“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.
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 1/4″ screen.
With a Liquid Crystal Video Display (LVD), the images would only appear when exposed to light. So the brighter the light, the better the screen pixels looked.
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’.
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 apparatus to measure the speed of sound in a gas or a solid rod.
The faux mosh pit is the result of a process called sound looking which demonstrates what audible vibrations may actually look like.
No one can doubt that life moves to fascinating rhythms & vibrations.
“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.
