Linked List: March 6, 2015

Friday, 6 March 2015

Astronomers Watch a Supernova and See Reruns 

Dennis Overbye, writing for the NYT:

It’s “Groundhog Day” in the cosmos.

In the 1993 Bill Murray movie, a weatherman finds himself reliving the same day over and over again. Now astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope say they have been watching the same star blow itself to smithereens in a supernova explosion over and over again, thanks to a trick of Einsteinian optics.

The star exploded more than nine billion years ago on the other side of the universe, too far for even the Hubble to see without special help from the cosmos. In this case, however, light rays from the star have been bent and magnified by the gravity of an intervening cluster of galaxies so that multiple images of it appear.

What’s wild is that the images can appear decades apart. Don’t skip the accompanying video — it’s great.

The Financial Times Profiles Jony Ive 

Jony Ive’s media tour continues, this time with a profile by Nick Foulkes for The Financial Times:

However, it was not without some trepidation that he embarked on the watch. “It was different with the phone — all of us working on the first iPhone were driven by an absolute disdain for the cellphones we were using at the time. That’s not the case here. We’re a group of people who love our watches. So we’re working on something, yet have a high regard for what currently exists.”

That’s a very interesting difference.

‘The Apple Watch Is Time, Saved’ 

Matthew Panzarino:

People that have worn the Watch say that they take their phones out of their pockets far, far less than they used to. A simple tap to reply or glance on the wrist or dictation is a massively different interaction model than pulling out an iPhone, unlocking it and being pulled into its merciless vortex of attention suck.

One user told me that they nearly “stopped” using their phone during the day; they used to have it out and now they don’t, period. That’s insane when you think about how much the blue glow of smartphone screens has dominated our social interactions over the past decade.

Great piece. I’ve been hearing similar things about Watch wearers using their iPhones far fewer times per day.

Apple, Music Labels Push Against Free Music on Spotify, YouTube 

Peter Kafka, writing for Recode:

Apple executives have been telling the music industry it can help them roll back the tide of free digital music by relaunching its own subscription streaming service this year. Unlike Spotify and YouTube, Apple’s service won’t offer a free “tier” of music interspersed with ads — after an initial trial period, you’ll need to pay to play.

Apple executives, led by media head Eddy Cue and Beats Music founder Jimmy Iovine, have been arguing that the music business “needs to get behind a paywall,” say people who have talked to them. Apple bought Beats last year, partly to help it gain a foothold on streaming music just as iTunes sales of digital downloads had started to drop.

Apple to Replace AT&T in the Dow Jones Industrial Average 

The Dow is a stupid index — a poor investment and an inaccurate gauge of the market as a whole, due to the arbitrary nature of its membership, and its bizarre use of price-based indexing. The S&P 500 is better in both regards. But it does seem somewhat poetic that Apple is taking AT&T’s spot in the index — Apple’s decade of amazing growth is built on the iPhone, and the iPhone came to market through a groundbreaking exclusivity deal with AT&T.

To be clear, I think AT&T did well through that agreement — the iPhone helped them narrow Verizon’s lead here in the U.S. But what’s telling is the way Apple turned the tables and maintained control over everything: handset design, software design, software updates, the App Store, pricing.