April 2019
This newsletter is a collection of things I have found in the last month that I enjoyed, found interesting, or simply wanted to share.
You can follow me more closely at my personal website or if you or someone you know is looking to buy or sell a home, you can point them to my real estate website.
M68
An Exclusive Look at an Original iPhone Prototype
Apple had developed the iPhone in secret over those two and a half years, and for many inside the company, the device had only been known by the codenames “M68” and “Purple 2.” Apple was focused on surprising everyone with the iPhone, and that meant that many of the engineers working on the original handset didn’t even know what it would eventually look like.
To achieve that level of secrecy, Apple created special prototype development boards that contained nearly all of the iPhone’s parts, spread out across a large circuit board. The Verge has obtained exclusive access to the original iPhone M68 prototype board from 2006 / 2007, thanks to Red M Sixty, a source that asked to remain anonymous. It’s the first time this board has been pictured publicly, and it provides a rare historical look at an important part of computing history, showing how Apple developed the original iPhone.
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Summarized:
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Set a timer to count down 52! seconds (that’s 8.0658x1067 seconds).
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Stand on the equator, and take a step forward every billion years.
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When you’ve circled the earth once, take a drop of water from the Pacific Ocean, and repeat.
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When the Pacific Ocean is empty, lay a sheet of paper down, refill the ocean and carry on.
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When your stack of paper reaches the sun, take a look at the timer.
The 3 left-most digits won’t have changed. 8.063x1067 seconds left to go.
- Repeat the whole process 1000 times to get 1/3 of the way through that time.
5.385x1067 seconds left to go. To kill that time you try something else.
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Shuffle a deck of cards, deal yourself 5 card poker hand every billion years.
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Each time you get a royal flush, buy a lottery ticket.
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Each time that ticket wins the jackpot, throw a grain of sand in the grand canyon
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When the grand canyon’s full, take 1oz of rock off Mount Everest. Empty the canyon and start over again.
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When Everest has been leveled, check the timer.
There’s barely any change. 5.364x1067 seconds.
The timer would run out sometime during your 255th time through the process.
Feeding the Algorithm
The Internet Knows You Better Than Your Spouse Does
Then the investigators had the program examine the likes of other Facebook users. If the software had as few as 10 [likes] for analysis, it was able to evaluate that person about as well as a co-worker did. Given 70 likes, the algorithm was about as accurate as a friend. With 300 [likes], it was more successful than the person’s spouse. Even more astonishing to the researchers, feeding likes into their program enabled them to predict whether someone suffered from depression or took drugs and even to infer what the individual studied in school.
Links
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Thanks for reading. Have a great month,
Clay
How kind of you to make your way down here.
A bit about me: I can be interested in anything, for better or worse. I love photography, travel, golf, and baseball. My latest pursuit is learning the guitar. I write a rad newsletter that I publish monthly.