and for making the point of whether Apple’s Retina Display is marketing speak and hyperbole or if in fact, Apple’s claims have merit.

 

As you can see from this image, the iPhone 1G pixels (each composed of a red, green and blue sub-pixel) measure approximately 190μm x 500μm.  Also note the blurryness of the image.  This was optimally focused, but the LCD panel itself is behind a non-bonded pane of glass with touch sensor on it leading to some image degradation.

 

As in the 1G iPhone, the iPhone 3G pixels are essentially the same size, though with a different contact location.  Again, these pixels measure approximately 190μm x 500μm and this LCD display has the same blurring issues that are present in the iPhone 1G.

 

This image of the iPhone 4G LCD is made at the same magnification as the 1G and 3G iPhones illustrating the substantially smaller pixel size in the iPhone 4G.  These pixels are remarkably small and if you look carefully, appear to be composites themselves where each sub-pixel is composed of its own sub-pixels.  I am not sure about this however and it may simply be an artifact of the construction.  Also note that there is very little distortion in the pixel images as the iPhone 4G has a bonded glass cover, eliminating the space in between the LCD panel and the touch sensitive glass surface.

iPhone1: ~176 x 223μm

iPhone 3G: ~176μm x 223μm

iPhone 4G: ~78μm x 102μm

So… the claim from Steve was that this display had pixels that matched the resolution display of the human retina.  Now, fan of Apple that I am, this struck me as perhaps a bit hyperbolic, so I figured I’d do some quick calculations to see where this claim fell.  Apparently I am not the first Ph.D. to wonder as another came out calling the bluff of Mr. Jobs.  Here is the deal though… While Dr. Soneira was partially correct with respect to the retina, Apple’s Retina Display adequately represents the resolution at which images fall upon our retina.

Essentially, this is a claim of visual acuity which is the ability of the visual system to resolve fine detail.  There are an awful lot of considerations to take into account when making such a claim such as contrast, distance, the resolution of the display and some metric of pixel size which gives you an estimate of visual resolution on the retina.  Claims of contrast ratios are notoriously flexible in a number of displays and will be influenced by a number of optical factors as well as the content being viewed and the black and color levels of the pixels as well as overall luminance.  Apple claims an 800:1 pixel ratio and I’ll take them at their word on that and focus on the claims of resolution here.

A “normal” human eye is considered to have standard visual acuity or 20/20 vision.  This means that a 20/20 eye can discriminate two lines or two pixels separated by 1 arcminute (1/60 degree).

The ability of an optical system to resolve fine detail requires minute spacing of optical detectors.  In the retina, there detectors are the photoreceptors.  Objects we look at at projected through the cornea and lens and imaged on the back of the eye on a plane that ideally lines up with the retinal photoreceptors.

Theoretically the limit of retinal resolution, say the ability to distinguish patterns of alternating black and white lines is approximately 120pixels/degree in an optimal, healthy eye with no optical abnormalities.  Again, this corresponds to one minute of arc or 0.000291 radians (π/(60*180)).  If one assumes that the nominal focal length of the eye is approximately 16mm, an optimal distance from the eye for viewing detail might be around 12 inches away from the eye which is reasonable to assume for someone viewing detail on their iPhone.

Dr. Soneira’s claims are based upon a retinal calculation of .5 arcminutes which to my reading of the literature is too low.  According to a relatively recent, but authoritative study of photoreceptor density in the human retina (Curcio, C.A., K.R. Sloan, R.E. Kalina and A.E. Hendrickson 1990 Human photoreceptor topography. J. Comp. Neurol. 292:497-523.), peak cone density in the human averages 199,000 cones/mm2 with a range of 100,000 to 324,000.  Dr. Curcio et. al. calculated 77 cycles/degree or .78 arcminutes/cycle of *retinal* resolution.  However, this does not take into account the optics of the system which degrade image quality somewhat giving a commonly accepted resolution of 1 arcminute/cycle.  So, if a normal human eye can discriminate two points separated by 1 arcminute/cycle at a distance of a foot, we should be able to discriminate two points 89 micrometers apart which would work out to about 287 pixels per inch.  Since the iPhone 4G display is comfortably higher than that measure at 326 pixels per inch, I’d find Apple’s claims stand up to what the human eye can perceive.

For reference, I am also including an image of the iPad LCD taken at the same magnification as the iPhone images above.  As you can see, the pixel size is actually much larger and herringbone shaped which is not uncommon in high quality desktop displays like say, the Apple Cinema Display line.

2 Comments

Categories: News (Apple Inc.), News (Technology).

Tags: iPad, iPhone, pixels, resolution, Retina Display

By bwjones

— June 24, 2010 at 11:00 pm

A very interesting article about the resolution of the iPhone 4's Retina Display, and the claims Apple made concerning its sharpness.

Dancing letters! I can't wait to see this in HTML5...

Tristan Miller

German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence^[1]

20 December 1999

Why don't I have a girlfriend?

This is a question that practically every male has asked himself at one point or another in his life. Unfortunately, there is rarely a hard and fast answer to the query. Many men try to reason their way through the dilemma nonetheless, often reaching a series of ridiculous explanations, each more self-deprecating than the last: "Is it because I'm too shy, and not aggressive enough? Is it my opening lines? Am I a boring person? Am I too fat or too thin? Or am I simply ugly and completely unattractive to women?" When all other plausible explanations have been discounted, most fall back on the time-honoured conclusion that "there must be Something Wrong™ with me" before resigning themselves to lives of perpetual chastity.^[2]

Not the author, though. I, for one, refuse to spend my life brooding over my lack of luck with women. While I'll be the first to admit that my chances of ever entering into a meaningful relationship with someone special are practically non-existent, I staunchly refuse to admit that it has anything to do with some inherent problem with me. Instead, I am convinced that the situation can be readily explained in purely scientific terms, using nothing more than demographics and some elementary statistical calculus.

Lest anyone suspect that my standards for women are too high, let me allay those fears by enumerating in advance my three criteria for the match. First, the potential girlfriend must be approximately my age—let's say 21 plus or minus three or four years. Second, the girl must be beautiful (and I use that term all-encompassingly to refer to both inner and outer beauty). Third, she must also be reasonably intelligent—she doesn't have to be Mensa material, but the ability to carry on a witty, insightful argument would be nice. So there they are—three simple demands, which I'm sure everyone will agree are anything but unreasonable.

That said, I now present my demonstration of why the probability of finding a suitable candidate fulfilling the three above-noted requirements is so small as to be practically impossible—in other words, why I will never have a girlfriend. I shall endeavour to make this proof as rigorous as the available data permits. And I should note, too, that there will be no statistical trickery involved here; I have cited all my sources and provided all relevant calculations^[3] in case anyone wishes to conduct their own independent review. Let's now take a look at the figures.

Number of people on Earth (in 1998): 5 592 830 000^[4]

We start with the largest demographic in which I am interested—namely, the population of this planet. That is not to say I'm against the idea of interstellar romance, of course; I just don't assess the prospect of finding myself a nice Altairian girl as statistically significant. Now anyway, the latest halfway-reliable figures we have for Earth's population come from the United States Census Bureau's 1999 World Population Profile (WP/98). Due presumably to the time involved in compiling and processing census statistics, said report's data is valid only as of 1998, so later on we'll be making some impromptu adjustments to bring the numbers up to date.

…who are female: 2 941 118 000^[5]

I'd've thought that, given the title of this essay, this criterion goes without saying. In case anyone missed it, though, I am looking for exclusively female companionship. Accordingly, roughly half of the Earth's population must be discounted. Sorry, guys.

…in "developed" countries: 605 601 000^[5]

We now further restrict the geographical area of interest to so-called "first-world countries". My reasons for doing so are not motivated out of contempt for those who are economically disadvantaged, but rather by simple probability. My chances of meeting a babe from Bhutan or a goddess from Ghana, either in person or on the Internet, are understandably low. In fact, I will most likely spend nearly my entire life living and working in North America, Europe, and Australia, so it is to these types of regions that the numbers have been narrowed.

…currently (in 2000) aged 18 to 25: 65 399 083^[4][5]

Being neither a pedophile nor a geriatrophile, I would like to restrict my search for love to those whose age is approximately equal to my own. This is where things get a bit tricky, for two reasons: first, the census data is nearly two years old, and second, the "population by age" tables in WP/98 are not separated into individual ages but are instead quantized into "15–19" (of whom there are 39 560 000) and "20–44" (population 215 073 000). Women aged 15 to 19 in 1998 will be aged 17 to 21 in 2000; in this group, I'm interested in dating those 18 or older, so, assuming the "15–19" girls' ages are uniformly distributed, we have

Similarly, of 1998's "20–44" category, there are now

females within my chosen age limit. The sum, 66 059 680, represents the total number of females aged 18 to 25 in developed countries in 2000. Unfortunately, roughly 1% of these girls will have died since the census was taken;^[6] thus, the true number of so-far eligible bachelorettes is 65 399 083.

…who are beautiful: 1 487 838

Personal attraction, both physically and personality-wise, is an important instigator of any relationship. Of course, beauty is a purely subjective trait whose interpretation may vary from person to person. Luckily it is not necessary for me to define beauty in this essay except to state that for any given beholder, it will probably be normally distributed amongst the population.^[7] Without going into the specifics of precisely which traits I admire, I will say that for a girl to be considered really beautiful to me, she should fall at least two standard deviations above the norm. From basic statistics theory, the area to the left of the normal curve at z = 2 is

and so it is this number with which we multiply our current population pool.

…and intelligent: 236 053

Again, intelligence can mean different things to different people, yet I am once more relieved of making any explanation by noting that it, like most other characteristics, has a notionally normal distribution across the population. Let's assume that I will settle for someone a mere one standard deviation above the normal; in that case, a further

of the population must be discounted.

…and not already committed: 118 027

I could find no hard statistics on the number of above-noted girls who are already married, engaged, or otherwise committed to a significant other, but informal observation and anecdotal evidence leads me to believe that the proportion is somewhere around 50%. (Fellow unattached males will no doubt have also noticed a preponderance of girls legitimately offering, "Sorry, I already have a boyfriend" as an excuse not to go on a date.) For reasons of morality (and perhaps too self-preservation), I'm not about to start hitting on girls who have husbands and boyfriends. Accordingly, that portion of the female population must also be considered off-limits.

…and also might like me: 18 726

Naturally, finding a suitable girl who I really like is no guarantee that she'll like me back. Assuming, as previously mentioned, that personal attractiveness is normally distributed, there is a mere 50% chance that any given female will consider me even marginally attractive. In practice, however, people are unlikely to consider pursuing a relationship with someone whose looks and personality just barely suffice. Let's make the rather conservative assumption, then, that a girl would go out with someone if and only if they were at least one standard deviation above her idea of average. In that case, referring to our previous calculation, only 15.8655% of females would consider someone with my physical characteristics and personality acceptable as a potential romantic partner.

Conclusion

It is here, at a pool of 18 726 acceptable females, that we end our statistical analysis. At first glance, a datable population of 18 726 may not seem like such a low number, but consider this: assuming I were to go on a blind date with a new girl about my age every week, I would have to date for 3493 weeks before I found one of the 18 726. That's very nearly 67 years. As a North American male born in the late 1970s, my life expectancy is probably little more than 70 years, so we can safely say that I will be quite dead before I find the proverbial girl of my dreams. Come to think of it, she'll probably be dead too.

So there you have it, my friends—finally, a cogent, scientific, non-self-deprecating argument for why I will never have a girlfriend. That said, if you happen to be a girl deluded enough to think that you and I have a chance together, feel free to drop me a line, but I warn you, you face odds of 157 060 to 1. I wouldn't bother if I were you.

Update (2000-04-01): My sarcastic pleas for some e-mail have finally been answered. Take a look at this letter from a hysterical female reader, which I think perfectly demonstrates the point of this entire essay. (I think the fact that she's a WebTV user explains a lot—in fact, I was sure this e-mail was an April Fool's joke until I noticed the return address.)

Endnotes and references

1. ↑ This paper was written when the author was at Griffith University, Australia.
2. ↑ After a short period of brooding, of course, these males will eventually come to the realization that the real reason they were never able to get a girlfriend is that they were too discriminating with their attentions. They will consequently return to the dating scene, entering a sequence of blasé relationships with mediocre girls for whom they don't really care, until they finally marry one out of fear of spending the rest of their lives alone. I am convinced that this behaviour is the real reason for today's alarmingly high divorce rate.
3. ↑ Due to rounding, figures cited may not add up exactly.
4. ↑ ^4.0 4.1 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Report WP/98, World Population Profile: 1998, Table A-3. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1999.
5. ↑ ^{5.0 5.1 5.2} U.S. Bureau of the Census, Report WP/98, World Population Profile: 1998, Table A-7. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1999.
6. ↑ WP/98 gives the annual death rate for developed countries as 10 per 1000, but does not list death rates per age group. Presumably, the death rate graphs as a bathtub curve, but in absence of any numbers supporting this hypothesis, and for the sake of simplicity, I will conservatively estimate the death rate among this age group to be 1% biennially.
7. ↑ Despite my efforts to research the matter, I could find no data on the distribution of beauty, either outer or inner, amongst the population. Perhaps attractiveness, being a largely subjective trait, does not lend itself to quantification. It is not unreasonable, however, to assume that like most other traits, it has a normal distribution. Indeed, this assumption seems to be backed up by informal observation and judgment—in any reasonably large group of people, most of them will be average-looking, and a tiny minority either exceedingly beautiful or exceedingly ugly.

Retrieved from "http://en.nothingisreal.com/wiki/Why_I_Will_Never_Have_a_Girlfriend"

Merle Savage has a wheezy, guttural smoker's cough. But the 71-year-old former Alaska resident and author of Silence in the Sound never smoked a day in her life. She did, however, spend four months as a general foreman during the Exxon Valdez oil spill recovery project in 1989. And she has a message for anyone working at the BP oil disaster sites: "You've got to use your common sense. Breathing crude oil is toxic."

Savage moved to Alaska in 1988--just one year before the Exxon Valdez oil spill ravaged Prince William Sound. After the spill, Savage decided to take action. She was assigned to clean oil-coated rocks on the beach, but says that Exxon never provided legitimate safety training. And since Exxon never told her that breathing crude oil was toxic, she didn't think twice about spraying hot water onto the oily rocks.

When the dizziness and vomiting set in, Savage assumed it was just the flu. "We were housed in close quarters, and I could see how the flu could go around repeatedly," she says. The "flu" continued as Savage moved into a position as general foreman on the spill's cleanup barges. But she didn't realize quite how much her health had deteriorated until leaving the cleanup operation.

"I was in the doctor's office continually," Savage says. "She always heard my stomach rolling and one day she said 'Have you eaten anything toxic or had any contaminated water?' I said no, never thinking it was the crude oil." Savage went on to develop a frightening list of symptoms: cirrhosis of the liver (she doesn't drink), rheumatoid arthritis, constant diarrhea, and respiratory problems.

When Savage was contacted by Riki Ott, a marine toxicologist specializing in oil pollution, she finally put the pieces together. According to Ott, respiratory and central nervous system problems are common among oil spill cleanup workers. In a recent blog post, she explains her concerns:

Oil spill cleanups are regulated as hazardous waste cleanups because oil is, in fact, hazardous to health. Breathing oil fumes is extremely harmful...Unfortunately, Exxon called the short-term symptoms, "the Valdez Crud," and dismissed 6,722 cases of respiratory claims from cleanup workers as "colds or flu" using an exemption under OSHA’s hazardous waste cleanup reporting requirements. I know of many who have been disabled by their illnesses – or have died.

The same symptoms--headache, nausea, coughing--are being reported by workers cleaning up the BP oil disaster. Savage, now retired and living in Las Vegas, hopes today's oil spill workers know what's really going on with their health. "Had I known the truth, I wouldn't have gone to clean up the spill," she says. "I am living and breathing now, but it's not by the grace of Exxon."

 Read more about the Gulf Oil Spill

Got information on the spill you want to share? Email us at oil@fastcompany.com. It'll go directly to the lead reporter and editor on these stories, and they'll assume all initial communication to be strictly confidential.

Ariel Schwartz can be reached on Twitter or by email

Related Stories: BP Reports On Worker Injuries, Illnesses at Oil Disaster Sites Secret Ingredients in Corexit Oil Dispersant Are Carcinogenic and Absorbed Through Skin

Topics: Innovation, Technology, Ethonomics, Exxon Valdez, gulf oil spill, merle savage, riki ott, editors picks, Merle Savage, Gulf Coast Oil Spill, Accidents and Disasters, Oil Spills, Exxon Valdez

It all began with a presentation in English on climate change that Felix had to give at his school near Munich in January, 2007.

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:  Felix was inspired by Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai

During his research, Felix came across a website with information on Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan activist who, together with other women in her country, had planted more than 30 million trees to fight deforestation and soil erosion.

Inspired by Maathai, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, Felix highlighted tree-planting in his presentation as a way to tackle climate change.

"At the end of the presentation I said 'let's plant a million trees in every country of the world," the 12-year-old told Deutsche Welle.

'We feel cheated'

Felix's class teacher was impressed and helped spread the word. Soon, Felix was sent to other schools in the area to talk about his ambition. Two months later, Felix's school – the Munich International School in Starnberg in southern Germany – organized the first official tree-planting drive.

The local media took an interest, other schools in the area began similar tree-planting events and Felix's idea snowballed into a local green movement. Three years later, the initiative achieved its one- millionth-tree in Germany and the group "Plant for the Planet" was born, making Felix Finkbeiner Germany's youngest founder of an environmental organization.

Today, the group is financed through donations and operates projects in 70 countries around the world.

Felix insists that the initiative isn't just about planting trees. It's also about children exchanging ideas and experiences of climate change.

"We children feel really cheated because such a lot was done for Copenhagen and at the end, what was really achieved there?" Felix said.

Wise green words

With his silver-rimmed spectacles and boyish face, Felix certainly looks his age, but he sounds somewhat older. He says that as an adult he and his generation will have to live radically different lifestyles from those of his parents' generation, if global warming is to be curtailed.

Bildunterschrift: Felix with fellow campaigners during a speech

"We children want the same chances for our future as today's adults have. But I'm convinced that we can't continue the same way as we have so far. We will never achieve our goals if we continue to drive cars and fly in airplanes as we do today. Our grandparents, my grandparents, didn't do air travel either and they were happy."

Travelling the world for a cause

Felix said that he actually liked giving presentations and travelling - two things that he's been doing a lot of in recent years, even in an airplane if necessary.

He's been invited to conferences in New York, South Korea, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria and Italy to introduce his organization and talk about his plans to protect the climate.

Earlier this year, he was invited to Beijing by the Chinese government.

All that globe-trotting means that the young climate campaigner has to miss school quite often - sometimes for entire weeks. But he says his grades are pretty good and he's confident that he'll keep up with his class mates.

At home, Felix is like any other boy his age. He says he loves riding a mountain bike and playing on a computer.

Inspired by his parents

The media has traced Felix's unusual commitment and vision to protect the climate to his parents, both environmental campaigners.

His father, Frithjof Finkbeiner, founded an environmental group almost a decade ago. It's based in the family's home in a small picturesque village near the Starnberger Lake where Felix lives with his two sisters and parents. Felix grew up listening to impassioned discussions about the environment and social justice.

"I'm convinced that what my parents do has certainly influenced me. But at the same time, there are thousands of children around the world who also plant trees, who are active and give speeches and presentations like myself. I think most of them give better speeches than I do," he said.

Author: Sandra Petersmann (sp)
Editor: Nathan Witkop