Invisibilia on Thad Starner:
Thad was a bigwig on Google Glass.
Cheers,
Scott.
STARNER: I was learning trigonometry. And I went to my father - he was a power engineer - and said hey, can you help me with this homework? My father looked at it for a few minutes and said nope, I can't. I really don't remember it. Hold it - you're telling me that you knew this stuff at one point, but you forgot it? So I resolved right then and there that I was going to find a way not to forget my lessons. I found that that idea that I could gain understanding of something and then forget it was intolerable to me. It was just a sense of loss - it's like losing a chunk of yourself.
SPIEGEL: The answer, Thad was certain, was computers. Computers are great at remembering stuff. You just needed a way to weave them into your day-to-day life. And this feeling that humans could greatly benefit from more integration with computers - only intensified after Thad went away to college at MIT.
STARNER: My sophomore year, I started getting classes that - when I'm being taught by the world's masters, I found that I either could pay attention in class and get a good intuition for what the professor was saying or I could take good notes - but I could not do both.
SPIEGEL: Having to turn his attention away from the professor, concentrate on taking notes on paper or a laptop - that made Thad lose the knowledge he so much wanted to have. And he needed to fix that. And then one night, totally by accident, Thad happened on an answer.
Thad was a bigwig on Google Glass.
Cheers,
Scott.