What I Learnt Today

MailPilot is a brand spanking new email client for Mac, and it is being launched today.

This is a limited release – if you would like to test it out you really need to act fast.

A Brief History of Mac Email clients.

For many years there was no good replacement on OSX for Apple Mail. Messages were acted upon and then either deleted to sorted into folders based on their subject matter. Inboxes grew huge and the amount of stored mail kept threatening the capacity of hard drives. Half your time was spent managing spam and spam filters. The other half was spent categorising mail into different folders. If you worked on a computer at home and work and also used an iPhone and iPad it was impossible to keep everything in sync – which messages have I replied to and what did I say?

Are you using Gmail to consolidate all your email accounts? If not, you should be. That is the first step in getting everything in sync.

Gmail has such a huge storage capacity that there is no need to delete old emails. You can access your account from anywhere and it remains all ‘joined up’. You can keep all your old email addresses, while still storing the mail on the gmail server.

Sparrow was the first mail client that took full advantage of gmails cloud-based features. It had a very different approach to managing email. Sparrow is a light client, in that most of the mail was stored on the Gmail server, but the experience of the user is as if it is all stored locally.

The interface of Sparrow encouraged you to pursue ‘Inbox Zero’. Achieve an empty Inbox by archiving each message as you act upon them. Don’t worry about deleting, categorising and folders – the messages are all stored on the gmail server and the gmail search engine is so good you can alway find what you want.

Sparrow was also available on iPhone and iPad. Their products were so good that last year they were bought out by Google and the Sparrow Apps went out of development. Many of the best Sparrow features are starting to appear in Gmails own apps.

In January this year, the app Mailbox was launched on iPhone and then on iPad. Mailbox understands that people use their Inbox as a giant todo list. It takes a ‘task orientated’ approach to your gmail. Each message is actioned – ‘completed’, ‘remind me tomorrow’, ‘remind me on a certain date’, ‘add to a list’. The Mailbox server takes care of moving messages back to your Inbox on the day you have specified.

The Mailbox launch was so huge that they had to ration access. I remember being 500,000th in the waiting list.

Mailbox has not yet launched a Mac desktop app.

Since Sparrow, I have been using the app Airmail as my preferred email client on the desktop. I really like it. It is fast, has good search functions, and has customisable themes. However, it doesn’t have some of the cool ‘task orientated’ features found in Mailbox.

Today there is a new contender in the Mac desktop email client market. MailPilot has been available on the iPhone and iPad for a few months. I’ve had the chance to test it out the desktop version for the last few days.

MailPilot also takes a ‘task orientated’ approach to your email.

It looks really good. The messages load quickly. The interface and keyboard shortcuts make it easier to get to the nirvana state of ‘Inbox Zero’.

The current beta release has some quirks, but I notice that each ‘build’ of the program is improving. In fact, a new build is downloading right now. Hopefully it will soon allow the use of ‘aliases’.

If you want to test it out, you should apply for a beta preview version today. I’d hate to see a loyal WILT reader be 500,000th in the queue.

What I Learnt On 4th December in other years

4th December 2011 Your experiencing self vs your remembering self

”I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.” Douglas Adams

TIm Minchin is a leading composer, lyricist, actor, writer and comedian. He is ‘spectacularly’ not a Nobel laureate, yet has been chosen to write the forward to the collection of ‘The Best Australian Science Writing 2013’.

He rejects the view that there is a conflict between art and science.

“I’ve only been to Portland once, but it’s a great city – its population a paragon of liberalism and artiness, sporting more tattoos than you could point a regretful laser at, and boasting perhaps a higher collective dye-to-hair ratio than anywhere on earth. Great music, great art, wonderful coffee … it’s my kind of town. Except, the residents recently voted – for the fourth time since the 1950s – against adding fluoride to the water supply. It’s as if a mermaid on one’s lower back is an impediment to sensible interpretation of data, or perhaps unkempt pink hair acts as a sort of dream catcher for conspiracy theories.”

“This apparent inverse correlation between artistic interest and scientific literacy seems to play out all over the world. Go to Byron Bay and you’ll find more painters and musos per capita than anywhere in the country, and – inevitably – a parallel glut of aura readers, homeopaths and anti-vaccination campaigners. There’s clearly no such thing as a free lunch: you want to listen to good blues, you have to have your palm read – and maybe get measles in the process.”

“Great science writing is the art of communicating that ”awe of understanding”, so that we readers can revel in the beauty of a deeper knowledge of our world.

If the entire volume is as good as the foreword, it will be a great read.

What I Learnt On 5th November in other years

5th November 2011 The Language of Love

Flight Attendant: Sir, I’m going to have to ask that you turn off your cellular phone.
Toby Ziegler: We’re flying in a Lockheed Eagle Series L-1011. Came off the line twenty months ago. Carries a Sim-5 transponder tracking system. And you’re telling me I can still flummox this thing with something I bought at Radio Shack?
—- 1.01: The Pilot.

Hooray! At last!

No longer do we risk bringing down a $300 million A380 and it’s 800 passengers by listening to Jack Johnson during take off.
It’s Soduku all the way to the terminal.

In a press release today the US FAA announced that it is safe to use our iPods, iPhones and iPads (or all at once) at all times during a flight. Currently, airlines insist that electronic devices are all turned off until 20 minutes after take off and for what seems like an eternity before landing. We can now reveal that this has always been a strategy to force us into reading their inflight magazines.

I accept the airlines’ apologies.

WASHINGTON– The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Administrator Michael Huerta today announced that the FAA has determined that airlines can safely expand passenger use of Portable Electronic Devices (PEDs) during all phases of flight, and is immediately providing the airlines with implementation guidance.

Ray Dalio is worth a cool $13 billion.

His investment company, Bridgewater Associates, is the world’s largest hedge fund, with $150 billion to look after.

He’s made his money by predicting big macroeconomic cycles. The New York Times says ‘he is one of the few investors to see the financial crisis of 2008 developing, and perhaps just as important, the rebound.’

Until now, his economic theories have been only known to those clients willing to invest with Bridgewater, paying the 2% management fees and 20% of profits.

But Mr Dalio has now decided to share his approach via a rather engaging cartoon on his new web site Economic Principles.

“While I kept it confidential until recently, I now want to share it because I believe that it could be very helpful in reducing big economic blunders, if it was more broadly understood,” he told the NY Times. He explained that, “I believe that most influential decision makers and most people cause a lot of needless economic suffering because they are missing the fundamentals.”

Even I could understand ‘How the Economic Machine Works in 30 minutes’. It should be piece of cake for someone who has a Macroeconomic exam next week (I’m looking at you, Oliver).

What I Learnt On 27th October in other years

27th October 2011 Crowdsourcing To Cure TB

Drats.

Millie has installed iOS7 on her iPod Touch before I installed it on my iPhone or iPad. Ouch.

Tomorrow marks the release of the new iPhones 5c and 5s.

You can still have that same ‘new car’ sensation without buying a new phone by installing iOS7 on your current iDevice. The new system was released today, and can be installed now on an iPhone4, iPod Touch 5, iPad2 or later releases of each.

To catch up to Millie and get with the program, you can start by

1 Updating iTunes on your Mac to 11.1. You do this by opening the Software Update (in the Apple menu) and installing the latest system update.

2. Backing up your iDevice in iTunes. (Plug your device in with a USB cable, select it in the sidebar and click update now. If you haven’t backed up for a while, you should slap yourself on the wrist.)

3. On that same screen for your iDevice in iTunes, select the Update software button. When asked, select download and install.

It is a large download, so unless you are on the NBN don’t start this just before you leave home in the morning.

More (perhaps) on iOS7 tomorrow, and (perhaps perhaps) a review of the new iPhone.

“My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel–it is, before all, to make you see.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Hat Tip – Stefahn

What I Learnt On 18th September in other years

18th September 2016 When is a Schooner not a Schooner? Beer glass sizes in Australia

18th September 2011 Wine Talking

Shhh. The 1200 people packed into the Sanders Theatre at Harvard University put down their paper airplanes and signal to each other to be quiet. The time has come. Five genuinely bemused, genuine Nobel Laureates are about to announce the 2013 Ig Nobel Prizes for science.

The Ig Nobels were first awarded by the magazine ‘Annals of Improbable Resaerch’ in 1991. This year’s 24th award ceremony took place last week, under the watchful eye of the official mascot of the Ig Nobel Prizes, ‘the Stinker’ (almost by Rodin).

Ten winners are chosen each year. The journal says that’the Ig Nobel Prizes honour achievements that first make people laugh, and then think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative – and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.’ I believe this is an overly generous interpretation of the criteria. Judging by past winners, it appears that the Ig Nobels are awarded to the scientists who undertake the silliest research. You be the judge.

Shh. The real Nobel Laureates are talking. The 2013 winners are…

Ig Noble Prize for Psychology

– for confirming, by experiment, that people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive. Who would have thought?
REFERENCE: “‘Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beer Holder’: People Who Think They Are Drunk Also Think They Are Attractive,” Laurent Bègue, Brad J. Bushman, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra, Medhi Ourabah, British Journal of Psychology, epub May 15, 2012.

Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine

– for assessing the effect of listening to opera, on heart transplant patients who are mice. Handy to know.
REFERENCE: “Auditory stimulation of opera music induced prolongation of murine cardiac allograft survival and maintained generation of regulatory CD4+CD25+ cells,” Masateru Uchiyama, Xiangyuan Jin, Qi Zhang, Toshihito Hirai, Atsushi Amano, Hisashi Bashuda and Masanori Niimi, Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery, vol. 7, no. 26, epub. March 23, 2012. – See more at: http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2013

Ig Nobel Prize for Safety Engineering,

awarded posthumously to Gustano Pizzo [USA], for inventing an electro-mechanical system to trap airplane hijackers — the system drops a hijacker through trap doors, seals him into a package, then drops the encapsulated hijacker through the airplane’s specially-installed bomb bay doors, whence he parachutes to earth, where police, having been alerted by radio, await his arrival. What could possibly go wrong.US Patent #3811643, Gustano A. Pizzo, “anti hijacking system for aircraft”, May 21, 1972.

Ig Nobel Prize for Physics
for discovering that some people would be physically capable of running across the surface of a pond — if those people and that pond were on the moon. Bear Grylls may need this information one day
REFERENCE: “Humans Running in Place on Water at Simulated Reduced Gravity,” Alberto E. Minetti, Yuri P. Ivanenko, Germana Cappellini, Nadia Dominici, Francesco Lacquaniti, PLoS ONE, vol. 7, no. 7, 2012, e37300.

Ig Nobel Prize for Probability
– for making two related discoveries: First, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and Second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again. They get back down, they get up again.
REFERENCE: “Are Cows More Likely to Lie Down the Longer They Stand?” Bert J. Tolkamp, Marie J. Haskell, Fritha M. Langford, David J. Roberts, Colin A. Morgan, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, vol. 124, nos. 1-2, 2010, pp. 1–10.

The other five winners are at the Improbable Research Site.

Are there any scientists you would like to nominate for the 2014 Ig Nobels?

What I Learnt On 17th September in other years

17th September 2011 Take a Nap! Change Your Life

Its about the journey, not the destination.

Alex, my eldest daughter, was exploring a rather rambling bookshop on the left bank of the Seine yesterday.

The bookshop was a tangle of small rooms, connected by steep staircases, and all overflowing with books. Out of a small door in one of the rooms came a rather eccentric young Paris madame. “Come in here. That’s right, in you come”, she said, and whisked Alex into one of the back rooms of the shop. To her surprise, Alex found herself part of a Sunday afternoon tea party.

Sylvia, for that was madame’s name, insisted that Alex read aloud what she had written to the assembled group. Alex protested that she didn’t have anything to read.

“Nonsense. Of course you do. Out with it”.

Sylvia was not to be denied. And she was right. Alex did have her journal in her bag, which she obediently read.

Was this a Mad Hatter’s tea party? Had she met the Red Queen?

‘Shakespeare and Company, a bookstore, was opened in Paris in 1919 by American Sylvia Beach (as you will see, not the same Sylvia that Alex met) It became a gathering place for expatriate writers, and in the 1920s became the epicenter of Anglo-American literary culture. It was frequented by Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald. James Joyce used it as his office. You could buy a book such as ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, too naughty for Britain, and Sylvia Beach herself published Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ in 1922 when he could not find another publisher.

In 1940, the bookshop fell victim to the German occupation (I guess English books weren’t welcomed by the Nazi’s). Sylvia was interned during the war, but managed to keep her books hidden.

In 1951, another expatriate American called George Whitman opened a bookstore at 37 rue de la Bucherie. It also became a focal point for literary culture in bohemian Paris, and was frequented by many Beat Generation writers, such as Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. When Sylvia Beach died in 1964, she left her books and the name ‘Shakespeare and Company’ to George. He must have been very grateful, because in tribute he named his shop after her shop, and later named his daughter after her. The store continues to operate in the same location, steps from the Seine, and a short walk from Notre Dame. Like its predecessor, it is a regular bookstore, a reading library, and a home for young writers. You’ll often find people curled up asleep in a corner of the shop, but if you are a writer and willing to work for a couple of hours a day you may be able to use one of the 13 beds. George said that over 40,000 people have slept in his shop over the years. He described the bookstore’s name as “a novel in three words”, and called the venture “a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore”.

George’s daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman, took over the running of ‘Shakespeare and Company’ in 2003. George died in 2011 at the age of 98. Sylvia runs the bookshop in the same style as her father. It was this Sylvia who gathered Alex into the Sunday afternoon writer’s tea. With genes like her fathers, she will be fostering the careers of young visiting writers for a long time yet.

You must call in and say ‘Bonjour’ when you are next in Paris. You’ll find ‘Shakespeare and Company’ just across the river from Notre Dame.

You never know, you may also fall down a rabbit hole into a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

What I Learnt On 16th September in other years

16th September 2011 60 Second Lecture: Down with Fractions