Work day = Link dump.
- More trouble for Apple? Last year a company called Proview won a case in a Chinese mainland court against Apple alleging ownership of the name “iPad”; it has been appealed by Apple. In the meantime, Proview is asking customs to block all iPad exports and imports to and from China. Apparently a huge portion of iPads are built in China.
“Local media reports said that several dozen iPads were taken from shelves in the city of Shijiazhuang just south of Beijing. In a statement Apple said: “We bought Proview’s worldwide rights to the iPad trademark in 10 different countries several years ago. Proview refuses to honour their agreement with Apple in China and a Hong Kong court has sided with Apple in this matter. Our case is still pending in mainland China.”
While this dispute continues, it is widely anticipated that Apple will announce the launch of the next version of the iPad in March. The speculation has not been confirmed by Apple. The company is notoriously close-lipped about future releases.”
- The Hadron collider at CERN will run experiments at an even faster rate this year, in preparation for a temporary shut-down.
“The LHC’s excellent performance in 2010 and 2011 has brought tantalising hints of new physics, notably narrowing the range of masses available to the Higgs particle to a window of just 16 GeV. Within this window, both the ATLAS and CMS experiments have seen hints that a Higgs might exist in the mass range 124-126 GeV. However, to turn those hints into a discovery, or to rule out the Standard Model Higgs particle altogether, requires one more year’s worth of data. The LHC is scheduled to enter a long technical stop at the end of this year to prepare for running at its full design energy of around 7 TeV per beam.”
- To win “Best New Artist” at the Grammys, shouldn’t the album you’re winning for have to be your debut album? Also, what the fuck? Kanye won “Best Rap Album” for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy?? That shit came out November 22nd, 2010. Unless I’m reading this Forbes list of 2012 Grammy winners wrong? It’s not even about how they pick terrible music… it’s about the fact that they can’t even get simple things like what a “new” artist is or when a goddamn album actually came out. Why does anyone care about the Grammys?
- Relatedly, two people I’m incredibly sick of: Adele and Jeremy Lin.
- An economist arguing that bigger (growth) maybe isn’t better:
“What is growth? Is it a temporary process to arrive at a state that we will then want to maintain? Or is growth a process which is itself desirable and is supposed to go on forever? Right now nobody defines a state of sufficiency. For example, in a recent growth report financed by the World Bank, experts took great hope from the fact that several countries had managed to grow at 7 percent for 25 years. Their goal—7 percent growth for another 25 years—will lead to a quintupling of the global economy and all that flows into it. And come 2033, will we be satisfied, or will the goalposts move once again? The idea of steady-state economics is that growth really should be a temporary process to arrive at some level of sufficiency.”
-Sonny
