Summer brings the heat and cool tech innovation

Don’t know about you, but we here in the Boston area have had just about enough heat in the first two days of summer to last all season. They say it helps to think cool thoughts — it doesn’t. Nonetheless, we’ve stacked this week’s roundup with cool tech innovations and acknowledge the man who pretty much made all of them possible. Switch on the A/C, grab a slushie and enjoy.  

• If not for Alan Turing we wouldn’t be writing this, you wouldn’t be reading it, we’d all have other jobs and the world would be a very different place. Give him his by props by checking out this piece on the centenary celebration of his birth.
• Look, Ma, no engine! That’s a neat feat in tech innovation and all, but the coolest thing about Tesla’s new electric five-passenger electric car has to be the 89 mpg.
• From the cool yet kind of creepy file: Facebook this week paid a reported $55-60 million for Face.com, a facial recognition technology software company. The technology is pretty amazing, and it’s expected Facebook will use it for mobile photo tagging, which is sure to make users happy. Call us old-fashioned, but we’ve found thinking about it too much just conjures Orwellian imagery. 
• Hot on the heels of the announcement of the admittedly cool-looking Surface tablet come rumors that a Microsoft phone may not be far behind.
•  Larry Ellison seeks to answer the question how cool it would be to own a tropical island. We suspect the ensuing onslaught of one-liners is the real cause of The Great Twitter Crash of ’12 . We liked the one about becoming a coffee farmer so he can finally make money off java. Ba-dum-ching!