Evan Parker

"By mimicking how a butterfly's wings shimmer, or how a peacock's tail is so iridescent, engineers at Qualcomm came up with mirasol technology. As Qualcomm notes, "Qualcomm's mirasol display technology is based on a reflective technology called IMOD (Interferometric MODulation), with MEMS structures at its core. This MEMS-based innovation is both bistable, meaning it is both extremely low power, and highly reflective, meaning the display itself can be seen even in direct sunlight." Here's a video explaining more and giving a rundown of how it is used in the e-reader. The battery sipping capabilities of the device (the form factor details of which haven't been divulged yet..what you see in the photo above is only a mock up of one design being considered) will exceed that of even the Kindle, which touts a long battery life, thanks to the mirasol technology. Slashdot notes, "As the mirasol team explained... once you start pushing traditional e-ink panel refresh rates, up to the point you can display smooth video, and introduce color, power draw can actual go beyond that of a regular LCD display. A color e-ink video-capable Kindle would last roughly a day using the same battery; meanwhile the same unit with a mirasol panel would last around a week."" - Evan Parker

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... for more background on the tech: "Interferometric modulator display (IMOD)[1] is an electrically switched display composed of miniature Fabry-Perot interferometers (etalons) that are switched on and off with microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). An etalon reflects light at a specific wavelength and gives pure, bright colors while consuming no power. An IMOD element is composed of subpixels that are actually individual Fabry-Perot interferometers (etalons), like the scales in butterfly wings. An etalon consists of two mirrors, one opaque and one half-silvered, with an air gap of an exact distance between them. This distance determines the wavelength that the etalon amplifies by constructive interference. As the light is "selected" from incoming light, the display is actually brighter in bright sunlight. In contrast, a back-lit LCD display suffers from incoming light. The etalon is switched off by bringing the mirrors very close together, pushing the reflected wavelength into the invisible ultraviolet range. A microelectromechanical device moves the lower, opaque mirror to achieve this. For a practical RGB display, a single RGB pixel is built from several subpixels, because the brightness of a monochromic pixel is not adjusted. A monochromatic array of subpixels represents different brightness levels for each color, and for each pixel, there are three such arrays: red, green and blue." - Evan Parker

"The buildings in these five California cities now have detailed facades, meaning that you can see storefronts and architectural details like you would if you were walking down the street. We've constructed these models by using imagery from Street View, similar to the way that users can make photo-textured models in SketchUp 7.1." - Evan Parker

"It is projected that raising the minimum year-around serum 25(OH)D level to 40 to 60 ng/mL (100–150 nmol/L) would prevent approximately 58,000 new cases of breast cancer and 49,000 new cases of colorectal cancer each year, and three fourths of deaths from these diseases in the United States and Canada, based on observational studies combined with a randomized trial. Such intakes also are expected to reduce case-fatality rates of patients who have breast, colorectal, or prostate cancer by half. There are no unreasonable risks from intake of 2000 IU per day of vitamin D3, or from a population serum 25(OH)D level of 40 to 60 ng/mL. The time has arrived for nationally coordinated action to substantially increase intake of vitamin D and calcium." - Evan Parker

Huge congrats to Keith Ito for leading this on the eng side and Michael Silisky for leading it on the pm side! - Evan Parker

That's a chart of Garmin and TomTom's stock, overlayed on a picture of the new Google Maps for Android with turn-by-turn voice guided directions, which was announced this morning. - Evan Parker

"If you weren’t sure about switching to an Android phone in the near future, this might put you over the edge. Google Maps Navigation is an absolutely killer app. And it is only available for Android 2.0 phones." - Evan Parker

On the first time out? Nice! I'm jealous. - Mandi

"“Precious,” the harrowing story of a 350-pound illiterate teenage girl who is pregnant for the second time by her father and horribly abused by her mother, is shot in an almost-documentary style interspersed with fantasy sequences. (It opens Nov. 6.) Like most independent films, it is character-driven, and at its heart is a spirit of understanding. When Precious’s plight lands her in a special school, she blossoms: the audience’s initial rejection of Precious, even repulsion at the sight of her, slowly gives way to a kind of identification. At Cannes, the film received a 15-minute standing ovation." - Evan Parker

Rather one sided, but I think the basic ideas are right: we need to get out of Afghanistan for economic, security, and humanitarian reasons. - Evan Parker

"Tele Atlas confirms that Google has decided to stop using Tele Atlas map data for the U.S. Google will now use its own map data. Our relationship with Google for map coverage continues outside of the U.S. in dozens of geographies." - Evan Parker

"In the past couple of months, nine devices using Google's mobile operating system have been announced" - Evan Parker

A new menu next to locations and a link to the "places" page. An option to narrow by distance for local search. - Ionut

But still no street view in Brighton (UK) :( - Martin Rix (Mrrix32)

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009... - Evan Parker

A particularly cool part of this launch is that we now have canonical, human-readable urls for many place (not all places have them yet), e.g. http://maps.google.com/places.... - Evan Parker

Interesting product, but I have to admit I'm skeptical this will be a success unless more social features are added. Being able to see comments from your friends (from twitter, friendfeed, facebook etc) about a page while you are on that page seems quite useful to me (e.g. what if this thread showed up in sidewiki if you happened across the article without seeing this thread first?). But seeing random comments from people I don't know, even if they are good comments, just doesn't seem that compelling to me: many sites already have comment features and I rarely find them useful. Granted there is not much ranking applied to comment features on these sites, maybe that will make a difference. - Evan Parker

Agreed. - Mandi