Call in. Question everything.
#50 Investigating Technology
March 12, 2010 · 3 Comments
We spoke to Jonathan Strickland, senior writer and “TechStuff” for howstuffworks.com, about the importance of critical thinking when examining new technology, and when determining whether the tech we use now does what it claims.
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3 Comments so far
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Just wanted to put my 2 cents worth in on the whole pixel count thing for digital cameras. One thing your guest failed to mention is that those extra pixels can also come in handy when cropping a picture. Cropping a picture acts much like zooming in with a telephoto lens and the more pixels you have to begin with the tighter you can crop and still have decent resolution on the result.
by Bruce · on March 15, 2010 at 7:13 pm
That’s very true. I did talk about pixels and cropping in an episode of TechStuff ages go, but failed to bring it up in the discussion. I used the example of taking a photo of a big group of people just so you can get a photo of a really cute girl. Because, you know, all of my examples start out fine and end up being creepy.
by Jonathan · on March 17, 2010 at 6:30 am
A couple comments:
1. Twitter was already profitable in 2009, as a result of search deals with Google and Microsoft. That probably won’t suffice for long-term monetization, but it’s not quite as bad as described.
2. It doesn’t seem like a good objection to a psi tester that you don’t know if the random number generation is valid–that’s a potential issue, but it’s not an insurmountable one. It’s also not reasonable to expect 99%-100% accuracy for claims of psi. A proper test would involve some kind of controlled comparison–that would give a mechanism for testing both the device and an alleged psi claim.
by Jim Lippard · on March 29, 2010 at 9:05 am