The voice interfaces of the future may be embedded in the products and appliances all around us.

One of the central problems facing designers of any voice-controlled smart hub, from Amazon Echo to Google Home, is how to convince people to put these odd devices front and center in their homes—where they're more likely to be heard and used. GE thinks it has a decent solution: Build a voice assistant right into the one thing every room needs: The lights.

GE and lighting designer Richard Clarkson just unveiled the C by GE Lamp: An 18-inch-tall LED lamp with a loop-de-loop design that looks something like a futuristic Aerobie. It's a literal conversation piece: Not only does it emit about the same of light as a 60 watt incandescent bulb, the base holds all the microphones and circuitry needed for it to also function as a node for Amazon's Alexa voice-controlled services. So not only is it a lamp you can turn on or off just by talking to it, but the C Lamp will also allow you to do anything you can do on your Echo, from controlling other gadgets in your smarthome to listening to Spotify.

According to Clarkson, whose previous eye-catching lamp designs include putting a literal thunderstorm in your living room, the C by GE's unconventional form was a response to the question: How do you design a lamp people know they can talk to?

"Smart home products tend to blend into the background, but we wanted something that would appeal to first movers, and have design cues that hint at its function, and give it a focus point" says Clarkson. "We not only thought the loop design was nicely iconic, but that it created an outline—a sort of visual microphone, if you will—telling you where to speak towards." The design was inspired by a range of products, everything from old-timey diaphragm microphones to neon lighting tubes.

The C by GE Lamp isn't yet available for purchase, although GE says that it will start accepting preorders early next year, at a still-unspecified price. The end goal isn't to just have one statement lamp in the line-up either. "The benefit of integrating this sort of voice-control functionality into our products is that lighting never looks out of place: It's wherever you want to put it," says Tom Stimac, chief innovation manager at GE Lighting. "Considering that, it's no surprise we'd love to be able to get this technology miniaturized so it can fit inside a lightbulb, and you could access Alexa in every single room."

That's impossible right now—the electronics that drive Alexa are still too big. But if C by GE heralds a smart home future at all, it's one in which your lightbulbs do more than just let you see: They also are always listening.

Aeromorphs, a new way to design inflatable materials, could also change the way we build furniture and design fashion.

Robotics aren't the only way to design objects that transform: Just look at a balloon, the airbag in your car, or one of those crazy Lamzacs. Filling something with air is a useful way of transforming an object—provided you can do so precisely.

That's just what students at MIT's Tangible Media Group have done with Aeromorphs, a new technology that creates origami-like inflatables that can transform in unique ways when filled with air, opening the door to new kind of toys, wearables, packaging methods, safety systems, and more.

With Aeromorphs, PhD student Jifei Ou and the rest of his team at the Tangible Media Group have created, essentially, a way of programming papers, plastics, and fabrics. Designing an Aeromorph starts with a custom software tool that lets you create a pattern based on the inflated shape you're trying to achieve. This design is then exported as a file so that it can be manufactured on a standard CNC prototyping machine fit with a custom heat-sealing head, which creates the necessary pockets of air across the material a bit like a sewing machine makes stitches. When inflated pneumatically, the fabric or material deforms into a predictable shape, as dictated by the team's software.

Aeromorphs come from the same team that created Biologic, a synthetic bioskin (and 2016 IBD winner) that regulates the wearer's heat and sweat by opening and closing flaps in the material as needed. Similarly, Ou tells me he imagines that Aeromorphs will have big applications in fashion: For example, he mentions flat-pack sneakers that can be pumped full of air to be worn, like a futuristic Reebok Pump, or a backpack that could change its shape and size depending on the content inside.

Outside of fashion, though, Aeromorphs have plenty of technical potential. From a practical perspective, packaging could be revolutionized by Aeromorphs, for the simple reason that the industry could design light, thin airbags that easily wrap around a product to protect it when inflated, further streamlining the shipping process in factories. Similarly, it's easy to see how this sort of approach could be used by automakers to create a new generation of safer airbags.

But you could just as easily use Aeromorphs to design soft teddy bears that hug kids back, interesting new types of flat-pack inflatable furniture, and more. Aeromorphs aren't so much a product in themselves as an innovative new technique for creating soft, transformable objects. We can't wait to see what designers do with it.

[Photos: Tangible Media Group/MIT Media Lab]

The Great Animal Orchestra is the second best thing to marching into a National Forest with a blindfold on.

When we think of the slow death of the natural world, we usually think of it in purely visual terms: polar bears starving to death in Arctic springtime and rainforests on fire. But if you want to truly feel the effects of climate change and man's impact on nature, you need to close your eyes, and listen. Not for the sounds, but for the silence.

The Great Animal Orchestra is a website that puts together interactive soundscapes of five acoustically diverse biophanies—the term the great American musician and ecologist Bernie Krause, who narrates the experience, uses to describe the acoustic landscapes of the natural world. It's one of those few websites that tells you to put your headphones on that you should take seriously: it's a poignant exploration not just of nature's sounds, but of how the way those sounds have been silenced.

There are five soundscapes in all. One is Ontario's Algonquin Park; the next California's Lincoln Meadow; there's the Yukon Delta Refuge in Alaska, the subaqueous sound of the Pacific Rim, and finally an acoustic medley of sounds in Zimbabwe. Each soundscape is a brief audio tour of the region, where the rich layers of any given soundscape can be stripped away to a single element, just by hovering over a navigation wheels of highs and lows. In this ways, one can separate the cacophony of sounds in any given space to the highs of sparrows warbling, the mediums of crows, and the lows of wolves howling.

It's all extraordinarily beautiful, but the Lincoln Meadow segment might be the most haunting; Krause allows you to hear what its biophanies sounded like before and after selective logging was allowed in the area. If the before is a surround-sound recording, the after is a playback with all but one speaker ripped away. It's a heartbreaking exposure to just how much sensation is being stripped away from the natural world by man's meddling, while we remain deaf.

Listen to the Great Animal Orchestra here. And actually do put your headphones on.

[Images: via The Great Animal Orchestra. Photo: RonaldWJansen/iStock]

Once you understand what this machine is doing, you'll understand many of modern computer science's fundamentals.

Scattering grains of sand across a stone is one of the oldest and most primitive computing methods there is. Called geomancy, it is a divination technique that has been used for over a 1,000 years to try to predict the future by running simple algorithms on the accidental patterns the stones formed.

Few today would say geomancy is a reliable way to model the future, but in it, German designer Ralf Baecker sees a primitive analog to the way we compute today: not by tossing grains of silicate, but by etching code into purified silicon. His latest piece, Random Access Memory, merges geomancy with modern computing to create a machine that relies on grains of sand instead of binary zeros and ones.

Watching the Random Access Memory machine, it can be a little hard to figure out what it's doing. But the name is no accident: just like the RAM in your computer or smartphone, the Random Access Memory machine's goal is to fill its memory with data. In this case, though, the RAM in question isn't some abstract stick of data. It's a circular platter that the arm on the Random Access Machine tries to fill with sand.

Each grain represents a single bit of binary data—a one, not a zero—-and the machine's goal is to position as many grains of sand into its platter of memory as possible. It does so with a tiny suction cup positioned on the end of a robot arm, which moves according to a ruleset variant of Langton's ant, a simple two-dimensional Turing Machine that proves many of computer science's general laws.

The end goal of the Random Access Memory machine is to fit as many grains of sand onto its rotating platter as possible. That would seemingly be easy, but the machine needs to explore its function by its own internal ruleset, only placing a sand down if other pre-existing conditions are true: another grain of sand, for example, not being positioned directly to the left of it. And because its "data" is physical grains of sand, the machine is prone to errors, like "bits" bouncing, or being accidentally shifted. That means that the Random Access Memory machine could well keep working forever, without solving its problem.

There's a lot of egghead-y reasons why the Random Access Memory machine is fascinating, but perhaps the thing everyone can appreciate about it is this: Computing is a very abstract concept for most people. But the Random Access Memory machine shows there's nothing so abstract about computers. Even the most advanced computers are scattering stones, just like our ancestors did. They've just gotten so much better at it.

New research shows the country isn't divided into states as much as it is divided into megalopolises.

The 2016 Elections made many Americans feel, at least philosophically, that the distances that separate us are wider than ever before. Spatially, though, the web that knits us all together is getting tighter by the year, as the megaregions in which we live—clusters of interconnected cities—get bigger and closer together.

Don't believe me? Just look at this map. It not only color codes America's distinct megaregions, it shows exactly how they're linked together. And it might just be fairer to say that increasingly, we aren't the U.S.—we're the U.M.A., or the United Megaregions of America.

The concept of megaregions is nothing new. The influential urban planner Sir Patrick Geddes first defined the concept in 1915—though he called these regions "megalopolises"—and there are many variations on the term. By some definitions, everything from Boston to Washington, D.C. is one large megaregion; other definitions might see that chain of tightly connected cities as being made up of five different megaregions, including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.

Either way, considering the fact that as much of 70% of our country's population and economy is centered in these cosmopolitan corridors, megaregions are more than just an academic concern—they're a matter of national import. So Garrett Nelson of Dartmouth College and Alasdair Rae of the University of Sheffield began wondering if there was a more scientific way to define and visualize them.

Nelson and Rae used census data to come up with a map of 4 million distinct commuter paths, tracing a person's doorstep to their office—datapoints they call "nodes." Once these paths were plotted out, the researchers turned to MIT's Senseable City Lab, which used an algorithm to divide the nation into distinct megaregions based upon the strength of the connections between all of its nodes. They then limited themselves to 50 megaregions—roughly one per state, although some states like California have more, and other states like Wyoming have none—to make the finished map visually coherent.

The colored candy floss map of the entire nation is, perhaps, the most visually interesting. But it's the simple black-and-white map, which names all of the country's megaregions, that really makes an impression. What this map makes clear is that megaregions usually expand across multiple states, and that there are far more plausible ways to divide the country into 50 sections than the arbitrary borders of statehood—namely, using the organic economic and cultural zones that have developed around cities. It makes you wonder how different the results of the last election would have looked if America was divided into megaregions, not states.

You can read more about Nelson and Rae's research here.

Browse the world's radio stations, just by spinning a globe.

Ever since the first commercial station—Pittsburgh's KDKA—began broadcasting on November 2, 1920, radio has functioned as a powerful cross-pollinating medium, capable of bringing new culture and ideas across even the most impenetrable borders. And in the internet age, a radio signal can reach clear to the opposite side of the Earth, if only you know where to look.

Created by Amsterdam's Studio Puckey and Moniker, Radio Garden is a gorgeous, Google Earth-style browser for the world's radio stations. No matter where a station is—from Reyjkavik's Kiss FM to Radio Frïa FM in Ushuaia, Argentina, which might be the only station you can listen to with a transistor radio in Antarctica—Radio Garden makes it easy for you to tune in. All you do is rotate the 3D globe and then click on the station you want to listen to.

First and foremost, the site is a fascinating way to be a fly on the wall in cities around the world, whether you tune into some obscure station in the middle of nowhere or some major station in an urban hub. For example, in Nome, Alaska, KICY is located so close to Russia that it's non-stop broadcast of proselytizing Christian pop music almost seems like it is aimed straight across the Bering Strait. Similarly, as I write this, WBRT in Bardstown, Kentucky, has some guy shredding on the fiddle; Radio ZP 30 seems to be playing Paraguayan Pop 20; and two Bangladeshi gentleman are shouting at each on Radio Shongi.

Outside of just a great way to listen to the world's radio stations, though, Radio Garden has a broader purpose: it was commissioned by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision as a way to show the way radio crosses borders. Consequently, there are no geopolitical demarcations on the Radio Garden's globe—just tens of thousands of glowing lights scattered around the world, showing everywhere the planet's "ON AIR" signs are lighting up.

It's true what they say. You just can't stop the signal. Check out Radio Garden here.

Sam Labs' DIY Hot Wheels are the perfect foot in the door for the neonate coder.

Products that teach kids to code abound. From videogames to board games to robots to throwable smartballs, pretty much every notable new toy is all about tricking kids into inducting themselves into the basics of computer science. But then what? Where do kids go from there?

Sam Labs, creators of the "Ultimate Internet Connected Electronics Kit," has long been about teaching people to code with Lego-like intuitiveness. But none of its products were necessarily kid-friendly, let alone kid-first. Its new Curious line aims to address that starting with Curious Cars, a kid-friendly boxset of different sensors and parts perfect for putting together remote-controlled robot cars. And unlike a lot of "koding 4 kidz" products, it has a fleshed-out ecosystem to graduate into.

Curious Cars is a set of Sam blocks, arranged around the theme of remote-controlled cars. Like Sam's larger product line, each of the six blocks included in a Curious Cars set is essentially an internet of things-connected sensor or button: two motors, an accelerometer, a light sensor, an on-off switch, and a slider. When strung together through the Curious Cars companion app, you can program these blocks to work in different configurations—a drag racer, for example, versus a truck or a bulldozer. And since most of what makes a car cool is its chassis, you can customize your vehicle with one of Sam's DIY papercraft shells, or go the extra mile and build one out of Lego, which Sam's IoT blocks nestle into nicely. (Eventually allowing for elaborate machines like this one to be constructed, although only if you graduate to the full Sam toolkit).

When Sam already sells a full-featured Lego set for the internet of things, what is the point of the more streamlined Curious Cars set, which focuses on purely vehicular mayhem? Part of it is to give kids an entry point. With the broader Sam kit, says Sam Labs founder Joachim Horn, "I felt that we were forcing users down a creative path without teaching them how the tools we were providing could be used in a really fun manner." With Sam's Curious Cars, kids who start programming their own RC cars can easily segue into a broader ecosystem of IoT building blocks.

But the greater goal, says Horn, is to just get kids interested in things like machine logic to begin with. "Studies have shown that what kids are playing with at five, or eight, correlate to their career choices, especially in STEM," he says. "The thing we're trying to figure out is how do we make play experiences into transformative experiences, that down the line benefit users and society as a whole? We think that's to stay as much in the realm of play as possible, and focus not so much on turning kids into inventors, but having fun, and trusting the rest will happen organically."

That's a broad goal, of which Curious Cars is just the beginning for Sam. "We have more planned in 2017, so keep your eye out for Curious," says Horn. For right now, though, Curious Cars can be purchased in time for Christmas for $199, and when they want to grow into designing not cars, but their own internet-controlled gadgets? The rest of Sam's toolkit will be there.

[All Photos: Sam Lab]

An AI bot called Gifted recommends presents based upon pictures of the recipient. Its suggestions can be a little hit or miss, though.

Finding a last minute Christmas gift can be hard, even if you know someone well. Gifted, a new SMS chatbot by developer Michael Jordan, leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to try to make it easier, by recommending gifts based upon a person's appearance. So how well does it work? Spoiler: Not too well, but if you're especially hard up, it might kickstart some ideas. It certainly beats frantically buying presents on Christmas Eve at the local Gas 'N' Gulp.

Here's how Gifted works. Using SMS, you send the Gifted chatbot an image of the person for whom you want to find a gift. From there, Gifted uses ClarifAI, an AI-driven photo tagger, to scan the image and translate what it thinks it sees into keywords, which it then rates based upon confidence. Gifted then matches these keywords up with a database of manually-picked Amazon products and sends you a link to a product. You can try it for yourself by texting any image to (267) 422-7066.

So how's it do? Well—err. Here's what Gifted recommended when I sent it this picture of my wife:

I can confidently say my wife would likely consider such a gift inscrutable at best, and insulting at worst, if I told her it was generated for her because a robot thought she looked tired and without confidence. (Adding further injury: Gifted also recommended I buy this same brand of Hey Girl tea for my sainted, gray-haired mother.)

Gifted thought I should buy my editor, Kelsey Campbell-Dollahan, an avid bicycle enthusiast who was pictured literally wearing a bicycle uniform, an Amazon Fire TV Stick. Er, okay? I would have thought some biking paraphernalia, but no, that recommendation is reserved for this picture of a three-year-old, who Gifted thinks I should buy a fixie:

And what about me? Here's a picture of me posing in Turkey in front of a ceramic Tyrannosaurus.

No Jurassic World Blu-Ray, or Dinosaurs Attack!collectible card set, or this robotic triceratops? Come on, Gifted.

Okay, but how does Gifted deal with celebrities? Here's what it recommended for a picture of Donald Trump.

Hey! That's actually not a bad gift! What about Trump's right-hand man in Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel?

Uh, okay, yeah, I guess it'd be a good gift for Thiel too. What about Elon Musk? A DIY rocket-kit, perhaps?

I'm noticing a trend, so I sent Gifted a picture of Kanye West. At this point, I wasn't expecting much, so I was pleasantly surprised by the result: A Bluetooth shower head for listening to music in the shower!

Show Gifted an image of Woody Guthrie, though, and it'll recommend the same gift—same with many other musicians I tried, although Gifted did think Björk could use some bronzer.

This may seem like it's an AI issue, but it isn't. Gifted's AI is pretty good at, say, looking at a picture of Trump and coming up with valid keywords: "portrait, people, politician, administration, business leader, adult, man" and so on. It doesn't recognize Trump, per se, but it recognizes the genre of person he appears to be, and the setting he's in. These words can then be used to search a database for appropriate Amazon gifts.

Instead, the limitations in Gifted simply come from the fact that the Amazon gift database it uses is still being fleshed out, and that's a manual process: Every gift for business leaders, for example, needs to be separately added. As this database gets developed, Gifted's results should become better. "Ideally the pool of gifts would be larger," writes Gifted's creator Michael Jordan. "But I'm a one-man team and having to manually tag gifts is profoundly time consuming. I only have 250 products in the database and that covers everything from infants to grandparents to cats and dogs—I'm trying to create a way to automatically tag gifts to create an automated database. I'd like to get up to 1,000 gifts by the weekend."

And, in truth, when I re-sent Gifted a picture of Trump this morning, it recommended this book about behind-the-scenes statesmanship in World War II instead. So Gifted is definitely improving, and could be useful to you, at least as a fun trifle that might accidentally recommend a decent gift. Just make sure to sense-check it first.

Try Gifted for yourself by texting an image to (267) 422 7066.

*Some celebrity images have been changed for copyright reasons, your results may vary.

Hug this tree in virtual reality, and you'll be sucked into an experience that can only be described as mind-altering.

How do you tell a first-person story about a tree? How do you give its wordless life a narrative, or explore its timeless inner world? Treehugger: Wahoma is an attempt to do just that for the giant sequoia. The exhibition, which launched recently at London's Southbank Centre, mashes together virtual reality, data visualization, and installation art into one poignant, breathtaking experience, transporting participants through the nervous system of a 3,500-year-old redwood—one of the world's largest living creatures, by volume.

Treehugger was created by Marshmallow Laser Feast, an interactive creative studio based in London. The experience begins in a small studio space, containing a single, fabric-covered column that stands in the middle of the darkened room. The name of the exhibition only makes sense once visitors don their HTC Vive VR headsets: In virtual reality, the dark column suddenly blooms into a magical, multihued sequoia before visitors' eyes.

In appearance, this virtual sequoia is stylized to resemble a sequoia you might find illustrated on some biology class blackboard, perhaps with a box of fluorescent chalk. Eddies of colorful lines diffuse through the soil, whorl through the air, and spread up through the trunk—a visualization of the surprisingly complex networks that cohabit a sequoia's invisible micro-ecosystem. Soon, a thunderstorm bursts overhead, denuding the sequoia and its soil with rain. As the drops patter around you, you can actually see the sequoia's subterraneous root structures swell and throb, sucking up the moisture and drawing it skyward through its trunk.

Physically hugging the tree begins an even trippier journey. By pressing your head into a knot in the sequoia, you can become a part of this suddenly visible lymphatic system, carried up with the water into the sequoia's canopy. From there, viewers are shrunk down to the size of molecules, droplets of water in the mineral mist breathed forth from a sequoia's uppermost branches. "We've heard the experience isn't that different from like, doing mushrooms," laughs Ersinhan Ersin, creative director at Marshmallow Laser Feast.

The process of designing Treehugger began last year, after Marshmallow Laser Feast completed work on In the Eyes of the Animal, an award-winning VR experience that let participants explore real forests through the eyes of the creatures that live there. Like Treehugger, In the Eyes of the Animal attempted to give people a new way to explore the natural world, but Marshmallow Laser Feast wanted to figure out a way to create a similar experience that could exist indoors (In the Eyes of the Animal involved installing and operating VR headsets in live forests).

The real-world component of Treehugger is more abstract than it was In the Eyes of the Animal, but no less important. The physical column in the middle of the room gives participants something to physically interact with as they explore the virtual sequoia. And since a sequoia can be hundreds of feet tall, Ersin says that being able to grab the column has an important secondary purpose: This real-world physical interaction helps prevent VR vertigo as participants travel up the trunk.

Eventually, Marshmallow Laser Feast hopes to do around half a dozen different Treehugger"chapters," each one exploring a different kind of tree. The end goal, says Ersin, is to use virtual reality as a way to connect people with the natural world, and prod them toward conservation efforts. "When most people look at trees, they don't necessarily see them as being as alive, because they move and grow so much more slowly than we do," Ersin says. "We're trying to give people a new perception of trees as creatures just as vibrant and alive as we are."

[All Images: via Marshmallow Laser Feast]

Could redesigning the ballot system strengthen our democracy? It's complicated.

The 2016 presidential election has raised all sorts of questions about the implementation of our election system. How can someone who lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes, and lost nearly two- thirds of the economy, still become president? It has a lot to do with our electoral system—a system most democracies don't embrace. But could the design of the ballot also be a problem? And if so, is there a better way?

Nicky Case, the digital artist behind this incredible exploration on how neurons work, is back with a new web project that explores that very question. To Build a Better Ballot not only explains some alternatives to our current ballot system, it visualizes how adopting such systems would change the results.

Right now, Americans who vote simply tick off a box that says who they want for office. It's called a "First Past the Post" ballot, a system we've used from the beginning, mostly because it would have seemed perfectly sound in eras before data modeling. In a First Past the Post system, the person with the most votes wins, at least in theory. But here's the problem. Let's say there are two candidates in a race—charmingly called Steven Square and Tracy Triangle in Case's interactive—both on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Tracy Triangle is winning the election. Now, here comes a third candidate, Henry Hexagon. Recognizing that Tracy is doing well in the race, he positions himself politically close to her.

What happens? The spoiler effect. For an example, look no further than the 2000 election, when Ralph Nader "stole" votes from Al Gore, letting George Bush win. The spoiler effect can result in the least popular candidate in a two-party system winning the election when a third-party candidate enters the race. "We've known for way too long that our current voting system—First Past the Post—forces voters to be dishonest, creates a polarizing 'lesser of two evils' scenario, and screws over both major and minor candidates," sums up Case.

So what are the alternatives? As it turns out, there are plenty of decent alternatives, and Case's interactive looks closely at five. In one alternative called Instant Runoff, voters rank each candidate from first to least favorite (this system is actually already used in local elections in San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Portland, Maine). There's also a variation in which voters are asked not which politician they think is best for a given office, but how many they would find acceptable for a given office. There's also a system in which you score candidates on a scale between one to five, and then just add up the ratings. Whomever has the highest score wins. Most of these systems are put forward by statisticians, and have not been used in politics, although you may recognize the concepts as informing the design of, say, Amazon and Yelp ratings.

The good news? As you can see in Case's interactive visualization, every voting system except First Past the Post is immune to the spoiler effect. Yet the alternatives also have their own glitches. In some Instant Runoff scenarios, for example, it's possible for a winning candidate to lose, just by becoming more popular. Other systems are just as bad. There's one Case writes about, for example, that has scenarios in which a bad candidate wins an election, simply because a slightly less bad candidate entered the race.

All of these scenarios seem equally nuts to a Trump win. And it raises the question: How would the adoption of another system have effected the 2016 election? Case cites a recent polling study, which simulated with 1,000 mock voters who would have won the most recent elections with five alternative voting systems. Trump only won one of those simulations; Hillary won three; and Gary Johnson won the last one.

The takeaway? There's no perfect ballot.

Much of what makes To Build a Better Ballot such a great explainer on the subject is that at any given point, you can play with a little visualization of how different voting systems work, dragging candidates around a grid representing political positions to show how the vote changes. But if you believe America should switch to a different voting system, get in touch with your state representative. Our neighbors to the north in Canada will be abandoning America-style First Past the Post ballots in 2017, in favor of a still-to-be-decided alternative system. Maybe that's what American democracy needs, too.

Companies have anointed voice the OS of home automation. But as Mark Zuckerberg found out designing his own AI butler, voice doesn't always cut it.

Some of us have husbands, or wives. Some of us have partners. Some of us have roommates. But most of us have an AI these days, whether it's Siri on our iPhone, or Alexa piping in from an Echo in the kitchen.

How do you communicate with your AI as intimately as you do with your wife, partner or roommate? It's a question that companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon have been wrestling with for the last few years. But it's Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg who has the best answer so far: by text.

At least some of the time.

In an exclusive article yesterday, Fast Company's Daniel Terdiman gave us a tour of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's self-called "Jarvis": a complete home automation AI, the creation of which he set for himself as his 2016 New Year's Resolution.

The parameters of what we'll call "Jarvis"—with deference to Marvel Entertainment!—are pretty straightforward. As the Facebook founder told Fast Company:

It's not a production system that's ready to go to other people. But if I couldn't build a system that can at least do what [Echo and Home can], I probably would have been pretty disappointed in myself.

Those systems, Google Home and Amazon Alexa, let users to control anything compatible in their homes—their lights, thermostats, security systems, entertainment centers, and more—via voice control. Which is all pretty standard: Apple's trying to do the same thing with Siri and HomeKit.

But Zuckerberg's key observation isn't that people want to be able to control their homes by voice. It's that they also want to be able to control their homes by text. As Terdiman wrote:

Speaking to Jarvis and having it talk back makes sense for playing music. (In the demo I got, Jarvis speaks in a garden-variety synthesized female voice not unlike that of Siri or Alexa; Zuck is on the verge of getting a well-known person to provide custom vocals.) But Zuckerberg found that in many other cases, text was more desirable, especially when there were other people around.

"If I'm letting someone in at the gate . . . that's not relevant to the people around me," [Zuckerberg] says, " so I'd much rather just text it."

Right now, companies assume that voice will eventually be the OS of home automation. They envision AI as a kind of invisible roommate servant: someone we nag out loud when we're a little too cold, or we want someone to press the buzzer, or to put on some different music. And when we want to command them, we speak our requests out loud, into the air, waiting for them, with technological servility, to hear and understand us.

That's fair, but it's half the picture. The key insight Zuckerberg has is there will be times we won't want to ostentatiously pronounce our commands. There will be moments of quieter command. Moments in which you are conversing with your dinner guests, and your doorbell rings. How would you prefer to hear it? An earsplitting din that disrupts everyone, followed by the calamity of bodies flowing toward the door? Or an insistent buzz on your phone, which you can respond to with text-like efficiency?

Self-evidently the latter. The truth is, taking an AI into our home is a partnership, just like any other. And we don't always communicate to our partners by voice. If I am sitting on the couch with my wife, yes, we talk to each other, but especially in the presence of others, we'll text each other, because text is the invisible UI in our household. It's the hidden layer we use to tell each other to turn down the heat, to check the door, to change the music, or—yes!—-sometimes send each other sweet nothings when others are in the room.

That's what Zuck has built himself. His Jarvis isn't the smartest AI on the block, by any means. Terdiman's article shows multiple examples of Zuckerberg's AI failing to understand the Facebook founder's voice commands. But that would be true of Siri, Alexa, or Google, too. What Zuck recognized is that there are times it's simply weird, or inappropriate, to bark out your commands into the air.

Obviously, this all beelines with Facebook Messenger's chatbot aspirations, announced in 2015. But Zuckerberg has wise words on why a voice-only command line doesn't yet work with AIs:

If you train a machine learning system on data from Google of people speaking to a search engine, it will perform relatively worse on Facebook at understanding people talking to real people. In the case of Jarvis, training an AI that you'll talk to at close range is also different from training a system you'll talk to from all the way across the room, like Echo. These systems are more specialized than it appears, and that implies we are further off from having general systems than it might seem.

In other words, people talk to each other using a different syntax from the ones we use to speak to AIs. It's a chicken-and-egg problem: until we start to speak to AIs like people, AIs won't have enough data to understand how to talk to people like people.

In the meantime, text messages—-especially in situations of ambiguity—make the most sense. We've all spend the better part of the decade communicating with Google's text-like search interface. We know how to text to machines, and the very medium of text trains us to enter into a more machine-like syntax. But talking to machines? Spend a few minutes faltering with Alexa, and Zuck seems more right by the second. We're just not ready yet. And because of that, AIs aren't either.

Land Lines will match any squiggle you draw to a real place on the planet.

The planet is a gloriously varied place, where almost every pattern you can think of can be spotted from the sky—even, say, the letters of the alphabet. Google's latest Chrome experiment, Land Lines, proves that any shape you draw already exists somewhere else on the planet, whether in the contour of the highway, the curlicue of some cape, or in the line of the waves beating the shore.

As explained in a post yesterday on the Google Earth blog, the Land Lines app presents you with two options: Draw and Drag. Click Draw, and you can draw any line you want, and Google will match it to an identical contour somewhere on the planet, as seen from Google Earth's satellite view. These lines can only be a couple inches in length, though. The more magical experience is the Drag function, which matches a long, continuous line you draw with a dynamic patchwork of map tiles, each one containing a section of the line you're drawing. These tiles might be from Mauritania, or they might be from Minneapolis, but when pieced together, they all become an "infinite line of connected rivers, highways, and coastlines," as put by the site page.

It's a fun project, but also a technically impressive one: The Land Lines web app is lightning quick on both mobile and desktop, despite the fact it's crunching data to detect lines on satellite images of the entire planet. This sort of speediness would normally require beefy backend servers to do all the edge-detection, but according to Google, advances in machine learning and GPU power allows almost all of the app to run locally within people's browsers.

Try Land Lines for yourself here.

For stimulating the world’s taste buds.

Pepsi makes some of the world’s most familiar-tasting products. Mehmood Khan’s job is to figure out how to develop new, unfamiliar ones. As head of R&D, he has helped the company design a lower-sodium salt crystal and has used sophisticated aerospace-industry computers to create a crunchier Lay’s potato chip. Here’s what he’s cooking up now:

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The company just released a major redesign of its iconic Chuck Taylor sneaker. Can it succeed without alienating fans of the original?

Designed by an Apple alum, the RokBlok is like a Roomba for record lovers.

In an ever more mobile world, vinyl–the least mobile audio format this side of a symphonic orchestra–is making a surprise comeback. But short of a return to the 7″, is there any way to make vinyl more mobile, and less dependent upon a bulky home stereo? The RokBlok might just be the answer. This boxy little robot with a needle on its belly can play records on any hard flat surface, no turntable required–although a Bluetooth speaker helps.

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Steve Jobs hated it, but Ive’s Twentieth Anniversary Mac set the stage for everything to come.

Perhaps you heard. A few weeks ago, Apple released a book called Designed by Apple in California: a $300 hardcover containing 450 photos of Apple products, chronicling almost 20 years of Apple’s industrial design–and specifically, Jony Ive‘s Apple industrial design.

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Because if you can’t give the gift of travel this Christmas, at least you can give the gift of traveling well.

Americans make over 405 million business trips per year–and that number is steadily increasing. But traveling, especially by air, hasn’t gotten much easier, between cramped seats and endless security lines. Here are five gifts that cut down on some of the more annoying aspects of frequent travel–and one wildly expensive folly for non-business adventures.

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Good luck shoplifting!

Amazon created its empire by making online shopping easy. Now, it’s trying to do the same thing in the real world. It has just opened a grocery store in Seattle with no checkout line and no cashiers. Instead, you walk in, grab what you want, and walk out. Amazon automatically knows who you are and what you took, so once you leave, your Amazon account is automatically billed.

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The machine is designer Sooji Lee’s attempt to bring craftsmanship back to the age of digital reproduction.

Press down a letter on your keyboard, and your computer will fill your screen with it, in any font you want. It’s a process we take for granted, says Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Sooji Lee, who wondered what it would take for a human to reproduce type–or at least one typeface, Bodoni–as reliably as a computer does.

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The Infinite Galaxy Map can be added to forever, or at least until you run out of table space.

The universe is infinite, at least on a human scale. Comparatively, most jigsaw puzzles only feel infinite, especially when you’re forced to do one at a family gathering. But the Infinite Galaxy Puzzle actually is endless. The puzzle, which was designed by the MIT alums at generative design studio Nervous System (no stranger to jigsaw puzzle design), tiles continuously so you can literally keep adding to it forever.

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