Tag Archives: Wired

Motorola Has Resuscitated Print

Who says print has to be dead? At least for this one ad for the Moto X, print is alive and interactive.

With the help of paper-thin electronics, about a quarter of the readers of Wired in the San Francisco and New York City areas will be able to see the Moto X change colors within their magazine. This video announcement comes on the heels of the sale of 500,000 Moto X smartphones in the third quarter, which is about 5% of the sales that Samsung reported for their S4 handset in the first month after its’ release. Google clearly hopes this ad will drum up interest and support for their competing phone and increase sales for the coming quarter.

In any case, it’s an interesting ad with an interactive aspect and an creative innovation in a medium that hasn’t lately seen much.

What Sparks Our Fire: Innovation in what many see as a “dead” medium.

Would you buy this magazine for the purpose of experiencing this ad?

L Is For The Way You Look At Me

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Love is the driving force behind most of the things people do on a daily basis. Love is an attribute almost unique to human beings, who are the only species to have marriages, write sappy love poems, and stay together for years. This is a removal from other animals who, for the most part are not monogamous, and don’t often write sonnets for each other.

The question is: what makes human beings so special, so unique, that they need to fall in love and get married? The answer, quite simply, is bad wiring.  According to neuroscientist David Linden, the neurons that make up our brains are very similar to the original neurons that occurred in the first living beings, and are now seen in similar forms in jellyfish and coral. We make up for this by having large brains with a great deal of gray matter, which makes up for our lower-performance neurons and helps us to be what Linden calls “clever us“, intelligent humans.

Since the size of the brain is related to how intelligent the being is, it is necessary that the mature human have a large brain, about 500 billion neurons, 1200 cubic centimeters of matter. A human baby will have about 400 cc’s of gray matter in their brain, and even a brain a third the size of maturity is a struggles to be born. This is why human beings have a much longer adolescence than other mammals, to allow the brain to be fully developed, ending at age 20.

In pre-modern, hunter-gatherer society, it was necessary that the adolescent human be protected and kept alive so that it could reach adulthood. This quite simply could not be done with a single parent at that time. Helping a child to survive for 20 years could only be accomplished by both parents being present. Therefore, marriage-like arrangements sprang up in nearly every culture, with both parents understanding that it was their joint responsibility to raise a child together.

This is the neurological reason we fall in love and write ukelele songs for each other. We do it because our brains are wired like jellyfish and take 20 years to boot up.

What Starts Our Fire: Love, and the biological needs that drive our progress as a species.

Do you think that love as a concept is weakened or strengthened because of it’s basis in survival?