brunobergher::blog

Beautiful!

The AirJelly is, quite simply, a jellyfish that floats through the air. It’s a concept project by Festo, a German manufacturer of motion control and automation systems.

There’s no information in English so far, but from the whitepaper in German I managed to get that it’s 1.35 m (4.43 ft) in diameter and 2.2 m (7.2 ft) high, while weighting a mere 1.3 kg (2.86 lbs). It must be quite a sight.

These are a couple of very famous quotations in the tech field:

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

and

I think there is a world market for about five computers.

They are supposedly attributed to Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and Thomas J. Watson, Jr., former president of IBM (1952-1971), respectively.

The wise folks at the Freakonomics blog have been running these so called ‘blegs’, a blog-beg, where they ask the readers of information they’d like to straighten out. These two quotations have been featured recently, and had been properly debunked as myths by both the authors and the readers. See here (Gates) and here (Watson).

I assume more of these interesting and perhaps fictitious phrases might come up in the future, so it’s worth checking back again.

On a side note, these posts broght to my attention The Yale Book of Quotations, which went straight to my Amazon wish list, since I’ve been collecting quotations as a hobby for quite some time. It seems like a great book if you’re into this kind of thing.