John Kheit is a New York attorney and a regular Contributing Editor for The Mac Observer. We share many common interests, including the 4K/UHD TV revolution, and have recently been comparing notes on that technology. So, for this edition of Background Mode, we just geeked out, chatted about his acquisition of an LG OLED 4K/UHD TV, compared OLED to the older Plasmas, covered LG’s use of webOS 3, talked High Dynamic Range (HDR), did some comparisons to LCD TVs, and offered our thoughts about the future of TV, including 8K. We finished the show chatting about last week’s Background Mode interview with Car and Driver magazine’s Eddie Alterman and the future of autonomous cars.

Dr. Alan Stern is a planetary scientist with the Southwest Research Institute. He’s also the co-founder and chief scientist of World View, working with high altitude balloon research. He is perhaps most famous as the principle investigator for NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto. Way back in grade school, Alan was interested in space exploration and wanted to be a part of the Star Trek future. He received his Ph.D. in planetary science from the University of Colorado, and that launched his life-long interest in Kuiper Belt Objects and the Oort Cloud. He’s a licensed pilot, was selected by NASA as a Payload Specialist, and has flown research missions in high performance jet aircraft. We talked about his career, the New Horizons mission design, Pluto discoveries (and planetary classification) and his latest research.