So very great. From The Verge’s post:

There’s one particularly interesting shot around two minutes into the video that shows Obi Wan Kenobi being run through by Darth Vader’s lightsaber. In Lucas’ cut of Episode IV, the blade passes through an ethereal Obi Wan; in the early shot, it rips through his cloak, leaving a trail of fire and the aging Jedi’s upper body hanging in the air as his lower body slumps to the floor.

[Via The Verge]

Slide Rule is a terrific resource, a collection of online courses of all stripes.

Education is changing, with great educators from around the world increasingly putting their amazing courses online. We believe we are in the early days of a revolution that will not only increase access to great education, but also transform the way people learn.

SlideRule is our way of contributing to the movement. We help you discover the world’s best online courses in every subject – courses that your friends and thousands of other learners have loved.

Many of the courses are free, some are gathered from places like Lynda.com and have an associated fee. If you have any interest in moving into a new field or just stretching yourself, spend a few minutes to browse the course catalog. Some great stuff here.

For the UN’s International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action taking place on April 4, New Museum in New York City will host an exhibit that uses iBeacons to simulate a virtual minefield and let anyone experience the danger of land mines.

Fantastic use of iBeacons.

Time:

If you wanted to pick a single date to mark the beginning of the modern era of the web, you could do a lot worse than choosing Thursday, April 1, 2004, the day Gmail launched.

Scuttlebutt that Google was about to offer a free email service had leaked out the day before. But the idea of the search kingpin doing email was still startling, and the alleged storage capacity of 1GB—500 times what Microsoft’s Hotmail offered—seemed downright implausible. So when Google issued a press release date-stamped April 1, an awful lot of people briefly took it to be a really good hoax. (Including me.)

Gmail turned out to be real, and revolutionary. And a decade’s worth of perspective only makes it look more momentous.

I still remember getting that Google press release and thinking, “This is the stupidest April Fool’s Day prank ever.”

Speaking as an amateur photographer, I think Allyson Kazmucha did a great job with this comparison. Looking at the pics, I don’t think the panoramas were a tie—the iPhone 5s won that.

“Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples,” the message said. “We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid.”

“What Google have done thus far, I wouldn’t be seen dead wearing. It really looks pretty stupid,” he said.

Indeed.

[Via Om]

Great news for China.

Johnny Cash is one of the best ever. I wish I could have met him.

This is so incredibly cool.

Steven Aquino:

So often, the tech commentariat — and a few of my Android-loving friends — disparage Apple for a perceived “lack” of innovation, arguing that Cupertino has failed to deliver to market anything truly innovative and revolutionary since introducing the original iPad in 2010.

The problem with exclusively tying innovation to hardware is that it misses, obviously, the innovation that can be made in terms of software. More specifically, I contend that an underrated aspect of Apple’s ability to innovate is the strides made by Apple’s Accessibility efforts, particularly on iOS.

What a great article.

VintageZen:

I’ve collected print ads from Apple, from their earliest days in the late 1970s to the present, which illuminate their continued focus on simplicity in design. In the first part of this two part series, I’ll look at Apple’s first twenty years of advertising.

We often think about Apple’s TV commercials when we talk about their advertising but for many years, it was all about print ads. How many of these do you remember?

Satya Nadella formally names Scott Guthrie as EVP of Cloud and Enterprise, Phil Spencer boss of all things Xbox, and Stephen Elop, former Nokia CEO, as EVP Microsoft Devices Group.

TechCrunch:

Late last night, a tweet was spread far and wide showing that a DMCA notice had blocked a file from being shared on a Dropbox user’s account.

What was going on? Was Dropbox suddenly doing something sketchy? Were they suddenly lurking around their users’ folders, digging for copyrighted material hiding amongst personal files?

Nope. The system is neither new, nor sketchy. It’s been in place for years.

You may have seen the original tweet fly around on the weekend. As is often the case, if you wait – rather than Chicken Little panic – someone comes up with a good explanation for the “offence”.

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This argument has been going on for a long time and I always find it interesting.

Eat24 is a food delivery service, with a pretty sizable following on Facebook. All that is about to change.

From the Eat24 blog:

Dear Facebook,

Hey. It’s Eat24. Look, we need to talk. This isn’t easy to say since we’ve been together so long, but we need to break up. We’d love to say “It’s not you, it’s us” but it’s totally you. Not to be rude, but you aren’t the smart, funny social network we fell in love with several years back. You’ve changed. A lot.

Eat24 spent years accumulating fans and likes on Facebook and is so upset with changes Facebook is making, they are deleting their entire Facebook presence.

From the linked re/code article:

The crux of the problem lies in a number of changes Facebook is making to its News Feed algorithms, according to recent reports, that when implemented will drastically reduce the number of people who will see a marketer’s posts.

Instead, it’s a way to shift marketers over to actually forking over cash to Facebook by paying to promote their posts to their thousands — or in some cases millions — of followers.

Both the blog post and the re/code article are fascinating reads. They each touch on the issue of Facebook being a huge battleship making a very slow change in direction, from accumulating followers to reaping revenue.

As with any major change, there will be breakage. If Facebook’s new algorithms and revenue model provide value, Facebook will succeed. If not, Facebook will either find a better path or will slowly fade in significance.

New York Times:

Some features in Samsung devices that Apple objects to are part of Google’s Android operating system, by far the most popular mobile operating system worldwide, running on more than a billion devices made by many manufacturers. That means that if Apple wins, Google could have to make changes to critical Android features, and Samsung and other Android phone makers might have to modify the software on their phones.

Given the incredible complexity of bringing a new Android OS to market, and the glacial adoption rates, this could be crushing. But I suspect the change will either be delayed to death, or be solved in a cross-licensing or financial arrangement.

On Thursday, April 3rd, Google will split their stock, creating two stocks, each of which will start at approximately half the current share value. I thought the logic behind the split was interesting.

Via Seeking Alpha (free reg-wall):

The current shares you see trading are Class A. For each Class A share, investors will receive a share of the new Class C stock. If you assume that the market works properly, each of these shares will trade for about $560 post split, based on Friday’s close of $1,120.15.

Class C shares will have no voting rights, which is why Google is doing this. With this move, the goal is to keep co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in control for a longer time period. The two own mostly Class B shares, which contain 10 times the voting power of Class A shares. A recent AP article states that the two own 56% of shareholder votes despite owning less than 15% of stock issued.

Once shares are split, Google can start using the Class C shares for compensation, acquisitions, and other dilutive items. Since these shares contain no voting power, Page and Brin won’t have their voting rights reduced as quickly as they would under the old system. At the end of 2013, according to the 10-K filing, Google had 335.832 million shares outstanding, of which 279.325 million were Class A, and 56.507 million were Class B.

Seems to me, the fact that there will be two different stock classes, one with voting rights and one without, will cause confusion in the market. Why would someone buy Class C shares when they could get Class A voting shares for the same price?The market will correct all this, I suspect, but still, if you have even the teeniest interest in the stock market, an upcoming learning experience.

She left behind a remarkable body of work — from her poignant diaries to her magnificent essays to her little-known children’s books to “the longest and most charming love letter in literature” — and a cohort of heartbroken friends, but the most stirring thing she left behind was her suicide letter to her husband Leonard.

Great timeline on the Strat. I would love to have one of the 60th anniversary models.

I don’t find this worrisome, since if someone wants access to a Tesla S, they’d find a way to break in. But I do find it interesting.

Tesla Motors Inc’s electric vehicles can be located and unlocked by criminals remotely simply by cracking a six-character password using traditional hacking techniques, according to newly released research.

It’s not like someone could take the car without the fob or stop the car while you are driving it. Both of those things would obviously be real issues for the owner.

Users are required to set up an account secured by a six-character password when they order the car. This password is used to unlock a mobile phone app and to gain access to the user’s online Tesla account.

The freely available mobile app can locate and unlock the car remotely, as well as control and monitor other functions. The password is vulnerable to several kinds of attacks similar to those used to gain access to a computer or online account, Dhanjani said.

An attacker might guess the password via a Tesla website, which Dhanjani says does not restrict the number of incorrect login attempts.

This wouldn’t stop me from buying a Tesla, but I do hope they give this problem some thought.

Online Sports Marketing Guy:

Have you ever wondered how much money you make compared to a Major League Baseball player? The interactive visualization can be used to compare your salary and the average US worker’s salary to any MLB player across several different statistics from the 2013 season.

Take my advise – do not do this. It’s way too depressing.

From FastCoDesign:

Next Thursday, Wikipedia will launch a redesign that’s almost impossibly large in scope, scaling across 32,533,899 pages in 287 languages. But admittedly, it’ll take a sharp eye to notice that font size is larger, or that the section headers will render in authoritative, old media serif (think Georgia) while body copy will render in streamlined sans-serif (think Helvetica).

This retooling is the tip of a very large iceberg:

Those bigger issue stem from a daunting problem: Wikipedia is 100% open source and free for the world to use. But there is no free and open typeface that can render in all of the world’s languages. For those of us in the Western world, it’s not much of a problem. We’re privileged, using operating systems like OS X that license fonts for us. Plus, our Latin-based scripts are represented in the vast majority of typefaces, while most written language is actually not Latin-based. Consider Chinese or Navajo.

Historically, this has created a design culture of the haves and the have nots, in which the look of Wikipedia was subject to the whims of whatever your software providers had already licensed. When rendering its pages in your browser, all Wikipedia would ask for was “sans-serif”–basically, give me anything you’ve got that’s sans-serif! As you might imagine, this has been a mess.

Whether you agree with the phrases “privileged” and “have and have nots”, the underlying problem is real and goes well beyond Wikipedia, to the core of the web and all manner of global publishing.

From the Harvard Business Review:

This isn’t your typical employee survey. Since we know that the way each employee experiences work is determined by innate characteristics (nature) and his or her surroundings (nurture), the gDNA survey collects information about both. Here’s how it works: a randomly selected and representative group of over 4,000 Googlers completes two in-depth surveys each year. The survey itself is built on scientifically validated questions and measurement scales. We ask about traits that are static, like personality; characteristics that change, like attitudes about culture, work projects, and co-workers; and how Googlers fit into the web of relationships around all of us. We then consider how all these factors interact, as well as with biographical characteristics like tenure, role and performance. Critically, participation is optional and confidential.

What do we hope to learn? In the short-term, how to improve wellbeing, how to cultivate better leaders, how to keep Googlers engaged for longer periods of time, how happiness impacts work and how work impacts happiness.

Interesting. There’s potential to help fine-tune work environments to make employees happier and, presumably, more productive. There’s a big brother aspect to this. Hopefully, the “Don’t be evil” motto is still in effect at Google.

Interestingly, the exclamation point at the end of the word is part of Jeopardy!’s official name. Here, see?

Jeopardy! will turn 50 this year and the version hosted by Alex Trebek will turn 30. Ken Jennings, one of the all time biggest winners on any game show ever, won more than $3 million on the show. In the linked post, Jennings interview the mother and creator of Jeopardy, Julann Griffin. Julan was married to Merv Griffin, who created Wheel of Fortune. Just saying.

My favorite bit:

Merv and I were coming back from my folks’ place in Ironwood, Michigan and we were going to our home in New York and he pulled out a paper with some clips and notes and things on it. And I said, “What is that, another game show?” and he said, “Yeah.” And I said, “I’m getting so tired of these game shows with people jumping around and doing pantomimes and acting like fools. What happened to the knowledge-based games?” And he said, “You know, since The $64,000 Question, the network won’t let you do those anymore, because they suspect you of giving them the answers.” So I said, “Why don’t you give them the answers and make people come up with the questions?” And he said. “Like what?” I said, “Okay, the answer is ’5,280.’” He said, “The question is ‘How many feet in a mile?’” I say, “The answer is ’52 Wistful Vista.’” He says, “The question is, ‘Where did Fibber McGee and Molly live?’” I don’t know if you know about Fibber McGee. Of course you do, you know everything. Fiber McGee and Molly was a radio show and they lived at 52 Wistful Vista and evey time they opened the closet everything fell out for about five minutes.

I said, “Okay, the answer is ‘Kathy Fiscus’?” and he said, “What is the name of the little girl that fell in the well in the 1940s?’” It was a big event because it was on radio and people stayed up and listened to see if she was being saved. She wasn’t, incidentally. But it was one of those stories of the little girl who fell in the well. So anythow, we kept going and I kept throwing him answers and he kept coming up with questions. And by the time we landed the plane, we had an idea for a show.