EPIC 2015 →
Classic. I first saw this in college, but something recently reminded me of it. This was made in January 2005: Facebook wasn’t a year old, and the iPhone was still two years away.
life:
Stellar Spire
“Appearing like a winged fairy-tale creature poised on a pedestal, this object is actually a billowing tower of cold gas and dust rising from a stellar nursery called the Eagle Nebula. The soaring tower is 9.5 light-years or about 57 trillion miles high, about twice the distance from our Sun to the next nearest star. Stars in the Eagle Nebula are born in clouds of cold hydrogen gas that reside in chaotic neighborhoods, where energy from young stars sculpts fantasy-like landscapes in the gas.” — From hubblesite.org
It’s true that the iPad has been a smash hit, selling 3.3 million units in just a few months. But Amazon claims its plucky little Kindle is doing pretty well, too. Amazon won’t give out sales figures, but Forrester Research, a market-analysis firm, reckons Amazon will sell 3.5 million Kindles in the United States this year, bringing its total number in U.S. readers’ hands to 6 million by the end of 2010. Amazon claims Kindle sales have actually gone up since the iPad came out, partly because Amazon slashed the price of the device from $259 to $189. That price cut caused the growth rate of Kindle sales to triple. “I think what people are seeing is that we are focused on building an uncompromised reading experience, and customers love that,” says Steven Kessel, who helps run the Kindle business at Amazon. Kessel says people have realized that the iPad might be good for a lot of things, but isn’t really the best device for sustained reading over several hours. It’s too heavy, for one thing—about a pound and a half compared with 10 ounces for the Kindle, which can be held in one hand, like a paperback. As Kessel puts it, in a bit of an understatement, “The Kindle and the iPad are very different products.”
You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.
Die Antwoord, son. Free.
