Nanotechnology is the area of science and innovation concerned with material of less than 100 nanometers. Specifically, it involves the control and manipulation of individual atoms and molecules. On this day in 1979, IBM created the smallest electronic circuit elements ever reported. The nano devices had a thickness of only 100 by 200 atomic diameters – that’s smaller than the fibers of a human nerve. This breakthrough was one of the first steps in the still-ongoing development of nanotechnology. Today, IBM scientists continue to explore and improve the design of semiconductors and computer chips, making them smaller, smarter and more energy efficient. It’s another way IBM is investing in practical technology development for the future.
IBM was one of the first companies to begin manufacturing punched cards. For almost four decades, punched cards were the major medium for storing, sorting and reporting data processed first through punched card equipment and—later—computers. Colloquially known as “IBM cards,” the punched cards were so embedded in business operations that by the 1950s, they represented over 20% of IBM’s revenue. On this day in 1971, IBM announced a new version of the IBM 3525 Card Punch replacing incandescent lamps with LEDs—a new technology at the time—to read punched cards. While the punched card may now be a thing of the past, LEDs are as relevant as ever, with new applications being actively developed. In retrospect, with a bit of serendipity, one great innovation passed the baton to another.
Based in Nairobi, Kenya, Twiga Foods is a business-to-business logistics platform for food stalls and kiosks. Twiga helps farmers distribute bananas, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, and more to 2,600 kiosks across Kenya. But they realized that they could help farmers sell more produce if they gave them access to capital, credit and other financial services. Working together with IBM, Twiga Foods developed a machine learning-powered, blockchain-enabled finance lending platform that is designed to manage and track micro-loans to farmers and vendors in Africa to help stimulate the economy and benefit its users. During an eight-week pilot program, Twiga’s service conducted 220 micro-loans (the average size of each loan is about $30, or 3,020 KES), which helped increase order size by 30% and profits for each retailer, on average, by about 6%. IBM is excited to help promote social good and use technology to bring positive change to these regional markets.
This series is to make it easier for you to become the person you want to be. Keep in mind that I’m not a therapist, and take my suggestions as you would from a friend.
Try achieving these goals every week. They’re short and doable, and it’s to increase your confidence, step by step.
To keep things simple, we only have 3 categories (external, mental and physical) which will have one goal each.
These are posted every Thursday.
External :
-Compliment someone today.
- It should be something that they can control, such as their shoes, how nice their hair looks, how they did a good job on X project.
- Refrain from talking about body shape, facial features (acne, etc), even if it’s positive. It could be a trigger point for them.
Mental :
- Sit cross legged on your bed as you face south east.
- Set a timer for 5 minutes.
- Close your eyes.
- Take deep inhalations and exhalations.
- Don’t respond to notifications and don’t get distracted for 5 minutes.
Physical :
- Do 10 minutes of light stretching.
- YouTube has a lot of options, choose something that adheres to your level of strength.
- Yoga with Adrienne, Satvic movement, Yoga with Bird are some good options.
People on Spring Break in Florida for the past couple of weeks were famously unconcerned with social distancing measures implementing in other areas of the country to help stem the tide of COVID-19 infections and save lives. Using cellphone location data from just the phones of the people gathered on a single beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, this video shows just how far those people spread across the country when they went home, possibly taking SARS-CoV-2 with them. They go everywhere.
Show of hands: who feels uncomfortable being reminded of the extent to which 3rd party companies know the location of our cellphones? With tools like the one demonstrated in the video & other easily available info, it has to be trivial to identify individuals by name using even “randomized” data and so-called metadata. (via @stewartbrand)
If anyone’s equipped to perform during a pandemic, it’s The Flaming Lips. Even before the pandemic, the band’s frontman, Wayne Coyne, often could be found performing inside a giant bubble. For their appearance on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Wednesday night, the band expanded on that concept. Not only did Coyne’s bandmates each get their own bubble, so too did the audience gathered to watch their performance of “Race For the Prize”. Catch the replay below.
“Race For the Prize” appears on The Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. Recently, the band teamed with Kacey Musgraves for a new song called “Flowers of Neptune 6”. They also released Deap Lips, a collaborative album with the garage rock duo Deap Vally.
First obvious association coming to my mind is with the visionary projects by Haus-Rucker-Co, from the late 60s on:
Put into the context of Haus-Rucker-Co’s general use of inflatables, as well as today’s emerging fresh-air market—with multiple links explaining this in the actual post—I suggest that what was once an almost absurdist art world provocation has, today, in the form of bottled air, become an unexpectedly viable business model. (Source: BLDGBLOG)
[Image: Haus-Rucker-Co, Grüne Lunge (Green Lung), Kunsthalle Hamburg (1973); photo by Haus-Rucker Co, courtesy of the Archive Zamp Kelp; via Walker Art Center, via BLDGBLOG]
I think the moment that convinced me the operating logic of our society is truly fucked in a way that cannot merely be reformed was after that eclipse in 2017 when the articles started coming out about how much money had been lost by productivity dropping from people stopping momentarily to watch it happen. To measure the world by the metric of the dollar to such a devotion that any cult leader would be jealous of that you would look at one of the most sublime experiences in nature which we, our ancestors, and even a not insignificant number of non-human species, have been observing in awestruck wonder for millennia, and decide that such a moment of profundity is something to be fought and preferably expunged from the human experience because it briefly impacts quarterly revenue.
It’s a feeling that has been coming up repeatedly, but with increasing frequency in the last few years. That being: what is all of this for? Where are we going? Nobody who defends the status quo can seem to answer it. What’s the point of an uninterrupted quarterly revenue stream if we can’t even look at an eclipse every few years? What’s the point of hustling and grinding 50, 60, 70 hour weeks if you never have time to have dinner with your friends, talk to your family on the phone, but on a bigger spectrum, what’s the point of all of that if you still don’t have any way of retiring in the future? With the way that our lives are being increasingly monetized and squeezed every second, what is there to look forward to?
