This is great, I love it.

Mashable:

The Calgary Hitmen held their 20th annual Teddy Bear Toss on Sunday, which allowed fans to throw 25,214 stuffed animals onto the ice in a heartwarming and entertaining display of charity.

The bears, which are bagged prior to tossing, are gathered up by the team and donated to more than 60 charities for the holiday season.

The Hitmen do this every year and it’s heartwarming and funny every time I see it.

Darrell asked Eddie to make him a replica of his famous black and yellow striped guitar a few months before he died.

When Van Halen arrived at the viewing, he had the guitar, but it wasn’t what Rita expected. He brought his original 1979 Bumblebee Charvel Hybrid VH2 to be placed inside Dimebag’s casket and buried along with him.

Much respect to Dime and Eddie.

Andy Ihnatko had the chance to visit the war room at NASA Goddard’s space weather lab. Take a look at this picture he snapped of what he calls “the single greatest browser tab ever rendered”. These three screens are processing a tremendous amount of data, all driven by a single Mac.

The funny thing is that these three huge HD screens, put together, have fewer than half of the 14.7 million pixels of the Retina iMac.

That’s astonishing.

Austin Mann is a noted iPhone photographer. You can check out his work here.

Mann put his experience to work to build a list of gifts for the iPhone photographer in your life.

Back in October, Jean-Claude Biver, president of LVMH’s watch division (makers of high end brands such as TAG Heuer and Hublot), had this to say about the Apple Watch:

“A smartwatch is very difficult for us because it is contradictory,” said Mr. Biver. “Luxury is supposed to be eternal … How do you justify a $2,000 smart watch whose technology will become obsolete in two years?” he added, waving his iPhone 6.

Jean-Louis Gassée, writing for Monday Note:

At the medium to low end, the impact of Moore’s law was nearly lethal. Smartphone cameras have become both so good and so convenient…that they have displaced almost all other consumer picture taking devices.

And:

The biggest question is, of course, Moore’s Law. Smartphone users have no problem upgrading every two years to new models that offer enticing improvements, but part of that ease is afforded by carrier subsidies (and the carriers play the subsidy game well, despite their disingenuous whining).

There’s no carrier subsidy for the AppleWatch. That could be a problem when Moore’s Law makes the $5K high-end model obsolete. (Expert Apple observer John Gruber has wondered if Apple could just update the watch processor or offer a trade-in — that would be novel.)

We’ll see how all of this plays out with regard to sales. I’ll venture that the first million or so AppleWatches will sell easily. I’ll certainly buy one, the entry-level Sports model with the anodized aluminum case and elastomer band. If I like it, I’ll even consider the more expensive version with a steel case and ingenious Marc Newson link bracelet — reselling my original purchase should be easy enough.

Regardless of the actual sales, first-week numbers won’t matter. It’s what happens after that that matters.

I have a different set of expectations for a watch than I do for my iPhone. Fair or not, I expect my watch to last forever, or until it breaks beyond a reasonable cost of repair. I think it is key that Apple find a way to keep my first generation Apple Watch usable longer than my first generation iPhone. Perhaps that’s just old school thinking.

The New Yorker:

High oil prices would force governments, corporations, and consumers to find another way to power the world. It was a nice dream, but it’s over now. We are awash in cheap oil. Propelled largely by a boom in domestic production, due to hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,’’ and horizontal drilling, oil prices fell below $70 a barrel on Thursday—from a high in June of $112.12. Prices have fallen nearly every day for the past two months, and some economists predict that we will soon see oil selling for less than fifty dollars a barrel.

Domestic production isn’t the only reason prices are falling but it’s certainly true that cheaper oil just delays the inevitable.

Peter King:

The sight of players going into contact without helmets is jarring to observers accustomed to standard football drills. Players dive at tackling dummies, or push into blocking sleds, or wrap up a live runner without helmets. Their heads are bare, and so by instinct, they don’t lead with their heads.

“At first, tackling without a helmet doesn’t seem like the best idea, with the size of the guys we have around here,” says Cameron Shorey, a 6-5, 252-pound sophomore defensive end. “But when we started doing it, it made more sense to keep our heads out of the contact zone. We use our chests, use our legs, and absorb most of the force with our bodies, not our heads.”

I love football – I played it in high school – but I definitely believe we have to find ways to make it safer for the players’ brains.

Ever hear of Bill Fernandez? Maybe not, but his importance to Apple’s early success is undeniable. And it makes for a great Sunday read.

“When Woz designed something, most of the design was in his head,” said Fernandez. “The only documentation he needed was a few pages of notes and sketches to remind him of the overall architecture and any tricky parts. What the company needed was a complete schematic showing all the components and exactly how they were wired together.”

This is where Bill Fernandez comes in. This is his story.

This is for math geeks and musicians. From Scientific American:

When we tune an instrument, we would like for all our octaves and fifths to be perfect. One way to tune an instrument would be to start with a pitch and start working out the fifths above and below it it. We start with some frequency that we call C. Then 3/2 times that frequency is G, 9/4 times that frequency is D (an octave and a step above our original C), and so on. If you learned about the “circle of fifths” at some point in your musical life, then you know that if we keep going up by fifths, we’ll eventually land back on something we’d like to call C.

The same is true with circle of fourths. You should, logically, end up where you started, albeit an integer number of octaves higher or lower. But sadly, the math doesn’t work, and you end up tweaking those tunings to create perfect octaves. Read the article to follow the math. It’s enlightening.

My thanks to Algoriddim for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. Algoriddim, creators of the world’s best selling DJ app with over 15 million downloads on iOS, has partnered with the AppStore and (RED) to bring you an exclusive (PRODUCT)RED version of djay. Available for a limited time only, djay 2 for iPhone and iPad contains a free (djay)RED skin as well as an exclusive (djay)RED sample pack available via In-App Purchase. From now through December 7, 100% of the proceeds when buying djay 2 or any of the (djay)RED In-App Purchases go to (RED)’s fight against AIDS.

Stand with Algoriddim, App Store, and (RED) to fight for an AIDS FREE GENERATION.

Get djay 2 on the App Store today: Mix Tracks. Save Lives.

Photofocus:

The folks at Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has produced a (free) comic book that explains copyright in both a clear and interesting way. Learn about the delicate balance between intellectual property and the public domain – the realm of material that is free to use without permission or payment.

Every “content creator” should understand the basics of copyright and this comic book is a clever and visually interesting way to do it.

Wired:

At a space shuttle launch, a front row seat is 3 miles away. If you want to get closer, you have two options: Be an astronaut, or be a camera. Photographer Dan Winters got a rare chance to explore the second option.

In 2011, after NASA announced it would be ending the shuttle program, Winters received permission to document the final launches of the space shuttles Discovery, Endeavor and Atlantis. He’s compiled that work in the book Last Launch. A shuttle launch is a violent event, yet Winters captured them with the same stunning intimacy found in his portraits. And while he had unparalleled access to make that happen, the logistics were tremendous. At WIRED by Design, the photographer explained how he got the shots.

Both the above video and the Wired article are fascinating looks at both the technical and emotional side of photographing these last moments of history.

This is Colossal:

The game units have been designed and approved for use by the city of Hildesheim, Germany where they were installed two weeks ago. Rebranded as the ActiWait, the devices aren’t just a clever way to pass the time while waiting for cars, hopefully they disuade impatient pedestrians from darting through traffic.

Who said Germans don’t have a sense of humour and fun?

Six Colors:

Apple’s getting its lunch eaten by competitors, and the hits just keep on coming. The most recent numbers have Google’s Chromecast and Amazon’s Fire TV pulling ahead of Apple’s set-top box, and you know what? They should be. Right now, they’re better products: they have support for more services, they have more flexibility, and they’re cheaper.

The Apple TV, on the other hand, hasn’t gotten a meaningful upgrade since 2010.

He’s not wrong. I used to recommend the Apple TV wholeheartedly but it’s far too long in the tooth now.

Have you ever walked by a restaurant and seen various dishes in the window, designed to give you a visual sense of the menu? Now imagine that hyper-realistic fake food as a necklace, earrings, hair clip, etc.

Just go to the web page. The default language is Japanese, but there’s a language popup menu in the upper left corner that will run everything through Google Translate.

I will be ordering some of these things for my secret Santa gifts.

This is a thoughtful, non-judgmental analysis of the design of Apple Maps and Google Maps, running on iOS.

Millions of people have done 3rd party application design. If you expand the pool to people who have sketched out app ideas, the number is probably closer to tens of millions. But how many people have designed 1st party apps? Ones that come on the device rather than being a download? I’d wager the number is less than a thousand.

To count this number, you count Google, Apple, Microsoft, plus companies like Blackberry and Samsung, each with their own design teams. And even at large companies, the design teams aren’t very large. No where near as large as the engineer corps. There’s just not that many of us. And as someone who’s been in this tiny club, let me tell you, it’s absolutely nuts.

See, as a first party designer, you don’t get to do whatever you want. Because everything you do is imitated (whether explicitly or implicitly) by potentially millions of other designers and developers. And you need apps on your platform to be coherent and follow certain rules of the road.

Fantastic read.

From Reuters. Fair warning – these are news shots and some are very graphic and disturbing but all are powerful.

TidBITS:

OS X 10.10.1 Yosemite has been out for a bit now and while it is working fine for many people, there are still a variety of complaints making the rounds on the Internet. Here then is a collection of five problems and solutions (or at least workarounds) that we’ve either experienced or had reported to us.

Not all of these will be applicable to everyone but some might help speed things up for you.

Popular Mechanics:

What a lovely video. What a delicate and sentimental homage to an elder statesmen of the land speed wars. What a beautiful, pastoral day, perfect for rolling out a… What uh…. What are they doing with the…. DEAR LORD. IT RUNS.

It’s called “The Beast of Turin” and it looks and sounds like the car Satan would drive. Thanks very much to Glenn Ramsey for the link.

Priceonomics:

To counterbalance its simplicity, the Slinky has an utterly complex backstory. The toy has dealt with a slew of uncanny circumstances — an inventor who fled to South America to join a religious cult, a seven-figure debt, a mind-boggling reemergence under unlikely leadership — and has somehow managed to persevere with very little redesign.

I don’t know how popular the Slinky is outside of Canada and the US but is there anyone who didn’t get one of these for a gift at some point? And how long did it take you (or your rotten little brothers) to break it?

Dan Frakes:

A couple months back, I tweeted that the iOS 8 share-sheet extension I really wanted was one that would let me send myself an email—in other words, to share the current thing via email, but to have the resulting email message pre-addressed to me.

Like Dan, I do this frequently on iOS and have been using and liking this little extension.

Time’s Lev Grossman, writing about Mark Zuckerberg’s relentless quest to get every human on the planet online and on Facebook:

The story of Facebook’s first decade was one of relentless, rapacious growth, from a dorm-room side project to a global service with 8,000 employees and 1.35 billion users, on whose unprotesting backs Zuckerberg has built an advertising engine that generated $7.87 billion last year, a billion and a half of it profit. Lately, Zuckerberg has been thinking about what the story of Facebook’s second decade should be and what most becomes the leader of a social entity that, if it were a country, would be the second most populous in the world, only slightly smaller than China.

This is an enjoyable, educational read. We get a sense of the current incarnation of Mark Zuckerberg and we get to know a bit about Facebook, the company.

When you walk into Facebook’s headquarters for the first time, the overwhelming impression you get is of raw, unbridled plenitude. There are bowls overflowing with free candy and fridges crammed with free Diet Coke and bins full of free Kind bars. They don’t have horns with fruits and vegetables spilling out of them, but they might as well.

The campus is built around a sun-drenched courtyard crisscrossed by well-groomed employees strolling and laughing and wheeling bikes. Those Facebookies who aren’t strolling and laughing and wheeling are bent over desks in open-plan office areas, looking ungodly busy with some exciting, impossibly hard task that they’re probably being paid a ton of money to perform. Arranged around the courtyard (where the word hack appears in giant letters, clearly readable on Google Earth if not from actual outer space) are restaurants — Lightning Bolt’s Smoke Shack, Teddy’s Nacho Royale, Big Tony’s Pizzeria — that seem like normal restaurants right up until you try to pay, when you realize they don’t accept money. Neither does the barbershop or the dry cleaner or the ice cream shop. It’s all free.

This sounds very much like Google’s approach, provide food and basic services so employees can spend more time focused on the job at hand.

My favorite:

Because of the limits of space and time, a lot of Silicon Valley companies don’t build new headquarters; they just take over the discarded offices of older firms, like hermit crabs. Facebook’s headquarters used to belong to Sun Microsystems, a onetime power-house of innovation that collapsed and was acquired by Oracle in 2009. When Facebook moved in, Zuckerberg made over the whole place, but he didn’t change the sign out front, he just turned it around and put Facebook on the other side. The old sign remains as a reminder of what happens when you take your eye off the ball.

Lots more to this, well worth the read.

Kirk McElhearn put up a page with a single question survey. If you would, please take a minute to click over to this page and answer the question. Once the results are known, Kirk will post them and so will we. Thanks.

Nice!

BBC:

Lawyers for Apple have raised a last-minute challenge saying new evidence suggested that the two women named as plaintiffs may not have purchased iPod models covered by the lawsuit.

The lawsuit covers iPods purchased between September 2006 and March 2009.

And:

But after lead plaintiff Marianna Rosen testified on Wednesday, Apple lawyers checked the serial number on her iPod Touch and found it was purchased in July 2009.

The other main plaintiff, Melanie Wilson, also bough iPods outside the relevant timeframe, they indicated.

“I am concerned that I don’t have a plaintiff. That’s a problem,” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said at the end of the trial’s third day of testimony in Oakland, California.

Are you kidding me? What a show of ineptitude, as well as an incredible waste of time and money. If this wasn’t such a travesty, it’d be comedic.

Question is, will they be able to regroup with different plaintiffs who do have iPods bought at the right time?