I thought I'd witnessed an impressive milestone in the annals of retail marketing Sunday when I came upon a BestBuy vending machine in Halifax's Stanfield Airport that dispenses iPads. Two hours later, in the Icelandair departure lounge at Boston's Logan Airport, Brookstone trumped BestBuy with its display of personal helicopter drones. For US$299, you can have your own Parrot AR Drone Quadricopter, equipped with two HD video cameras (one facing front and the other pointing earthward), all controlled by an app on your iPhone or iPad. Steve from the Brookstone store gave Balgovind Pande and me a demo: [Video link] Parrot claims battery life sufficient for...

Visa has released a new iPhone app that uses survey data to help parents calculate the going rate for tooth fairy emoluments, based on a parents' gender, age, income, location, and educational attainment. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal played with the app for a while and came up with in interesting discovery that doesn't really surprise me much: The smaller the amount I put in for household income, the greater the size of the average tooth fairy's gift. In fact, I was only able to get calculator to output $5 by setting my household income to $20k per year and selecting that my...

Brendan Chilcutt has created the Museum of Endangered Sounds, where you can revisit technological sounds of yesteryear: PacMan, a dot matrix printer, a dial telephone, and a 56K modem connecting over a phone line. It was that last example that caught the fancy of Atlantic Technology columnist Alexis Madrigal: Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It's the sound of a modem connecting with another modem across the repurposed telephone infrastructure. It was the noise of being part...

Two women in a canoe on Ireland's River Shannon stumble across one of nature’s greatest phenomena: a murmuration of starlings. Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo. H/T to The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal who writes: The starlings coordinated movements do not seem possible, but then there they are doing it. Scientists have been similarly fascinated by starling movement. Those synchronized dips and waves seem to hold secrets about perception and group dynamics. Last year, Italian theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi took on the challenge of explaining the murmuration. What he found, as ably explained by my old Wired colleague Brandon Keim, is that the math equations that...

The format of a standard business card is so inherently boring, it cries out for creative embellishment. In place of the usual 2x3-inch card, games inventer Will Wright (SimCity) hands out worthless paper currency stamped with his contact information. This bill, which Wright recently gave The Atlantic's technical editor Alexis Madrigal, happens to be from Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists. Fittingly, it features electrical pioneer Nikola Tesla. (That's the blurred-out stamp on the right-hand side.) Why didn't we think of that, dear reader? H/T: Alexis Madrigal...

The Internet has responded collaboratively to the lack of trust in official pronouncements about radiation levels in Japan. First, Shigeru Kobayashi aggregated geiger counter readings from around Japan. Then Haiyan Zhang, self-described interaction designer, technologist and maker of things, produced a Google maps mashup of Kobayashi's data. Click this image to view the actual interactive map. Alexis Madrigal comments: One of the key problems has been that people aren't sure whether to trust the official measurements, no matter how many of them there are. Today, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci addressed the issue of lack of trust in institutions in her essay, "If We Built...

That's what Atlantic tech blogger Alexis Madrigal calls Google's Books Ngram Viewer. Google has scanned about 10 percent of all the books ever published. Enter any word or phrase into the search box, and the viewer returns a graph of its frequency of appearance in books published over the last two centuries. Note that the searches are case sensitive, and you can compare the relative frequencies of up to four five different words or phrases, separating them by commas in the search box. Say, "Nova Scotia" and "Ontario," for example: Try it yourself, and please send me any interesting pairings you come up with. Madrigal's...

Alexis Madrigal, Atlantic's new tech blogger, poses the question this way: You hop onto a parent's computer to check your email or do a little work. But, to your dismay, the only browser available is Internet Explorer and (for whatever reason) you don't like Internet Explorer. You download Firefox (or Chrome), then install and launch it. Firefox (or Chrome) then asks whether you want to make it your (Mom's) default browser. Of course you do! But should you really make this decision for Mom? Yes, says Madrigal, quoting a mashup of Tweeted responses: "It's our responsibility to help our parents figure out technology"...