In what was amazing technology for its day, the Seiko TV watch (Model T001-3) from 1982 is still one of the smallest TVs ever made with a 1.2-inch screen.
Watch tv on your wrist
With a Liquid Crystal Video Display (LVD), the images would only appear in 32-pixel resolution when exposed to light. So the brighter the light, the better the screen pixels looked. The watch’s battery lasted for only 5 hours.
The watch made its big-screen debut in the 80s movies James Bond Octopussy and Dragnet featuring Tom Hanks. However, the digital LCD wristwatch was first sold in Japan only and was manufactured in limited numbers after that.
This dual-mounted listening device served as an aircraft detection device before the invention of radar in 1935.
The Dutch military used the elephant-looking ears to detect approaching enemy aircraft by listening afar for engine sounds.
There were various iterations of the acoustic locators.
The Germans created a dual sight and sound system in 1917 that combined sound-ranging capabilities with binoculars to scope out aircraft.
The Imperial Japanese army used massive war tubas (resembling the musical tuba instrument) in World War I to detect the sound of incoming aircraft.
The Dutch also created acoustic horns in 1935 that were double the size of the personal sound locator. They offered passive detection of enemy aircraft by listening for incoming engine noise.
England built concrete acoustic mirrors around its coasts up until 1935.
Put your hands in the air and wave them like you just don’t care.
What looks like a dubstep rave of little ghost people is actually styrofoam dancing to sound waves in a massive plexiglass pipe known as a Kundt’s tube.
In 1866 German physicist August Kundt constructed the experimental acoustical apparatus to measure the speed of sound in a gas or a solid rod. Said Kundt, “A physicist must be able to saw with a file and to file with a saw.”
The faux mosh pit is the result of a process called “sound looking” which demonstrates what audible vibrations or acoustical forces may actually look like.
No one can doubt that life moves to fascinating rhythms & vibrations.
Touch is intuitive; the candy-colored screen all too addicting.
Generation thumbs transcend humans.
Still, it is the ability to communicate and tell stories that released humans from the prison of biology.
This video echoes what Yuval Noah Harari noted in his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind on the difference between humans and other animals.
We control the world basically because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. And if you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is based on some fiction like the nation, like money, like human rights. These are all things that do not exist objectively, but they exist only in the stories that we tell and that we spread around. This is something very unique to us, perhaps the most unique feature of our species.
You can never, for example, convince a chimpanzee to do something for you by promising that, “Look, after you die, you will go to chimpanzee heaven and there you will receive lots and lots of bananas for your good deeds here on earth, so now do what I tell you to do.”
But humans do believe such stories and this is the basic reason why we control the world whereas chimpanzees are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.
“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” said Andy Warhol. That was certainly true for the “broccoli tree” in Sweden.
In March 2018, the once anonymous broccoli-shaped tree on the shoe of Sweden’s Lake Vättern disappeared due to the popularity of its Instagram account of over 30,000 fans.
The tree became a tourist attraction and a host for various photography exhibitions during the time photographer Patrik Svedberg started documenting the broccoli tree.
But according to a heartless individual, the tree overstayed its welcome. Some loveless person sawed off one of the tree’s limbs and the tree suffered a tragic death.
“To share something is to risk losing it,” narrator Seth Radley notes in the tribute video. “You can’t unsaw a tree, but you can’t unsee one either.”
The broccoli tree may be gone, but its fame still lives on through calendars, prints, its nostalgic Instagram feed, and a website dedicated to its name.
What a harsh world for something that seemed so untouchable.
In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the world’s first supercomputer with 5 MB of data.
The machine weighed over a ton — it took a team of people to transport it.
To put the computer size and storage in perspective, our pocket-sized phones contain 256GB of storage. A grain of rice dwarfs the world’s smallest computer.
The world’s smallest computer next to a grain of rice
120 Years of Moore’s Law
Like fire and farming techniques before it, the ubiquity of computers and the exponential processing speed of chips, also known as Moore’s Law, changed the course of history. But even Moore’s Law is dying in exchange for brain-inspired chips.
Writes venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson who updated Ray Kurzweil’s visualization of Moore’s Law:
The fine-grained parallel compute architecture of a GPU maps better to the needs of deep learning than a CPU. There is a poetic beauty to the computational similarity of a processor optimized for graphics processing and the computational needs of a sensory cortex, as commonly seen in neural networks today.
Stephen T. Jurvetson
Dare we say it, the next supercomputer is not only artificially intelligent, but it also melds the mind and the machine.
Forget Google. Imagine having already downloaded all the relevant knowledge directly to your mind and using it expeditiously.
Here’s how IBM’s Director of Research Dario Gil sees the fusion of chips, neurons, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing wiring together.
“We’re beginning to see an answer to what is happening at the end of Moore’s law. It’s a question that has been the front of the industry for a long, long time.
And the answer is that we’re going to have this new foundation of bits plus neurons plus qubits coming together, over the next decade [at] different maturity levels – bits [are] enormously mature, the world of neural networks and neural technology, next in maturity, [and] quantum the least mature of those. [It] is important to anticipate what will happen when those three things intersect within a decade.”
In this video, the late Christopher Reeves who played Superman explains what the fictional superhero represents.
In a world of selfishness ushered in by smart devices and social media, Superman as a friend metaphor is a subtle reminder of the power of relationships.
It’s nice to know that there’s someone out there who’s willing to offer a hand and be a friend regardless of supposed differences, whether that be in race or politics.
Big thinking, small fragile world — such prescient words from Superman in the tribal world that is today.
Eye patch, parrot, and wooden leg, and a limp. Those are the essential ingredients to becoming a pirate.
But did you know that pirates wore an eye patch, not because of a missing eye, but because the patch increased their sight instantly inside low lit areas?
Early technology to avoid temporary blindness
During raids, pirates needed the ability to flip up the eye patch so they could quickly snag a cannonball faster below the deck of the ship.
So one eye was trained to see in daylight, the other in dark. The pirate patch was an early technology to solve the issue of temporary blindness caused by going to a dark room from a brightly lit space.
MesoSPIMs are open-source light-sheet microscopes for imaging cleared tissue.
The custom-built microscopes enable scientists to look at individual neurons using sheets of light rather than cutting a brain into slices.
The mesoSPIM Initiative paves the way for the future discovery and understanding of the brain’s complex organization. The studies may one day reveal vital information on the neuronal networks that drive mental illnesses and addictions.
A chicken embryo captured under the mesoSPIM microscope
There’s a road in the Netherlands that starts to sing the Frisian Folk Song when cars hit the right speed of 60 kph/40 mph limit.
The musical road resides in the village of Jelsum in the north part of Holland.
The structure of the strategically laid “rumble strips” was built in 2018 to celebrate the unique language and culture of the Friesland region. But the special ‘singing road’ also served as a warning to slow down speedy drivers.
However, the musical experience struck a chord (literally) with the locals who grew tired of hearing the notes 24 hours a day.
According to Dutch News, the €80,000 custom-built pavement markers were finally removed for driving (see what I did there) ‘psychological torture’.
“Everything you can imagine is real,” said the legendary painter Pablo Picasso.
In 1949, photographer Gjon Mili captured the painter using a small electric light in a dark room to paint the artist’s iconic centaurs, bulls and greek figurines.
The chaotic images vanished as soon as they were created but thanks to Mili’s two separate cameras, Picasso’s timeless “light drawing” live on.
Thanks to today’s advancements in virtual reality, one can replicate Picasso’s moves using Google’s Tilt Brush application on the Oculus Rift. The app lets your paint in 3D space with virtual reality.
The inventor of the laser printer at Xerox, Gary Starkweather, has died at the age of 81.
When Starkweather first proposed the idea of a laser printer to his boss at Xerox, they shut his idea down. But curious and determined, Starkweather persisted because he was convinced of the possibility of making precise copies.
Starkweather developed the printer at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center beginning in 1969 before completing it in November 1971
Even more interesting his how the genius inventor did it. Writes the Wall Street Journal:
To avoid blurry prints, Mr. Starkweather had to find ways to direct laser pulses precisely. He devised a cluster of revolving mirrors and a lens to guide the light. One of his breakthrough ideas came while he was mowing the lawn; he turned off the mower and drove to the lab to test it out.
Xerox created the first-ever laser printer in 1969
The Xerox printer found itself in nearly every office and home eventually, making the company an absolute fortune.
We often forget how people we’ve rarely heard of impact our lives. Gary Starkweather was one of them, as was Evelyn Berezin who developed the world’s first processor.
The prescient Starkweather also issued a warning about the negative effects of our over dependency on technology. The WSJ writes:
Though he never lost his fascination with technology, Mr. Starkweather worried about some of the consequences. “We talk about productivity,” he said, “but I’ve watched people go from 40-hour weeks to 60-hour weeks.”
He disliked the pressure to stay digitally connected at all times. “A big question about the future of information technology,” he said, “is, ‘Do I get to stay human in the process?’ ”
