Like all questions in life, the answer is "it depends". It depends at which point in their respective orbits you measure. Furthermore, as CGP Grey points out, the diameter of a planet's orbit has a huge impact on its relative distance to other planets. And for this reason one should ask not which plant is closest to Earth, rather which planet is on average most closest to Earth.

Today, there are more ways to keep our data safe and private than ever before. From password managers, to multi-factor authentication, to encryption everywhere, to bio-metrics authentication, to VPNs, to encrypted DNS. And yet, as the ways to keep your data safe increase or become more easily accessible, so do the ways in which we more freely give that very data away. Though voice assistants are nothing new, their popularity has grown exponentially in the past couple of years. It makes sense. As the world becomes ever more...

The latest version of MacOS, Catalina, and iPadOS, 13.x, now allow you to natively extend the display of your computer unto your iPad for free. In the past, I had used paid software to do this. And while the software worked pretty well, native solutions generally work more smoothly. If you are like me, you can never have enough display real estate. I have a 13in MBP and have it maxed out on screen resolution and I still could use more real estate. I have been using my...

Recently I had to get my MacBook pro repaired. I made the rookie error of placing pieces of paper between the screen and keyboard, and closed it. When I got home I realized I had made a huge mistake. The pieces of paper were stapled. And I just happened to have placed the staple at the base of the hinge, where most of the torque would be applied upon closing. You guessed it right; the staple became a fulcrum that punched through the screen and cracked it. I...

#snowden #privacy #newera Edward Snowden is back in the news. Snowden is promoting a new book, Permanent Record. In the book, a memoir, he goes on to provide a more in-depth record of what happened. This is not a book review, rather a look at how things have changed, if at all, since his revelations, back in 2013. I have been working in technology for a long time, circa 2001. I got my first computer back in the early 90s, during the Prodigy and AOL days. I still...

#science #reflection #mirrors #honeycomb Have you ever looked closely at a bicycle reflector? If you have, you will have seen the honeycomb pattern deep inside. What you are seeing is less honeycomb and more a stitching of multiple reflecting surfaces at a right-angle to each other. Mirrors are a great reflecting surface. When you shine a light to them, the light will reflect at an angle directly opposite, this is known as the law of reflection. For example, in this diagram, P is the light being projected onto...

#libra #stablecoin #potentialforcatastrophe #potentialforgood Yesterday, an association of 28 companies, most notably Facebook, Mastercard, Visa, Uber, Lyft, eBay, Vodafone, Coinbase, and Kiva, released a whitepaper for a new cryptocurrency called Libra (oddly enough, that translates to pound in Spanish). The goal of this cryptocurrency, according to the whitepaper, is to facilitate payments between the billions of people that are unbanked in the world. While banking is not a new concept for most people in developed countries, in the rest of the world, it can be either too expensive...

Smartphones have most definitely changed the way we communicate with each other. This revolution in communications began not with Smartphones or the iPhone, but with the internet and computers. Already, back in the late 90s, in the era of instant messenger and the early days of VoIP technology, distances across the globe became obsolete. Communicating with a friend across the street, or on the other side of the world, happened at the speed of light. In the 90s and early 2000s, the communications revolution belonged to wealthy countries....

If you said Lithium, which has half the density of water, you'd be wrong. The answer is graphene aerogel, which holds the world record as the least dense solid.

It has become almost a non-issue these days for large companies to announce a security breach that resulted in bad actors obtaining customer data. And in almost all cases, the data obtained by the bad actors is user-identifiable data such as email address and passwords. Today, Flipboard announced they were hacked since the middle of 2018 until recently. Findings from the investigation indicate an unauthorized person accessed and potentially obtained copies of certain databases containing Flipboard user information between June 2, 2018 and March 23, 2019 and April...