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Granted, it’s not a lot. But adding a book to your Kindle does make it heavier, as computer scientist John Kubiatowicz discovered:
Although the electrons were already present, keeping them still rather than allowing them to float around takes up extra energy – about a billionth of a microjoule per bit of data.
Using Einstein’s E=mc² formula, which states that energy and mass are directly related, Prof Kubiatowicz calculated that filling a 4GB Kindle to its storage limit would increase its weight by a billionth of a billionth of a gram, or 0.000000000000000001g.
This is roughly equivalent to the weight of a small virus, while the equivalent number of books – about 3,500 – would weigh approximately two tons.
Link -via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Flickr user jimmiehomeschoolmom
Class assignment: “Explain something modern/internet based to someone who lived and died before 1900”
Cardiff School of Art & Design student Rachel Walsh decided she would explain the Amazon Kindle to author Charles Dickens and submitted this project. She designed 40 miniature books and placed them inside of a hardcover book, a Victorian age metaphor for a portable reader.
“I made the book start to finish over five days, and it took about 35 hours to make I reckon. It was pretty painstaking cutting out all the gaps in the book itself, and making the books to go inside. They’re all bound like actual books, so as I waited for them to glue and dry I would design the covers for them. All the covers are copies of real book covers. They include many of Dickens’s novels, his favorite childhood books, and some of my own.”
Link – Via Gamma Squad and My Rusty Sieve
When I heard something on TV about getting an Phone for $50, I thought about the people I know who paid $600 for theirs. I am not an early adopter of new technology (unless it is free, of course), since I am old enough to remember Betamax. You might have to look that one up, since it is not on the list of the 15 Biggest Fails for Techies Who Bought the Wrong Gear Too Early. This is a slide show of things you may regret having bought when they first came on the market, because the price dropped, it became obsolete, or you can’t upgrade the early models. Shown is the Amazon Kindle.
The Kindle’s transformation from luxury gadget to impulse buy isn’t based on a single moment but rather on a series of price drops that broke the hearts of early adopters. If you bought a Kindle 2 in February 2009, it cost $359. Five months later, $299. Three months after that, $259. By June 2010, the Kindle 2 cost $189–and if you thought that was a good time to pull the trigger, July brought word of the Kindle 3, including a Wi-Fi model for $139. In less than a year and a half, the Kindle had become thinner, lighter, and $220 cheaper.
Maybe one day I will get around to buying one. Link -via Interesting Pile
When you thought texting while driving is bad, someone out there took it up a notch. Here’s the multitasking driver, who’s reading a book, using a Kindle AND talking on the phone at the same time while driving on the freeway. BuzzFeed has more: Link [embedded YouTube clip]
Many years ago, while riding on the school bus, I saw my own version of the multi-tasking driver: he was shaving (yes, with shaving cream and razors) while driving.
SFist blogger Brock Keeling posted a picture of three cramped San Francisco Muni passengers pass the time with a newspaper, Kindle and iPad.
One SFist reader wondered about the symbolism of the empty seat.
Without missing a beat, Keeling cleverly replied: "The empty seat is reserved for web 4.0."
Photo by Brian Brooks.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
The past ten years have been outrageously productive for the advancement of digital video. It seems like only yesterday we were waiting patiently for our downloads of 10 second clips that would be displayed as small flash, and the pre-YouTube world was a mess of digitization. Now, the technology has become so great, that web content seethes with embedded video on blogs, Facebook and Myspace.
Is it not obvious that this trend will continue to dominate the digital domain? The proliferation of cameras and editing software means the upload frequency will just bloom even more.
Behold this Vimeo clip that shows what your typical magazine might look like in the very near future.
VIV Mag Motion Cover – iPad Demo from Alexx Henry on Vimeo.
Vertical video! And that’s only the beginning. Vertical panoramas are a newish trend in photography. It makes sense to format that way now, in light of the way more and more people view media – on blogs or portable tablet devices.
Of course that’s just my opinion. Any Neatoramanauts have any insights on the future of video?
