Emma Perrier spent the summer of 2015 mending a broken heart, after a recent breakup. By September, the restaurant manager had grown tired of watching The Notebook alone in her apartment in Twickenham, a leafy suburb southwest of London, and decided it was time to get back out there.
Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/hook-line-and-sinker/542748/
This is a good example of a typical off-the-wall sci-fi speculation that sits around trying to premonitory for decades on end. Most ideas like this, and man do I have a lot of them, aren’t “premonitions” of anything. They’re just eccentric notions that wink out like flung sparks.
Link:https://medium.com/@bruces/computer-as-furoshiki-1993-8c9a20f1b3bf
In the heart of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 24) in Katowice, Poland, Global Climate Action (GCA) is hosting a lively program of events, which will demonstrate how cities, regions, businesses investors, and civil society are working – in harmony with governments – to implement the Paris Agreement.
Link: http://newsroom.unfccc.int/climate-action/how-blockchain-technology-could-boost-climate-action/
The moment Google Pixel Buds were used earlier this month to demonstrate real time translation from Swedish to English, people started freaking out about potential use cases for this kind of technology. But the thing is, Google isn’t the only company taking this on.
Link: https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/18/earbud-translators-will-bring-us-closer-the-future-irl/
Traditional anti-capitalism focused on the ownership of the means of production, yet the modern capitalist doesn’t even want to own the means of production, they want to own the very right to produce. To control the ideas required to produce and simply charge rents for these ideas.
Link: https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/is-capitalism-compatible-with-free-p2p-systems/2017/10/17
In the striking image above, you can see an early experiment in making books portable–a 17th century precursor, if you will, to the modern day Kindle.
According to the library at the University of Leeds, this “Jacobean Travelling Library” dates back to 1617. That’s when William Hakewill, an English lawyer and MP, commissioned the miniature library–a big book, which itself holds 50 smaller books, all “bound in limp vellum covers with coloured fabric ties.”
A Stanford University class –available on a podcast replays the 1970s Manitoba, Canada, experiment called “mincome,” on the way to rejoicing in Universal Basic Income.
In the U.S., Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who according to some is preparing to run for U.S. President, are promoting universal basic income.
One of the most beautiful aspects of the Maker Movement is how inclusive it is. Anyone can be a maker, and everyone is encouraged to find the maker within. Highly skilled combat veteran Karolyn Smith never considered herself a maker. Having returned home from her deployments with multiple debilitating injuries and PTSD, she found herself heavily medicated and losing hope, with no real solutions in sight.
Link: https://makezine.com/2017/10/04/meet-disabled-veteran-who-prototypes-prosthetics-cats/
Zipline, a California-based robotics company that has made a name for itself delivering blood by drone in Rwanda, has just announced plans to operate its services in Tanzania by early next year.
The Great 78 Project is a collaborative project between the Internet Archive, George Blood LP, and the Archive of Contemporary Music that seeks to work with the community in order to locate and preserve as many 78rpm records as possible. The current count is over 200,000 but are always looking for more. Most of of these donated 78s are also being digitized for future generations.
Hovering low over the ground and shooting mangrove seeds into the water, drones may become a common sight in Myanmar by the end of the year. It’s part of a reforestation project that aims to restore a natural ecosystem that is beneficial to wildlife, the environment and the local population.
Link: https://reliefweb.int/report/myanmar/drones-soon-be-planting-100000-mangroves-each-day-myanmar
The Australian National University (ANU) has unveiled its entrant for the 2017 solar car race from Darwin to Adelaide.
ANU’s ‘Super Charge’ is the scrappy underdog in the World Solar Challenge, racing against cars injected with cash from some of the world’s largest universities and tech companies.
Link: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-19/anu-unveils-solar-car-challenge/8960070