Signals

It’s a paradox, that’s what it is. Technology, by nature, charges forward. Its unstated goal is to obsolete itself as fast as possible. If you’re into technology, the only real place to be is on the cutting edge. You must be an early adopter, own the latest and greatest, and camp overnight at the Apple Store. The paradox is that if you are one of those people, you might be envied, or even admired. But you are not cool.

It has become trendy to bash corporations. And in some cases, if a corporation is big enough and faceless, it's easy to suppose that it's merely a shareholder profit machine that is uninterested in the needs of individuals. But of course many companies certainly do not fit that profile. Instead, you'll find that many small and medium size companies take a very different view of their role in society and, in many case, are family-run businesses. Case in point: Sennheiser and the Sennheiser brothers.

Late one night, unable to sleep, you fire up your short-wave radio and aimlessly tune across the dial. Broadcasts from close by and from distant lands, in English and in languages very much not English. Then you come across something unusual — a radio station with a voice endlessly repeating a series of seemingly random numbers. Congratulations. You have stumbled into the strange world of numbers stations.

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a potentially serious blow to Apple. The justices decided that a consumer group could move forward with its class-action antitrust suit against Apple. An unfavorable decision in that case could cost Apple hundreds of millions of dollars, upend the apps marketplace, and even rewrite the economics of streaming music.

“For a number of years now, work has been proceeding in order to bring perfection to the crudely conceived idea of a machine that would not only supply inverse reactive current for use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters. Such a machine is the Turbo-Encabulator.”