Wishing you a healthy and happy 2017
Miami sunset last night. Photo by Eliot Hess
Outside My Front Door 🚪
iPhone photos by me
Lance is an editor at Mashable, a tech site.
In Memoriam 2016: Remembering the Famous Figures the World Lost. Click here
Image: Google
Jeff Chiang, product manager of Google watches, told the Verge, a tech site, “We are working with our partner OEM on flagship watches for Android Wear 2.0. The devices will be known by the partner’s name, rather than Google’s.
Read all about it in the Verge.
My 50th Anniversary
This is one of Eliot’s favorite apps. He uses Skyview to help him find stars or constellations in the sky. Eliot just opens the SkyView app and points it to the sky. It’s as easy as that. Have fun!
The sales reports are in. Amazon had its best season yet. Five times better than last year. The online retailer shipped over 1 billion items for the holidays. Echo devices were the most popular. Prime customers dominated the sales records .
Amazon claims they couldn’t keep Echo devices in stock. Americans will be yelling “Alexa” more than “mommy” or “daddy” over the next year or so, according to Amazon. December 23 was the biggest day for Prime customers. Amazon also figured out that Americans were purchasing approximately 46 electronics per second on their mobile device on Cyber Monday. Woohoo!
Retail is surely changing.
Next subject
My favorite movies, in the order that I love them.
Getting Ready For CES
From A Facebook Friend
You may not believe this but it’s just a matter of time that some of our children, or grandchildren, will take a robot as a life partner. In fact, at the recent Love and Sex with Robots conference in London, industry experts predicted that human-robot marriages will become commonplace by 2050.
You can read all about it here.The New York Post just did a story about this. While many of us consider The New York Post to be a rag, they do have unique and bizarre stories that eventually come true.
Make sure you watch the video too.
My cousin Allan spent the week in Israel with his two grandsons. I had the pleasure of watching their terrific journey together.
Happy Holidays To All
It’s a good thing that Eliot keeps his cameras ready on his desk for any action that happens outside our windows. He has captured fires, car accidents, new cruise liners, low-flying sea planes, and boating accidents. Tonight without warning, we had a magnificent fireworks display.
We see a multitude of fireworks every New Year’s Eve and Fourth of July. Tonight was different. Someone planted a barge right in Biscayne Bay next to the MacArthur Causeway to produce a private celebration. It was spectacular. We have no idea what the celebration was for, but we enjoyed the spontaneous show. Thank you, whoever you are.
Warning: The above video could cause you to faint or vomit. If you don’t like the sight of blood, don’t open the video.
I squinted my way through it. I watched because I didn’t want to miss the first time a surgeon used a pair of Snapchat’s Spectacles to record his procedure.
As a reminder, Snapchat’s Spectacles are sunglasses fitted with a camera that records 10-second clips that are uploaded to personal Snapchat accounts.
Dr. Shafi Ahmed, a hernia repair surgeon at the London Independent Hospital, used his Snapchat account to share a series of video clips that formed a tutorial for medical students.
Dr. Ahmed, said, “It’s about using the tools we have, from smartphones to Facebook, to push the boundaries and reach more people than ever before. The Snapchat platform is really interesting because it mimics who we are. We see things, we forget about them. Some goes into our long-term memory, but most of it, 95% of it, is all short-term.”
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Approximately, 150 to 200 medical students watched the tutorial in real time, others joined in within the 24-hour limit.
To learn more about Dr. Ahmed’s operation, read Time Magazine’s coverage of the entire event.
There a new # (hashtag) in town. #DisruptingAging
AARP has a social media captain which tries to debunk old age. If you want a dose of reality, watch the video. You may be as old as you feel, but what do others think?
AARP explores, “What age do you consider to be old?” They posed that question to millennials and asked them to show them what “old” looks like. Then they introduced them to some real “old” people. Watch what happens when folks let go of their outdated beliefs and embrace the idea that aging is not about decline – it’s about growth. #DisruptAging
DigiDame 