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Google expanded access to Compute Engine in 2012, offering virtual machines on the same broad infrastructure family that supported Google’s own services. The product put Google in more direct competition with Amazon EC2. Read more
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Windows RT devices reached consumers in late 2012, including Microsoft’s Surface RT. They ran on ARM processors rather than the x86 CPUs that had defined Windows PCs for decades. Read more
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On November 10, we remember Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Read more
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Microsoft released Windows 8 on October 26, 2012. The operating system combined a touch-oriented Start screen with the traditional Windows desktop, making it one of the most radical interface changes in Windows history. Read more
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Sometimes I think about how quickly a person disappears from memory. I know the names of my parents and grandparents, of course. But when I move further back, the details become weaker. Great-grandparents turn into a few stories, a photograph, or only a name. Read more
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Apple introduced the iPhone 5 in September 2012 with LTE cellular support, a taller 4-inch display, and the new Lightning connector. LTE was the most important networking change because it brought much higher mobile data speeds than the 3G technology used by earlier iPhones. Read more
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Windows 8 reached release-to-manufacturing status in August 2012, giving PC manufacturers a final build before the public launch. The operating system was built around Microsoft’s belief that touchscreens would become central to personal computers. Read more
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Apple released OS X Mountain Lion in July 2012, continuing the transfer of ideas from iOS back to the Mac. Notification Center, Messages, Reminders, Notes, and deeper iCloud integration made the desktop operating system more closely connected to Apple’s mobile devices. Read more
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Microsoft announced the first Surface tablets in June 2012, marking an unusual move for a company that traditionally licensed Windows to PC manufacturers rather than building flagship computers itself. Read more
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Google introduced the Knowledge Graph in May 2012 to supplement ordinary web search with structured information about real-world entities. Instead of treating every query as a collection of words, Google increasingly tried to determine whether a user meant a person, place, book, company, or other specific thing. Read more
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Google launched Drive in April 2012 with 5 GB of free storage and tight integration with Google Docs. The service entered a market already shaped by Dropbox but connected file storage directly to Google’s browser-based productivity tools. Read more
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NVIDIA launched its Kepler GPU architecture in 2012 with products including the GeForce GTX 680. Kepler was designed to improve performance per watt compared with the preceding Fermi generation. Read more
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The Unexpected Hanging Paradox is a puzzle about prediction, knowledge, and surprise. A common version begins with a judge telling a prisoner that he will be executed on one weekday during the following week, but the execution will be a surprise. The prisoner will not know the day in advance. Read more
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Zeno of Elea created several paradoxes about motion more than two thousand years ago. The most famous versions all play with the same uncomfortable idea. Before you reach a destination, you must travel half the distance. Then you must travel half of what remains. Then half again. Read more
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Berry’s Paradox lives in the uncomfortable space between language and mathematics. A common form of the paradox asks us to consider: “The smallest positive integer that cannot be described in fewer than twenty words.” At first, this sounds like a valid description. Read more
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The Raspberry Pi went on sale on February 29, 2012, and demand immediately overwhelmed the distributors’ websites. The $35 Model B was a complete ARM-based Linux computer on a board roughly the size of a credit card. Read more
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Hilbert’s Hotel is one of my favorite ways to think about infinity. Imagine a hotel with infinitely many rooms. Room 1, room 2, room 3, and so on forever. Now imagine that every room is occupied. In an ordinary hotel, the answer is obvious: there is no space for another guest. Read more
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The Birthday Paradox is not a real contradiction. It is a contradiction between probability and intuition. Imagine a room with 23 people. What is the probability that at least two of them share the same birthday? Most people expect the probability to be small because there are 365 possible birthdays. Read more
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The Banach-Tarski Paradox sounds impossible the first time we hear it. In very informal language, it says that a solid mathematical ball can be divided into a small number of special pieces and then rearranged using only rotations and translations to create two balls, each the same size as the original. One ball becomes two. No stretching. No ordinary copying. Read more
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Consider the sentence: “This statement is false.” It is only four words, but it creates a problem that has troubled philosophers and logicians for centuries. Suppose the sentence is true. Read more
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The Barber Paradox is a simple story that carries the same logical problem as Russell’s Paradox. Imagine a village with one barber. The rule is this: The barber shaves all men in the village who do not shave themselves, and only those men. At first, the rule seems clear. Read more
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Raspberry Pi production began in early 2012 after the foundation finalized a board that could be sold at an unusually low price. Manufacturing a computer this cheaply required controlling not just component cost but board complexity, testing, packaging, and distributor margins. Read more
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Russell’s Paradox is one of those problems that looks harmless until one sentence turns mathematics against itself. Bertrand Russell discovered the paradox around 1901 while thinking about the foundations of set theory. The problem begins with a simple question. Can a set contain itself? Read more
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Mathematics began very close to the physical world. People counted objects, measured land, followed the movement of stars, and solved practical problems. Read more
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The name “imaginary number” sounds almost like a joke. How can a number be imaginary? The idea appears when we try to solve equations that have no answer among the real numbers. A simple example is Read more