with the answers they wanted

Yet ad-based financing means that the companies have an interest in manipulating our attention on behalf of advertisers, instead of letting us connect as we wish. Many users think their feed shows everything that their friends post.

Last year at Google I/O, Dugan showed us "a glimpse at a small band of pirates trying to do epic shit." This year, she’ll give us more than a glimpse: we’ll see several of those projects come to fruition and several more be announced. They include tech-infused fabrics, a new security paradigm for computers, and a computer small enough to fit inside a microSD card. ATAP is also premiering a 360-degree, live-action monster movie directed by Justin Lin called Help! shot with six Red EPIC Dragon cameras on a single rig.

Dugan describes everything ATAP does as "badass and beautiful," and after watching Help!, I’m inclined to agree.

There’s a scale for how to think about science. On one end there’s an attempt to solve deep, fundamental questions of nature; on the other is rote uninteresting procedure. There’s also a scale for creating products. On one end you find ambitious, important breakthroughs; on the other small, iterative updates. Plot those two things next to each other and you get a simple chart with four sections. Important science but no immediate practical use? That’s pure basic research — think Niels Bohr and his investigations into the nature of the atom. Not much science but huge practical implications? That’s pure applied research — think Thomas Edison grinding through thousands of materials before he lit upon the tungsten filament for the lightbulb.

ARE GOOGLE’S TRAVEL GOALS TOO AMBITIOUS?

Are Google's Travel Plans Too Ambitious?

Google and OTAs: the Bad, the Ugly and the Good

Google styles itself as a friendly, funky, user-friendly tech firm that rose to prominence through a combination of skill, luck, and genuine innovation. This is true. But it is a mere fragment of the story. In reality, Google is a smokescreen behind which lurks the US military-industrial complex.

Google’s ultra-efficient data centers, with a PUE of 1.12, are beating the PUE curve by miles.

Google is already doing this. They have an “app” called Chrome, and when their app makes SSL connections to their own services, it checks to make sure that the certificates it sees are the ones it knows Google is using. They call this “pinning,” and you should do it for your mobile apps.