Wednesday 19 July 2017

Everyone Should Watch Tim Cook’s 2017 MIT Commencement Address


On June 9th 2017, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook took to the stage at MIT and addressed this years graduating class. Throughout the speech you can hear echoes to the address the late Steve Jobs gave to the Stanford class of 2005 but make no mistake this feels like it’s personal and coming from the heart and to me it was brilliant. I cannot recommend it enough. If you decide you don’t have time to listen then just take away this one line:

Measure your impact on humanity not in the likes, but the lives you touch; not in popularity, but in the people you serve. - Tim Cook 2017



Tim strikes the perfect balance between hope, caution and responsibility. Your role in this world is to find how you can best serve humanity. Don’t let the negative voices, no matter where they come from, divert you from doing what you believe to be right and don’t let yourself become one of those voices. Sticking to your values and making the world better for everyone is not easy and is not going to be easy. Embrace the challenge.

Technology can help us meet that challenge but technology itself does not care either way. It’s how we use it that allows technology to improve or destroy each others lives. Lets use it for the good of everyone not just the few.

Sunday 4 June 2017

WWDC 17 - XCode & Return Of IB #MassivePunt

There's no shortage of predictions and leaks around what Apple will announce at WWDC tomorrow. I'm going to add one more.

Since this is the developers conference and iPad seems to be getting a renewed focus I'm going to predict/hope for XCode on iOS. I don't expect something that's as powerful as the Mac version but I'm thinking a Swift code editor and potentially the return of Interface Builder. Being able to lay UI elements out on an actual iPhone and iPad screen would be fantastic. Checkout your code onto iPad, do some changes and submit it to your CI workflow for building etc would be very powerful.

Saturday 22 April 2017

A Little Time Travel Thought Experiment

During the Back to the Future (BTTF) anniversary celebrations there was a lot of talk about how accurately they represented time travel. The consensus seemed to be that travelling back and appearing at the same physical location but in a different time was how time travel would likely work. This is where I got thinking.
The universe is an ever moving beast. Nothing sits still and this leads to some pretty big problems. To start with the Earth rotates on its axis every ~24 hours, so our traveller would need to arrive at approximately the same time of day in the past. He’s worked out time travel so that’s not going to be hard to do.
Next, the Earth orbits the sun every ~365.25 days. This one is a little more of a problem. If our traveller is in the heat of June and has decided to travel back because he wants to see an Xmas in the past he’s got a problem. The Earth will be on the other side of the Sun. So Marty needs to travel back to roughly the same day each year? Fair enough I suppose but it gets worse.
The Solar System itself orbits a super massive black hole in the Galactic Centre. A Galactic (Cosmic) year last between 225–250 million terrestrial years. To put that in perspective, humans started walking the Earth about 0.001 Galactic years ago (thanks Wikipedia). If our traveller wants to go back and visit Middle Ages England then when he reappears the whole Solar System is in another location altogether and he’s in deep space. If he has to travel back in units of Galactic Years in order for Earth to be back to the same location in space, and ignoring the fact that the terrestrial year would have to line up with this exactly, then the first period he can go to is the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event. So Marty is going to find out what happened to the dinosaurs but getting run over by his grandfathers car is becoming less of a concern.
We’re not done yet though, and this is the deal-breaker. The galaxies themselves are moving through space with increasing speed and, so far as we can tell, not in an orbit of anything. So by the time the Earth and Solar System have completed their respective orbits the whole thing has moved off anyway!
So what’s my point? Well, firstly Doc Brown had actually created a machine that can traverse both space and time in an instant, so well done for that. And secondly I am genuinely wondering if trying to time travel is even worth the effort? My two cents, the human race are explorers so I'll say yes but just don’t expect to actually see very much when we do.
Originally posted to Medium on May 8th 2016.