Lots of bits today. Firstly, make sure you open next weeks email, you have a huge chance of winning a cosy hoodie if you do 👀

I’m sure you’re all watching the Olympics, I’ve found it particularly cool this year that, through social media, athletes can bring everyone along behind the scenes like never before - we’ve all seen the demos of the cardboard beds.

Whilst social media was around for London and Rio, for the most part you had to have ‘followed’ an athlete in advance in order to see their content during the games, but Tiktok has opened a whole new world of organic reach, where individual videos can become popular rather than accounts, which is amazing and allows athletes from all over, no matter their sport or country, to share their experience to a potentially massive audience that doesn’t ‘follow’ them. What’s also mad is that social media was barely a thing during the Beijing games!

Anyway, C’mere to me…

Bits

Typo on Irish Covid Cert Site

Good news first, the latest data now shows that over 87% of the Irish adult population (over 18) has had at least one shot, with over 73% fully vaccinated - Irish Times Tracker

However, when it came to distributing the EU digital certs, remarkably, the Irish Government managed to register, and subsequently publish a website to, a domain with a typo... The domain was irishcovidcertifcate.org (missing the second ‘i’ in certificate)

Fionn Kelleher and Adam Conway spotted the mistake, purchased the correct version of the domain (irishcovidcertificate.org), and set up a joke site to mock the mistake.

They also kindly redirect folks though, and it’s very fortunate that two kind souls noticed the error before someone else with more nefarious intentions did. It would have been far too easy for a scammer to have created an identical lookalike site on a seemingly valid domain, and happily collect people’s names and PPS numbers.

Fionn and Adam now own the correct domain, with the ‘i’, so the government, in order to correct the error, had to completely change the name of the site.

Twitter Removed Fleets

Software as a service can become very cluttered when companies are constantly copying each other and adding as many new products as possible to their services. Social networks, in particular, are big culprits.

Twitter’s Fleets, similar to an Instagram Story, were just that, a pretty unnecessary product for a platform like Twitter. Therefore, to see companies pairing back their offering and doubling down on what they’re good at is refreshing.

On a similar note though, I really enjoy Twitter Spaces (an integrated Clubhouse copy) and I think it has a lot of potential as audio rooms suit Twitter far more than fleets - the same way stories suited an already media-based Instagram when they ‘borrowed’ the idea from Snapchat.

Interesting

Why is the US Twisting the Medal Leaderboard?

Propaganda? 🇺🇸

I want to preface this by saying that the overall medal totals don’t actually count towards anything, they are a vanity metric. Nevertheless, I think this is pretty outrageous, I’d even go as far as to say propaganda.

According to all major international newspapers and sports networks, that I could find, as of today, these are the current medal totals from Tokyo 2020 (2021), they may vary slightly by the time of the screenshot.

The ones I’ve included below include the Official Tokyo 2020 site (whose data Google use), BBC Sports, The Guardian, Sky Sports, News AU (Australian), and Frankfurter Allgemeine (German). There are far, far more though across all languages that agree with this list.

Notice how China is on top because they have the most Gold Medals. And notice how Japan is listed ahead of Great Britain for the same reason (despite this being a large selection of British media).

Sorting by Gold medals is the norm at the Olympics, it’s always been the way. If countries are tied on gold medals then it goes to how many silvers they’ve won, and so on to bronze.

If you go back through the previous medal totals on Wikipedia, the lists are always sorted this way.

Of course, in many cases, the country with the most Gold medals often also has the most total medals but take this example from the 2010 Winter Olympics. Germany has more total medals but Canada, with 4 more Golds, is listed first.

However, all US media sites, that I could find, list the US on top of the Tokyo 2020 medal tables because they choose to sort by total medal count rather than by gold…

From the New York Times, Washington Post, ESPN, NBC, Fox Sports and so many more…

They are technically correct, they do have the most medals by sheer total but this is not normal etiquette and feels very propagandistic to make such a conscious decision to sort this way.

They would have had to technically alter how their tables totalled from previous years, all in order to make it seem like the US is leading.

If you live in the States you likely have quite a different perception of how the US is doing in the games…

Watch 📺

Jocelyn Bell Burnell was an astrophysicist who grew up in Armagh in the 1940s.

In 1967, as a PhD student at Cambridge University, Jocelyn discovered Pulsars, a radio wave phenomenon caused by spinning stars and a hugely significant revelation for astronomy.

However, in 1974, her supervisor, Anthony Hewish, was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work on this discovery and as this short op-doc by the NYT points out, it seemed Jocelyn was robbed of that joint honour largely because she was just ‘a girl’ and just a graduate student at the time.

16 mins, and is really worth a watch.

She did eventually get significantly recognised with an award in 2018, albeit not a Nobel Prize, and incredibly she decided to donate all of the prize money, £2.3 million! to help female, minority, and refugee students seeking to become physics researchers.

Smile 😊

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

Too many people hire for the y-intercept when they should be hiring for the slope

-@vidhster

I love this one, it’s so true. If you’re confused, the y-intercept here is where x=0, implying x is your time at this new company and the y value being your skill level.

That’s all 🤙🏽

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Disclaimer.

Bits

Revolut Buying People Pints 🍺💳

In a clever marketing move, if you replied to Revolut on Twitter yesterday, with a picture of your card wherever you were watching the Euros from, they’d send you £4.50 or a ‘pint on them’, which is pretty sound.

🚢

Remember the Ever Given?

You might remember the Ever Given, the ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal last March, well it hasn’t been able to properly leave since…

The ship was effectively impounded by the Egyptians and it was only on Wednesday of last week, after the Suez Canal Authority eventually reached an undisclosed compensation agreement with the ship’s owners, did it finally began its journey home.

“In April, Egyptian authorities obtained a court order to detain the ship and argued the ship’s owners owed them $916 million in losses, a claim that the UK P&I Club called “largely unsupported.” Egypt later amended that claim to about $550 million.”

New York Times

The crew aboard, many from India, have been stuck on the ship the entire time, away from their families for months. Of course, these crews would expect to be away for weeks and months at a time, but this was, obviously, a completely unscheduled delay, of well over 100 days at that!

Smile 😊

Watch 📺🦠

This video by Johnny Harris has quite the title & thumbnail, “Was Covid Created in a Lab?”, but I assure you that this is not some conspiracy theory, rather it’s a very well-researched look at the two leading hypotheses about where we think Covid-19 originated and why we still don’t actually know.

It really does seem that a lab leak is far more likely than initially reported at the beginning of the pandemic, a huge element of which was influenced by the political situation at the time. This is especially because, over a year on, scientists have yet to find anything conclusive on the animal transmission theory for our particular coronavirus.

28 mins, but it’s worth a watch.

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

If meddling kids and a stoner dog are what foiled your criminal scheme, you probably weren't going to get away with it in the end anyways

That’s all 🤙🏽

Feel free to reply to this email ↩️

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Disclaimer

I hope everyone had a lovely pride month 🌈

We’ve already had a great summer of sport but there’s loads to look forward to - The EUROs finals and Wimbledon both this week, an exciting F1 season underway, the Lions Tour against South Africa, and of course the much anticipated Tokyo Olympics kicking off in just under 3 weeks! (to name but a few)





Anyway, C’mere to me…

Bits

EU Bans Single-Use Plastics 🥤

The directive passed in 2019 and as of July 3rd 2021 (last Saturday) certain Single-use Plastics are no longer permitted to be sold in the Irish Market.

These include Cotton Buds, Cutlery, Plates, Stirrers, Chopsticks, Straws, Expanded polystyrene single-use food and beverage containers, and all oxo-degradable plastic products. Further stricter rules will continue to come in 2023 & 2024, read more via Gov.ie

The World has a New Ocean 🌏

To join the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Arctic Oceans, Nat Geo cartographers officially recognize the Southern Ocean as the world’s fifth ocean.

The term the Southern Ocean has become increasingly used by scientists and in the media, so this is not just adding the term but also officially recognising it for its ecological distinction.

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is what defines this new ocean, unlike the land and continents used to define the others.

“The ACC flows from west to east around Antarctica, in a broad fluctuating band roughly centered around a latitude of 60 degrees south—the line that is now defined as the northern boundary of the Southern Ocean. Inside the ACC, the waters are colder and slightly less salty than ocean waters to the north.”

National Geographic


On a related note, how many continents are there?

Last week ‘Map Men’ released this great video explaining why it’s quite hard to answer that question…

The US Leaves Afghanistan

After almost 20 years, this weekend US troops very quietly but officially left their last base, Bagram Air Base, to the Afghans. Leaving the country in an uncertain state of Taliban advance.

This Irish 98-year-old woman helped win WWII

From Blacksod Lighthouse in Co. Mayo, at 1 pm on 3rd June 1944, 21-year-old Maureen Sweeney was the first to forecast a severe storm coming from the Atlantic.

This information led to the D-Day landings being postponed by at least 24 hrs.

Details of the enormous military operation were of course covert, so it wasn’t until a decade later that Maureen and her family found out that she may well have helped change the course of history.

A few weeks ago she was awarded a special US House of Representatives honour. 

And she beat Covid-19 too!

never gets old

‘ladies and gentlemen, the weekend’

I get a kick out of this Twitter account. Every week.

I’m sure you’ve seen the meme before, it’s a video of Daniel Craig introducing the artist ‘The Weekend’ on Saturday Night Live last summer, except it’s cut so that all he says is ‘ladies and gentlemen, the weekend’.

What’s gas is that every Friday, for the last few months, this account has tweeted this video.

And every single week, without fail, it gets a massive response, with between 100k-200k likes, and tens of thousands of retweets.

While the corporate world scrolls Twitter on a Friday afternoon it just doesn’t seem to get old!

Smile 😊

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

Zero-sugar cans use the away kit, diet cans use the alternative kit

That’s all 🤙🏽

Feel free to reply to this email ↩️

I love to hear your thoughts, if you ever want to get in touch you can email guyb@cmeretome.ie or simply reply to any of these emails! And if you ever stumble across a cool story/link you think is worth sharing — submit it here.

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Disclaimer.

I hope the Bank Holiday is treating you well! I’m very fortunate to be writing this from Spain - here on a short work project.

Travelling just feeds the soul, especially if you’re a creative in any form, I can’t explain how good but also strange it feels given the last year, but even more so I cannot wait for the summer ahead and hopefully the opening up of holiday travel ✈


Anyway, C’mere to me…

Interesting

Ransom Demands 💰

Threatening to spread foot & mouth disease...

We all read about the HSE attack in the last few weeks, but this was certainly not the first time a ransom attack has threatened the Irish Government.

Published on Saturday, a cool piece in The Irish Times tells the remarkable story of a letter to the state, in 1979, from a group threatening to introduce foot-and-mouth disease unless the government paid up £5 million… (somewhere around €25 million today)

Particularly funny though was that, following instructions from the extortionists, over a period of 7 months the government had to take ads out in the Irish Times in order to communicate with them.

The massive economic impact of such an outbreak amongst the livestock of a farming nation meant the threat had to be taken seriously.

Read the full piece, including about how the Gardaí tried to track down those involved, here - Irish Times

Reporter, Charlie Bird, has also published a podcast series discussing in detail how everything unfolded.

Smile 😊

Watch 📺

it’s weird, amazing and unbelievably self-produced.

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

“Let sit for 2 minutes” is possibly the most ignored instruction among microwave users

I’m listening to

That’s all 🤙🏽

Feel free to reply to this email ↩️

I love to hear your thoughts, if you ever want to get in touch you can email guyb@cmeretome.ie or simply reply to any of these emails! And if you ever stumble across a cool story/link you think is worth sharing — submit it here.

Please Share 📩🤝🏼

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Guy

Disclaimer.

Can’t quite believe it’s June 😎

The hottest day of the year so far was recorded on Sunday, at 23.1°C, out West at Newport Furnace, Co. Mayo, according to Met Éireann.

Balmy for Ireland but certainly not impressive…

Nevertheless, summer is upon us! 🌞


Anyway, C’mere to me…

🐾

Dogs Sniffing Out Covid

The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) released a pre-print paper on dogs, determining that they can detect Covid-19 on clothing worn by infected people with a 94% accuracy.

“The highest performing dogs in the trial detected the odour of the virus in the samples with up to 94.3% sensitivity (meaning a low risk of false negative results) and up to 92% specificity (meaning a low risk of false positive results). This is a greater accuracy than recommended by the World Health Organization for COVID-19 diagnostics, with the dogs consistently outperforming lateral flow tests across sensitivities between 80-90%, which have an overall sensitivity of between 58-77%.

While PCR is the gold standard of tests, with 97.2% sensitivity and 90% specificity, the researchers emphasise the dogs have the advantage of being incredibly rapid, and non-invasive, with the potential to quickly and passively screen individuals in public places without inconvenience.”

— LSHTM

Similar studies are emerging in countries all over the world, all with promising results.

A French study by Paris’s Necker-Cochin hospital found that dogs were much better than fast lateral flow tests (LFTs) and were able to detect the presence of the virus with 97% accuracy. The canine friends were 91% correct in identifying negative samples.

Another study at the University of Pennslyvania in the US, published in PLOS One, determined that dogs can sniff out COVID-19-positive samples with 96% accuracy.

Finland and many other countries are currently using dogs in their airports to test for Covid-19.

“Some methods of detection, like temperature screening, can’t identify infected people who have no symptoms. But dogs can, because the infected lungs and trachea produce a trademark scent. And dogs need fewer molecules to nose out Covid than are required for P.C.R. testing, Thai researchers said.”
— New York Times

Whilst they are not going to replace a PCR test, it seems that dogs are far more effective and accurate than rapid antigen tests.

They are also much less intrusive and can work much quicker. A commonly suggested use case is to have dogs walk through crowds at the entrances to events and at stadiums, airports, train stations etc

A two dog team could screen a 300 passenger plane in 30 minutes. Those identified as having Covid-19 would then be required to get a PCR test and quarantine while awaiting results, but this would still be more efficient than everyone having to be tested days beforehand and far cheaper too.

Important 🧠

Media Obligations in Professional Sport 🎾

Naomi Osaka is one of Tennis’ biggest young stars, at just 23 she’s a four-time Grand Slam winner and the worlds highest-paid female athlete.

Last week, before the French Open began, she made it clear that, for the sake of her mental health, she was not going to do press during the tournament.

“If the organizations think they can keep saying, ‘do press or you’re going to get fined,’ and continue to ignore the mental health of the athletes that are the centrepiece of their cooperation then I just gotta laugh,” she wrote in a statement posted to Twitter.

Following her first-round victory on Sunday, she stuck to her word and did not attend post-match interviews.

Within hours she was fined $15,000 by the tournaments referee and received a stern warning that she could face further penalties if she did not fulfil all of her media obligations.

So on Monday she made the decision to withdraw from the tournament altogether.

It raises some really important questions about media obligations in sport. Whilst we, as fans, love to see interactions with the athletes off the courts and pitches, at the end of the day they are there to play and that should be what we tune in for.

Of course, there has to be some media contact, especially with sponsors and the balancing of commercial commitments (who fund professional sport), but that can never come at the cost of someone’s mental health.

Smile 😊

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

It's weird to think that your co-workers might be faking their personalities as much as you are

That’s all 🤙🏽

Feel free to reply to this email ↩️

I love to hear your thoughts, if you ever want to get in touch you can email guyb@cmeretome.ie or simply reply to any of these emails! And if you ever stumble across a cool story/link you think is worth sharing — submit it here.

Please Share 📩🤝🏼

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Guy

Disclaimer.

(it landed accident free in the Indian Ocean btw)



Anyway, C’mere to me…

🗺 🇧🇪 🇫🇷

Moving the French-Belgian Border

Inadvertently…

A Belgian farmer, frustrated by a stone on his land, dug it up and moved it 2.29m (7.5ft), also moving his perimeter fence slightly too.

Normally this might just piss off your farming neighbour, but in this case, he inadvertently moved an international border, making Belgium a little bigger and France a little smaller…

The out of position border marking stone was spotted by very eagle-eyed French men, amateur historians, who regularly walk along the border and enjoy checking each stone they encounter against original maps. It’s estimated the stone was moved a few months ago.

The farmer, naturally, has caused a bit of a stir and is now obligated, and has been formally asked, to move the stone back to its original position.

Should he refuse to comply, not only could he face charges but the Belgian foreign ministry might have to summon a Franco-Belgian border commission to resolve the dispute - something that has not been needed since 1930…1

Smile 😊

Watch 📺

Enjoy this 40-sec clip, from 2010, of a reporter unintentionally making a no look half-court shot 🏀

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

4am is the hour where you’re either up really late or really early

That’s all 🤙🏽

Feel free to reply to this email ↩️

I love to hear your thoughts, if you ever want to get in touch you can email guyb@cmeretome.ie or simply reply to any of these emails! And if you ever stumble across a cool story/link you think is worth sharing — submit it here.

Please Share 📩🤝🏼

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Disclaimer.

Our springer spaniel, Harvey, passed away on Thursday morning 💔

It was an autoimmune attack on his platelets, preventing his blood from clotting properly. The hardest bit was that it really came out of nowhere, he was in unbelievably good shape and ran at least 5km every morning. Within less than two days from an inkling of a problem and heading to the vets for a check, he was gone. The shock since has completely wiped us.

I’ve always spent a huge amount of time with him, but this past year in particular he got into the habit of sleeping on my bed, which faces my desk, watching me work for hours and hours every day. Be it mornings, afternoons, or into the night, anytime he wanted attention, company, and a nap, he’d come find me.

Writing C’mere to me often keeps me up late and for the first time in well over a year he’s not watching me right now as I type this… which just breaks my heart 😢

I know some people have pretty trivial relationships with pets, where at the end of the day ‘a dog is just a dog’, but as sappy as it sounds he really was more than that. Harvey was my best friend. We had a special bond, and the timeline for which he was in my life was also a big part of that; from just two days after I turned 13, to now, aged 23, all of my most formative years. I grew up with him, and no matter what was going on in my life I could confide it in him.

I don’t want to bring your day down with my sad news, I just want to remind you to be grateful for what you have right now, for who you have around you.

Don’t let life’s strife for ‘more’ cause you to take everything for granted, appreciate the little things.

Anyway, C'mere to me…

News 📰

Oscars 🏆📽

Nomadland won best picture at last nights Oscars.

And Chloé Zhao became the first woman of colour, the first Chinese woman and only the second woman ever, to win the Oscar for best director, for her work on Nomadland.

India 🇮🇳🦠

Covid is out of control in India, with the 7-day average now at over 310,000 cases a day, ~350,000 just yesterday.

This short article, by Bloomberg, outlines what the US needs to do to help, both as a humanitarian act but also as a necessary response in preventing the development of a more dangerous strand of the virus as it rips through a population of over 1.3B people…

“India’s role in the global pandemic is unique. The developing world is counting on affordable Indian vaccine-makers such as Serum Institute of India Pvt. Ltd. for their supplies. With India now reserving virtually all its doses for domestic use, those countries will have to wait even longer to be vaccinated. And if the pandemic disrupts production at Indian pharmaceutical companies, it could affect crucial non-Covid medications as well.”

(read more - Bloomberg)

Interesting

Cherry Blossoms 🌸

Lots of people have been out enjoying the fine weather this past weekend and the stunning Cherry Blossoms.

The trees are special in many cultures and are celebrated all around the world, but they are a particularly big deal in Japan.

There are several celebrations in the lead up to Spring for the Japanese but the bloom of the Cherry Blossoms is the main event, in fact, people are often even given days off work or half days to go and enjoy them.

They symbolize a time of renewal and their beauty actually lies in the fact that the blossoms last for such a short amount of time.

They represent the fleeting nature of existence and the impermanence of life, but looking at it in a beautiful and appreciative way rather than with sadness.

The Blossoms also bring hope, good fortune, and optimism for the future. And it coincides with the end of the fiscal and the school year in Japan, a period of change and new beginnings.

(shared this photo last week too, but I think it’s really pretty)

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

Painkillers are the "Mute Notifications" option for the body

That’s all 🤙🏽

Feel free to reply to this email ↩️

I love to hear your thoughts, if you ever want to get in touch you can email guyb@cmeretome.ie or simply reply to any of these emails! And if you ever stumble across a cool story/link you think is worth sharing — submit it here.

Please Share 📩🤝🏼

If you enjoy reading this every week I’m sure your friends would too.

Consider Supporting ☕

If you like my content and want to give back in the simplest way possible, please consider buying me a coffee.

Buy Me A Coffee ☕

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Thank you so much ❤

Guy

Disclaimer.

Exciting C’mere to me news coming next week 🤞🎙

I realise today’s post is really long, but I think it’s worth a read, took a while to compile anyway!



I think in future we might stick to just the shorter little snippets, but let me know if you enjoy the longer pieces? I know it’s easy to scroll straight past a block of text but I promise I’m always cutting out bits trying to keep it as short as possible whilst still drawing from lots of sources and perspectives, giving the most consise yet well rounded view of a story.




Anyway, C’mere to me…

Bits

Earth Day 🌲

This Thursday, April 22nd, is Earth Day.

National Geographic just joined Tiktok and will host an event on ‘Earth Day Eve’ this Wednesday including a live EDM afterparty - which for some reason seems off-brand but is actually really cool.

European Super League ⚽

As I’m sure you’ve seen, a selection of the biggest football clubs in the world have, very controversially, signed up to participate in a new breakaway ‘super’ league.

It certainly seems like it has little chance of actually happening due to the dire consequences it would have on the domestic leagues and with the uproar from fans & organising bodies, including the FAPL, UEFA & FIFA, it would limit the clubs involved and their players from participating in anything else, but nevertheless, I thought this was a comprehensive piece to read if you’re looking for the all the details- see Sky Sports

Interesting

Ecological Cost of Crypto ₿🌍

What no one is talking about.

An important follow-up on NFTs and a very relevant one too, given Earth Day is this week.

(the post from a few weeks ago - NFTs Big Picture 🔮)

So the calculations required to add blocks to the blockchain are enormous and this uses a LOT of computing power, which in turn has a much bigger environmental impact than you might think.

The site cryptoart.wtf, created by digital artist Memo Akten, allowed people to estimate greenhouse gas emissions was one of the first to spark a lot of attention, but he subsequently took it down due to information on the site being misinterpreted and spread falsely online. 1He analysed 18,000 NFTs and found that the average NFT has a carbon footprint of the equivalent to more than a month’s worth of electricity for a person living in the EU.

Now, watching YouTube or Netflix, or any heavy internet usage has an ecological impact. Millions of machines are running around the clock to provide you with information in an instant yet still the impact is significantly less, and while data centres are becoming more and more efficient the opposite is true for crypto - the block calculations are getting harder and longer.

It is also very important to note that the financial amount an NFT is sold for does not affect its ecological cost, be it a euro or a million euro it still requires the same computing resources.

“Researchers at Cambridge University have estimated that mining Bitcoin uses more electricity than entire countries like Argentina, Sweden or Pakistan. A recently published paper in the journal Nature Communications warned that, if left unchecked, cryptomining in China could undercut the nation’s climate goals.”

- New York Times

Austrian architect and artist, Chris Precht, was set to release a whole host of NFTs, which would have been extremely well received by his large following, but as he explains in an IGTV linked below, he took the agonising decision not to sell his pieces due to the environmental impact of doing so.

I want to be clear that to a large extent you can’t directly blame artists. Firstly because marketplaces that facilitate everything make it very easy to sell NFTs but don’t at all disclose the eco-cost of doing so. Secondly, there is a valid argument that the mining of blockchains such as Etheruem would continue regardless and that NFTs (being the new hyped face of blockchain potential) take the blame. And thirdly, there is a cost to doing anything in life, even in the physical world, hosting an exhibition etc.

It’s also a tough thing to try and deter small independent artists when for the first time it’s the ‘little guy’ that can do really well in the digital art space. How do you tell people who could become millionaires overnight not to upload their work?

However, the ease by which in just a few weeks an artist can use such a crazy amount of energy is more than notable, especially when they choose to release multiple editions of the same piece, multiplying their impact exponentially as those, in turn, are sold on again and again, with each new transaction using ‘gas’ to be added to the chain.

There are a growing number of resources available to raise awareness of the issues and to track the impact - including carbon.fyi where you can simply enter someone’s public Ether address to see their transaction count and therefore estimate their environmental impact.

In fact, a few weeks ago while explaining a little about NFTs, I mentioned an Irish artist who I was impressed by… and well… their Ether address is responsible for about 19,641 kgs of CO2 emissions, which in a short period of time is pretty insane, 2the equivalent of driving over 79,000km or double the circumference of the earth…

I’m not implying anything about them or their art, but rather putting it into context and pointing out that it is something digital artists really need to be conscious of when using and profiting massively from the sale of NFTs.

Thankfully though, many of the top artists are investing in renewable energy and conservation projects to try and offset their impact, even if that is a band-aid of a solution.

I liked this quote from The Verge.

“Figuring out the culpability of NFTs is a little like calculating your share of emissions from a commercial plane flight, according to Joseph Pallant, founder of the nonprofit Blockchain for Climate Foundation. If you’re on the plane, you’re obviously responsible for a portion of its emissions. But if you hadn’t bought the ticket, the plane probably would have taken off with other passengers and polluted the same amount anyway.

Individual behavior becomes a bigger problem, though, when it drives trends. If enough people decide to start flying who weren’t planning to before, an airline might decide to operate more flights — which means more emissions overall.” 

(read more - The Verge)

There are things in motion to remedy this situation and more sustainable routes are emerging. For example, Ethereum’s developers have planned a shift to a ‘proof-of-stake’ method which is a much less energy-intensive form of security, although people have been waiting years for this and there is no clear deadline.

Many miners also use the environment to their advantage, setting up in Arctic climates and underground to save spending vast amounts of energy on cooling computers, and this not only saves them money but also has a lower environmental impact, win-win. Similarly powering mining centres using renewable energy sources.

Finally, on a completely different note, another knock-on effect of the uptake in crypto (and thus increased demand for mining) is a huge demand for GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) which has led to both the prices going up and dwindling stock levels around the world - all incredibly frustrating for gamers and creative professionals who’d like to put those consumer made tools to better use.

Smile 😊

Ian, @killarneyman, made a little website, willyoushiftmyfriend.com where you can relive getting rejected in a nightclub, just hit the button.

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

Most board games have one winner and multiple losers. Jenga has one loser and multiple winners.

That’s all 🤙🏽

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Disclaimer.

Bunch of videos to share this week, just a better medium to explain bits in this case 📺

Physics

Discrepancy between Experiment and Theory ⚛

A pretty remarkable result was released to the physics world at the end of last week, let’s talk about it. I think it’s really cool, albeit I barely understand it either.

Essentially, extremely simplified, there are particles call Muons (similar to electrons but 200x heavier) and how they behave in a magnetic field, specifically their ‘wobble’, can be ultra-precisely calculated and this number is called the g-factor.

Back in 2001, an experiment was conducted at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, on Long Island NY, and this seemed to show that the Muon behaved differently to the Standard Model - a particle physics theory describing three of the four known fundamental forces (gravity being the other).

The g-factor was not as predicted.

For the last 20 years, they have been working on and preparing for another go in the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, near Chicago. This time though with significantly more precision, to establish whether this deviation was merely just the result of errors and uncertainties in the experiment or some new unknown phenomenon.

“In its first year of operation, in 2018, the Fermilab experiment collected more data than all prior muon g-factor experiments combined. With more than 200 scientists from 35 institutions in seven countries, the Muon g-2 collaboration has now finished analyzing the motion of more than 8 billion muons from that first run.

Data analysis on the second and third runs of the experiment is under way, the fourth run is ongoing, and a fifth run is planned. Combining the results from all five runs will give scientists an even more precise measurement of the muon’s wobble, revealing with greater certainty whether new physics is hiding within the quantum foam.” - Fermilab News

It’s important to appreciate just how long the data analysis and validation of calculations like this take.

“To ensure the objectivity of the analyses, several analysis teams are working in parallel and independently of one another. The experiment is also using blinding techniques similar to those employed in clinical trials.

First, the analysis teams relate the frequencies they measure to a clock whose pace has been slightly altered -- and is now running too fast or too slow. A clock on the wall of this kind, for instance, would tick 60 times, but the time elapsed would be slightly more or less than one minute. Only two people beyond the experiment know the factor by which the clock has been adjusted -- in the experiment, this corresponds to a particular signal on the frequency measuring devices. Only when the relative results of the individual teams are consistent with each other (known as "relative unblinding") is this factor announced and can then be factored into the calculation. ”

(read more - Science Daily)

As you can see from the graph above, neither result agrees with the Standard Model.

Now, these results are not certain enough to be a refute of the Standard Model (yet), as the departure of the two combined experiments from the theory is 4.2σ (standard deviations) and Physicists only consider it a ‘discovery’ when the probability that the result was a fluke is 5σ1 or less than 0.00005 %

What’s unusual is that this deviation from the Standard Model mean this isn’t something we’ve theorised or that scientists expected.

Unlike say, the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012, which was theorised fifty years earlier and then finally proven by experiment, in this case, scientists have no idea what is causing the discrepancy.

So this could be an experimental error (although the chances of that are about 1 in 40,000), but it also could be some fifth fundamental force… they actually don’t know yet, and that’s exciting 👀. There are also computer modelling calculations underway too using Lattice QCD, the latest of which tend to agree with the experimental data rather than the theoretical data which is also compelling.

Here are a few resources for those who want to read up in more detail;

There is an extensive article by Forbes, definitely worth a read.

This is the detailed press release on the Fermilab Gov Site.

And this video by Fermilab is also a good explanation.

YouTuber Dianna Cowern, know as Physics Girl, also put up a really simple but great video where she just tries to explain it to her small production team (who aren’t scientists) and it’s a fab conversation to listen to if you’re interested.

Mad Stuff

Pong 🏓🐒

Another time we can talk about Neuralink and what they’re up to, but they also released this video on Friday of a Monkey playing the arcade game Pong just with its mind…

This video offers a brief explanation too, so is worth a quick watch.

Smile 😊

for tech people today

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

Villains would win a lot more often if they’d just set the bomb timer 1 second shorter

That’s all 🤙🏽

Feel free to reply to this email ↩️

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Disclaimer.

I hope everyone had a lovely Easter 🐰


This ones a litle lighter than usual as I’ve been absolutely flat out for the last two weeks — stupidly late nights at the desk — but I’m also very excited to show you what I’ve been working on, the biggest project has just lauched as of this morning 😎 (see below!)



On another note, I saw this scary realisation …




Anyway, C’mere to me…

Bits

LinkedIn Paid Week Off 👔

LinkedIn has given the entire company this week off, from April 5th, as an “opportunity to unplug, recharge and avoid burnout” - read more.

Obviously, a few essential employees will remain looking after the site but they too will get their week off at some point soon.

I think it’s a very cool initiative, definitely something I need right now.

Comparing Vaccines 💉

Read this piece, by Vox, on why comparing different vaccines and their efficacy is misleading and doesn’t make one better than the other - see more.

mad

Shipping Yourself 📦

The Irish Times had this pretty remarkable story yesterday about a Welsh man who wanted to escape from a job contract in Australia and decided the best way home was to ship himself in a box by airmail…

Things did not go to plan though… he was flown on a different route, the box was turned upside down and he ended up in Los Angeles with the FBI.

But, it was Brian’s two Irish friends, also working with Victorian Railways in Melbourne at the time, who actually helped him seal the crate shut and ship him off, and he is now on a mission to try and to find those two lads whom he hasn’t seen since.

Read more - Irish Times.

Smile 😊

Watch 📺

My new Skillshare Course is live:

Ultimate Guide to Getting Started in 35mm Film 📸🎞

I’m very, very excited (and nervous) to finally share it with you… if you do check it out over the next few weeks or at any stage in the future please let me know, I really hope it’s helpful!

I’ll elaborate another time but oh my days… it has been an insane amount of work, I’ve poured everything into it and I’ve completely and utterly burnt myself out in the process too 💀

Now, lots of work certainly doesn’t mean it’s any good, in fact, I’ve also never doubted my own ability, knowledge of a topic, or any other project quite so much as with this one, a very real imposter syndrome.

Nevertheless, I’ve learnt a crazy amount, so regardless it’ll be have been a worthwhile use of the last few months. Although I’ve had loads of other bits going on too, I actually started this at the end of October, during lockdown 2.0, and was expecting to have it finished by early December… oh how wrong I was 😅

Watch it here 📸🎞

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

Everyone has experienced the disappointment of mixing all the colours together expecting to get some sort of super colour, it's an early lesson in less is more.

That’s all 🤙🏽

Feel free to reply to this email ↩️

I love to hear your thoughts, if you ever want to get in touch you can email guyb@cmeretome.ie or simply reply to any of these emails! And if you ever stumble across a cool story/link you think is worth sharing — submit it here.

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Disclaimer.


I hope everyone is doing well, a 4 day work week for many of you so that’s good news! 🐰



Anyway, C’mere to me…

Bits

More on NFTs

Just a little follow up on last weeks post - NFTs Big Picture 🔮, new things I saw this week I figured were worth sharing.

Jack Dorsey’s tweet did sell in the end, for a crazy $2.9m.

This viral meme made me laugh, taking a dig at NFTs for just being a jpg with a verified badge ☑

BUT he then sold this image as an NFT for 74.00 ETH or currently $125,000…

Shout out to Dublin man Alan Bolton, making waves in the digital art space.

For years he’s been creating insane visuals on Instagram, and finally, there is a digital art market for them to shine, if there were any Irish VFX artists to watch right now I’d keep an eye on him.

Also, thinking about a C’mere to me asset, what would be cool? could be worth something in years to come 🤔

Interesting

Really Quite Stuck… 🚢

You can’t have missed the news about the Ever Given, part of the Evergreen fleet, that has been wedged in the Suez Canal since last Tuesday, but you might not quite appreciate how stuck the thing really is...

For scale, it’s the size of the Empire State Building at 400m long, 59m wide and weighs 224,000 tonnes.

It has a draft of 14.5 meters, so there’s more than a three-story building of it below the water level when floating, so we can’t even see where it’s actually stuck.

This video goes into detail about the frictional force required to straight-up pull it out, which is enormous because things get drastically harder when it’s ‘on land’. I think they’ve overestimated it a little but they got a figure of 33,000 tons of force, for which the average tugboat has a bollard pull of 65 tons, so you can see why that hasn’t worked yet…

Digging it out from the surface is almost impossible too, because of the sheer size and depth of the hole that needs to be dug, and they have to ‘reach’ dig it as on unstable sand you can’t have equipment placed over the spot your digging.

So dredging seems like the best option, removing land from underneath, and salvage teams have been working through the night for the last few days, but this no easy feat either, especially as they don’t want to damage the vessel in the process.

The other option, in conjunction with dredging it, would be to reduce its total mass, by removing containers, so the ship would require less water depth to remain buoyant.

Again though this is an extremely difficult logistics issue, given the location of the ship and the angle it’s at, but equipment and plans to do so have already been called in.

Rhett Allain, writing for Wired, did some rough maths and estimated that to decrease the draft by just 1 meter you’d need to reduce the ship’s mass by 23 million kilograms (remember mass is different to weight, but nonetheless a staggering number). This amounts to somewhere around 600 containers.

According to Lloyds List, a shipping data company, the blockage is costing the global economy a whopping $9.6 billion a day in goods that are held on those ships in the queue on either side, that’s $400 million every hour.

In total, according to the Egyptian shipping agency Leth, at least 327 vessels are stuck waiting to pass through the canal; 134 at Port Said Anchorage (North), 42 in Great Bitter Lake (Midway) and 151 at Port Suez Anchorage (South). 

Several vessels in recent days have changed their course, opting to take the route around the tip of South Africa, the Cape of Good Hope, the difference being an extra 12,000km and up to two weeks longer.

The longer this goes on the more significant the effects will be. About 1.9 million barrels of oil a day go through the canal, and yesterday amidst the delays and crucial missed shipments, the Syrian government has said it will start to ration fuel, an even more dire situation for the wartorn country.

QAnon (completely falsely, if that doesn’t go without saying) think this is all the doing of Hillary Clinton, but I think we know who is really behind it…

I thought this was a good quote:

“All in all, the blockage of the Suez Canal has laid bare the vulnerabilities of international shipping lanes and the fragility of supply chains. While the blockage will likely be resolved soon, it raises pertinent questions about the size of vessels and how these giant ships can be accommodated by what are essentially 19th and 20th century, man-made waterways.” 

(read more - ArabNews)

Smile 😊

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

Pressing the ‘lock’ button on your car key fob multiple times is the grown up version of saving your game twice

That’s all 🤙🏽

Feel free to reply to this email ↩️

I love to hear your thoughts, if you ever want to get in touch you can email guyb@cmeretome.ie or simply reply to any of these emails!

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Anyway, C’mere to me…

little bits

Expense your lunch 🍔🍟

A Toronto restaurant chain, Good Fortune Burger, renamed its burgers and products on Uber Eats to officer supplies — so that they would show up on the receipts and employees could expense their lunch… genius…

Walrus Adventure Continues

The Arctic Walrus that remarkably showed up on Irish shores in Kerry last weekend has now been spotted in Pembrokeshire, Wales. Another long journey for an animal that so rarely travels this far south.

Seal rescue Ireland are confident based on its markings and tusks that it’s the very same one that first appeared in Valentia.

Interesting

NFTs Big Picture 🔮

(worth a read, promise)

Surely at this stage you’ve heard an NFT, a Non-Fungible Token, they’ve been all the news and rage for the last few months.

If your ear is close to the ground in the tech world you’re probably fed up with hearing about them, especially because technically they aren’t anything new and have been around for years.

Nevertheless, I’ve consumed a lot of media about them in recent weeks and they have massive potential, albeit certain things are very over-hyped right now.

Really briefly, let me catch others up, I’m going to spare the details here, especially the technical bits because there are a million much better resources out there.

An NFT is essentially a digital asset that is provably unique and one of a kind. Yes, you could have many copies of the digital file but you’ll only ever have one person who owns a given NFT, that certificate as such can’t be duplicated or forged and this is enabled because they utilise a blockchain.

The majority of NFTs currently use the Ethereum blockchain, but they work differently from an ETH coin.

If you’ve only heard about them recently the concept can be difficult to understand, as in they’ll initially seem silly or worthless, but trust me there more to it and the possibilities in the long-term are where it’s really at. Plus how people perceive value has always been a contentious topic, and this is a new medium for expressing that, people love scarcity and the blockchain can verify that like nothing before.

The big headline that you’ll have seen is that digital artist Beeple, real name Mike Winkelmann, sold an NFT of a digital collage for an insane $69,346,250 — making it one of the largest art sales ever, the third-largest by a living artist and naturally the biggest NFT sale ever.

This was definitely reported as a sort of overnight success, but in reality, Mike was one of the first people working on and sharing digital art and had amassed a large social media following too after years of relentless work. He had never really been able to monetise it like ‘physical art’ and started experimenting with some NFTs last October.

The $69M piece was a collage of Beeple’s first 5,000 works (an enormous feat) which he shared every day from May 1st 2007 - January 7th, 2021.

The auction started at just $100 but was at over $1 Million within the first ten minutes…

This was Beeple’s reaction.

What is definitely less appealing about NFTs is that the viewing ‘experience’ of the piece is no different whether you own it or not, and in most cases, you aren’t also buying the distribution rights either.

For example, the person who paid $69M doesn’t have a version of it that is different from the jpg I have included above…

Although some of the short term hype is most definitely inflated excitement, this was a big validation moment for digital art and NFTs, a force to be reckoned with. And even the small sales are not insignificant amounts of money, with many NFTs going for several thousands of dollars.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter Co-Founder & CEO, is ‘selling’ his first tweet as an NFT, but will be donating all the proceeds to charity. This one from 2006 ⤵

The current bid is at $2.5M and supposedly it’ll end very shortly (writing this very late Sunday night). Again though, they’ll just own the bragging rights really, you can still view it as is and the new owner’s experience won’t be different in that sense.

“In October, the National Basketball Association partnered with Dapper Labs to start selling clips and images of famous basketball players as NFTs. By the end of February, they had made more than $230 million. Artists also got in on it, with a copy of the famous Internet creature Nyan Cat selling for $600,000 in mid-February”

(read more - Washington Post)

Big picture though, many people are comparing NFTs to the very early days of the internet or social media, and I know that seems far fetched but their application spans far out of art, and they aren’t going away anytime soon (best to read up when you get a chance).

Currently, there are issues with blockchains in scalability and transaction speeds, there are also lots of barriers to entry from managing and storing keys and wallets, to paying gas fees (cost of executing a transaction on the blockchain), to all of the regulations in the centralised world that will need to be bridged.

These obstacles were the same at the dawn of the internet, there were so many issues with accessibility and bandwidth, all things that have been solved and because of which we use the internet in ways that weren’t even imagined at the beginning.

Similarly, before the eventual crash of the Dot-com bubble there was loads of hype around this new ‘internet’ thing, that so many didn’t understand, but from the ashes rose Google and Amazon and the internet we couldn’t live without.

One of the most interesting things to me, that is happening right now, is the re-sales, and this is one of the cool potentials for both artists and those early adopters. On the Etherum blockchain, you can build in self-fulfilling contracts and perpetual sales splits, say for example the artist could get 10% every time the asset re-sells, allowing them to retain a guaranteed piece of it’s growing worth and taking the pressure off the initial sale to be of a certain amount.

Beeple sold a 10-sec video NFT, back in October 2020, to art collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile for almost $67,000, and at the end of February 2021, Pablo re-sold that same piece for $6.6M (three weeks before the big collage sale).

There are big things happening with them in the creator economy too, people are using them as a tool for investing in creators, similar to shareholding, and this may grant them access to exclusive perks or even voting sway in the company or creator that issued them. In music too, artists are selling publishing rights via NFTs, specifically, there is a good article here - VICE

So what do you think, would you buy an NFT?

Smile 😊

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

Headaches make you realise how much you take not having one for granted

That’s all 🤙🏽

Feel free to reply to this email ↩️

I love to hear your thoughts, if you ever want to get in touch you can email guyb@cmeretome.ie or simply reply to any of these emails!

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Happy Monday ☕


If you enjoy any of these please make sure you mark this address as ‘not spam’, just so you don’t ever miss the best ones!


Anyway, C’mere to me…

Interesting

An Evolution of the Music Industry 🎶

From the MP3, to Napster, to iTunes, to Spotify, to Touring, to Virtual?

I recently watched this three-part doc, by Bloomberg Quicktakes, on the music industry and it is really worth a watch, especially if you are an artist or a musician.

I know it’s unlikely you’ll commit to it right now, on this fine Monday morning, but each part is about 25mins and it is definitely a more productive way to procrastinate if you’re bored at home.

As someone who has keenly followed the evolution of the industry since I was a kid, from a tech point of view that is, I was so impressed that they managed to cover so much, albeit briefly, in this little YouTube series, so all credit to Bloomberg Quicktakes for writing it so comprehensively.

The doc first explores the technical revolution of the MP3, a breakthrough not just for music but for web video too with a new MPEG standard for file compression.

It then goes on to Napster, describing how Sean Fanning & Sean Parker shook up the music world forever, for better and for worse, but mostly for better, I think.

The story continues on to the consequences for the labels and what they do to fight back and fight new peer to peer networks with their legitimate campaign against IP theft, but also their unnecessary litigation against the end-users, often just naive kids.

Following this comes the era of online music stores, such as iTunes, and the splitting up of albums into singles, causing huge revenue losses.

Then Spotify enters the picture, changing the game yet again, and everyone follows suit, even apple drop the store model in favour of a new streaming service.

The series of events in the doc goes right up to the present day, with the growth in popularity of live events combined with more artists forced to tour because revenues are down, which in itself has its own tolls.

And then, of course, the pandemic hit artists like a brick wall. However, on the flip side, it also allowed the growth of new mediums for streaming and opportunities for supporting artists online.

Above is part 1, the three-part playlist is - here.

Add it to your ‘watch later’.

In my opinion, during the Napster era, the loss of IP control for artists was not a good thing in the short term, but in hindsight, shaking up the archaic labels that held all the money and distribution rights was a good thing for both artists and fans.

Although streaming revenues are not nearly in the same league as CDs, the opportunity today for artists to distribute independently and recoup close to 100% of what they do earn is a good thing.

Also, as they touch on briefly at the end of the series, it is not about comparing streaming to CDs like for like, rather the earnings model has changed.

Streaming plays more of a marketing role now and live experiences such as tours and concerts, even virtual ones, as well as merchandise and tonnes of other monetisation options in the new creator economy, is where the money now comes in.

Another interesting video out there is by Colin & Samir, who break down the Travis Scott x Fornite concert, which took place last May, could these ‘experiences’ and integrations be the next big thing in music?

Smile 😊

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

Prescription glasses must be of the most expensive yet least stolen items

That’s all 🤙🏽

Feel free to reply to this email ↩️

I love to hear your thoughts, if you ever want to get in touch you can email guyb@cmeretome.ie or simply reply to any of these emails!

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Disclaimer.

Remember when you wanted what you currently have? -1

The pandemic has set all of our plans back and that feeling of not being where you want to be or where you’d thought you’d be ‘by now’ is more prominent than ever.


So take a sec to add some perspective to your day, you’re doing great and don’t worry you’ve got time.


I’ve got some really big ideas for C’mere to me, and I can’t wait to see them through over the next few months, thank you so much for reading these.



Anyway, C’mere to me…


Bits

Product Care 🧵

Patagonia has a page dedicated to product care and repair videos, from fixing zips to buttons to patching and washing.

“One of the most responsible things you can do as a consumer is to keep your stuff in play as long as possible–and our care and repair tutorials can help you do that.”

(See more here)

Bridges of the Euro Notes 🌉

Many of you may not have held a cash note in months, but nevertheless, this is cool.

The bridges that adorn the back of the Euro notes are completely fictional, and deliberately so, no one country could complain if they just didn’t exist.

The first euro note designs, by Robert Kalin, were unveiled in 2001 2 and the bridges ‘symbolise the close co-operation and communication between Europe and the rest of the world’. They represent styles of bridges from all across Europe as well as a mix of different architectural eras.

However, did you know that back in 2013, Dutch designer Robert Stam3 brought them all to life by building mini versions…

You can actually visit them in Spijkenisse, Holland.

Interesting

Drawing Icebergs Wrong? 🧊

I stumbled on this thread by Megan Thompson-Munson, a PhD student studying glaciers and climate science, and I thought she made a cool point.

“A floating elongated iceberg can satisfy the buoyancy requirements of Archimedes’s principle in many orientations, but most, including that depicted in figure 1, turn out to be unstable. To see an example of such an instability, take a wine cork and immerse it in water in any orientation. Upon release, the cork will rise to the surface and float only with its long axis horizontal—that is, parallel to the surface of the water.”

(read more - PhysicsToday)

Then software developed, Joshua Tauberer, off the back of Megan’s tweet, built this little website.

Although this simulation is very very basic, you can draw any shaped iceberg and it’ll emulate how it might actually float.

You can try here - Iceberger

^ much more fun than it looks.

Smile 😊

Watch 📺

Indian or Native American?

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

Signing contracts with blood actually makes sense. A written signature can be forged or ambiguous, but the DNA test will always show whose signature it is.

That’s all 🤙🏽

Feel free to reply to this email ↩️

I love to hear your thoughts, if you ever want to get in touch you can email guyb@cmeretome.ie or simply reply to any of these emails!

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Guy

Disclaimer.


A little Covid related today, but whilst it is still such a big part of our lives we should continue to read up on what is happening and more importantly what needs to happen to get where we want to be…


Hopefully you’ll learn something about emojis too 😋



Anyway, C’mere to me…

Worth a follow 📲

Two Irish Instagram pages I thought were worthy of a mention ⤵

Frankie @meditationsfortheanxiousmind, if you need a good laugh this morning but simultaneously a meditation about Dublin’s Gay Spar, reinstating the Moro Bar, the Journal’s comment section, and the mystery that is Kimmage, then head over and give his page a follow.

Also, shoutout to @reelingintheweird — think reeling in the years but just the absurd stuff you can’t quite believe actually got aired on Irish Tv.

Few important Covid Bits

COVAX 🦟

COVAX is the initiative to get vaccines to the third world by securing agreements directly with pharmaceutical companies and with countries that have surplus supplies.

It was set up by the World Health Organization (WHO) and also involves the Global Vaccine Alliance (Gavi) and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi).1

They are aiming to distribute free vaccines to 20% of the world’s 92 poorest countries2. Middle-income countries, such as Mexico and South Africa can also purchase vaccines through the scheme, but will pay for them.3

4Research has found that is not only our humanitarian duty but it will be essential for trade. If the populations of developing countries remain out of work they won’t have the money to buy exports from developed nations, similarly, huge industries such as textiles are dependent on manufacturing in developing countries.5

The purchasing of vaccines for developing countries is as much of an economic necessity for governments as it is an act of generosity.

And crucially, should we let variants run wild and unchallenged in large populations of the world, we run the risk of allowing variants of the virus to develop that could be resistant to the vaccines we are so proudly administrating6... it’s a race.

The Gates Annual Letter 📫

Naturally, given the past year and their particularly philanthropic focus on world health, Bill and Melinda’s annual letter for 2021 is all about Covid-19.

“The moment we now find ourselves in calls to mind a quote from Winston Churchill. In the fall of 1942, he gave a famous speech marking a military victory that he believed would be a turning point in the war against Nazi Germany. “This is not the end,” he warned. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”"

(read the letter)

Interesting

The Syringe Emoji 💉

Apple & Google have redesigned it

From the release of the beta edition of iOS 14.5 Apple has redesigned the syringe emoji to remove the drops of blood and resemble that of a vaccine.

Google has followed suit and it looks like it will come to an upcoming Android version.

The process to have an emoji approved can take a year at least and it is often much longer still before it has been embraced by platforms.

So in this case a redesign has the effect of almost adding a new emoji (but not quite).

Not having blood in the syringe also makes it more versatile, it can now represent any form of injection.

Emojis are decided upon by Unicode, an organisation that is essentially the world’s standard for encoding and representing text and emojis across all devices and platforms. Almost all platforms use Unicode and it is fundamental to the success of the web we have today.

Individual companies cannot just create a new emoji out of thin air, if they did it would only work on their devices as no one else’s system would know how to represent the code, it wouldn’t work on any online services either.

They can, however, design it to look as they wish, this is also why emojis look different across platforms like iOS, Android, Windows, and so on.

It is important to understand that each emoji is not ‘an image’ but rather it is a character, which when typed is then displayed on every device that supports (has their own stored version) for that character.

In fact, emojis actually take up more than one character in the code, mostly two, but variations, in order to represent race and gender, can take up several characters (albeit you don’t notice, it still appears as if it is one, just the systems do)

At the end of 2018, Twitter declared that all emojis would be considered equal in terms of character count, even if they are still different lengths in the code — previously you could use up more of your character limit with certain emojis.

Even now though, all emojis are treated as two characters, so if your tweet was just emojis you would hit the current limit in 140 emojis rather than 280 characters.

The cool image below shows the changes in styles of the syringe emoji across the different platforms over the years.

Apple, also in their latest iOS Beta, have redesigned the headphone emoji 🎧 to look like their new AirPods Max…

We should have a go at creating an emoji, it would be gas, any suggestions?

(It’s a thorough and strict application process but I’d be willing to do it)

Smile 😊

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

It takes a lot of courage to list a piece of exercise equipment for sale and include “barely used” in the description

That’s all 🤙🏽

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Disclaimer.

A belated happy valentines to you all, particularly anyone who has supported, shared or referred their friends to C’mere to me, I love you 💜

This one is all about Mars and it took a little longer than some to put together so I think it’s worth a read if you’re interested — but no probs if not, just scroll down for some funny tweets 🕊



Anyway, C’mere to me…

Interesting

The Perseverance Rover 🚀🕹

Scheduled landing this Thursday, 20:55 pm (IST)

You might have heard that last week the UAE’s Hope probe entered a stable orbit around Mars. The mission is part of a wider geopolitical rebrand away from oil into science and tech, it wasn’t groundbreaking but nevertheless an impressive feat on their first try, only the second country to do so, behind India.

This was the first photo released just yesterday, taken by the probe in orbit.

Image: United Arab Emirates Space Agency

“The Hope orbiter carries three sensors designed to make the first comprehensive weather observations across the planet’s surface. The $200 million mission is the keystone of a national effort to make science and technology mainstays of the small Gulf state’s economy in anticipation of a day when its oil revenues dwindle, U.A.E. officials said.”

(read more - WSJ)

The launch window for Mars only opens every 26 months, hence why everyone is arriving at the same time. It also takes between 6 and 8 months to get there, traveling at enormous speed.

Image: NASA

Last Wednesday, China arrived into orbit too — with a much more ambitious project and their own rover scheduled to land later in the year.

“Tianwen-1, which means "Questioning the Heavens," launched on July 23, 2020 and is China’s first independent interplanetary mission. It arrived in orbit around Mars after a 202-day, 295-million-mile (475 million kilometers) journey through deep space. It snapped an image of the Red Planet during its final approach.

The spacecraft consists of both an orbiter and a rover. The landing attempt for the rover is not expected until May or June, giving the orbiter time to image and map out the intended landing site in a region known as Utopia Planitia.”

(read more - Space.com)

On Thursday, the US is going to join the party, but much more spectacularly, at least at first, when they try to put their new rover, Perseverance, on the ground.

To be clear, landing on Mars is really hard, only about 50% of Martian landing attempts, by any space agency, have been successful.1

NASA’s Curiosity rover successfully landed back in 2012 and has since gathered a remarkable amount of data. Achieving its goal of finding ancient organic material and showing that Mars did once have the right chemistry to support microbial life. It also took measurements of radiation levels and more, critical in assessing the conditions for future human missions.

As of writing this, Perseverance is traveling at more than 15 times the speed of a bullet… and has been on its way since last summer.

View the live stats - here

On entry to the Martian atmosphere, the craft’s heat shield will hit a temperature of over 2,100°C 2, and it will slow down to around 1,600kmp/h.

Next, an extremely strong supersonic parachute will deploy, slowing the craft down further to around 320kmp/h, which is still far too fast to land. The heat shield also gets detached, exposing the radar and cameras to work out its altitude the landing trajectory. Lastly, boosters are deployed to do the final major slow down, before lowering the rover to the surface by wires.

If the boosters went right the way down to the surface, they would kick up so much dust it would damage the sensors and equipment on the rover, which is why the ‘sky crane’ manoeuvre is used (see the GIF below).

As sci-fi as this looks, this is legitimately what they are going to attempt to do…

It takes about 7mins from the top of the atmosphere to landing, and this is known as ‘the seven minutes of terror’ because there is little to no margin for error.

Perseverance has to perform all of the entry and landing manoeuvres autonomously as it takes between 3 to 22mins to receive a radio communication signal from Mars (depending on where Mars is relative to the Earth) so it’s not possible for humans to intervene during the landing. On Thursday night it’s going to be like watching tv coverage 12 mins behind what’s happening ‘live’.

Jezero Crater, the landing site, is believed to have once been flooded with water and was chosen for its high potential for finding signs of past microbial life. Advancements in the tech onboard Perseverance will allow for a much more accurate landing and thus much less driving time. If you miss, it could take the rover months to drive to where you want it to, we are talking about a planet here… and there ain’t no roads.

Perseverance is on a different mission to Curiosity so although they look very similar they are very different. She has some seriously cool tech on board, from a ‘Mars helicopter’ drone to a CO2 to O2 generator and really complex sample collection tools - see NASA’s Mars 2020 website for all the details.

Image: NASA/JPL

The Curiosity rover is still there and is still operational. I personally think it’s really cool that, all going well, there will be two of them just roaming around, albeit, in different spots.

Mark Rober, who worked on Curiosity, posted an excellent and trending video explaining it much better than I ever could…

I’ll definitely be tuning in for (hopefully 🤞🏼) a smooth landing on Thursday at approx 20:55 Irish time, it’ll be on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook everywhere @NASA

Smile 😊

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

The international space station takes the smartest people on the planet and turns them into maintenance workers

That’s all 🤙🏽

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Anyway, C’mere to me…

Interesting

Invention ✈💻

Bezos Stepped Down

As I’m sure you’ve heard, last week Jeff Bezos stepped down as Amazon’s CEO, with Andy Jassy, the current boss of AWS, the company’s booming cloud services business, set to take over.

Bezos will still remain very involved though, particularly in big picture decisions, as he moves into the role of executive chairman.

On announcing this, Jeff wrote an email to all his employees and I thought this was an interesting excerpt:

“Invention. Invention is the root of our success. We’ve done crazy things together, and then made them normal. We pioneered customer reviews, 1-Click, personalized recommendations, Prime’s insanely-fast shipping, Just Walk Out shopping, the Climate Pledge, Kindle, Alexa, marketplace, infrastructure cloud computing, Career Choice, and much more. If you get it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. And that yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive.”

(read the full email)

Image: Amazon

I think he’s right in saying that, like it or not they are inventors whose products and services have been so successful you can’t imagine a world without them.

Most people aren’t even aware of how much there is to Amazon and how big their product set is, and by ‘products’ I mean the company’s product offering of which the entire online retail experience is just one piece of the puzzle.

In that list above, for example, Jeff didn’t even get to mention products like Prime Video, Amazon Music, Audible and retail chains like Wholefoods & Amazon Fresh.

I thought this Forbes article on the scale of Marketplace was really interesting. Amazon’s income and profits have skyrocketed, but still the majority of revenue from sales on the site actually goes to third-party sellers & brands, and Amazon just takes seller fees and fulfillment fees.

“Analysts have done the calculations and estimate Amazon’s GMV is about $490 billion in total and about $300 billion of that is from third-party sellers.”

(read the full piece here - Forbes)

The move will allow Bezos a little more time to focus on his other massive projects - as the founder & owner of Blue Origin, a SpaceX competitor, and the owner of The Washington Post.

Just for fun, this was the original Amazon.com page, after it opened in July 1995.

This picture is from 1997, when Jeff Bezos flew to Japan to deliver a package to Amazon's millionth customer.

This was the first Amazon office.

Images: Amazon

Smile 😊

Watch 📺

In 2019, Josh Reid flew to Shanghai (on the east coast of China), got a bike from the manufacturer Giant, whose factory is there, and then cycled all the way home to the UK…

He cycled 15,000km through 19 countries and it took him 4 months.

Josh recently posted this beautifully simple compilation of his trip, completely self-filmed. If you want to just relax for 30mins, I highly recommend giving this a watch, even if that means coming back to this email later.

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

Independence from Britain is one of the most internationally celebrated holidays around the world.

That’s all 🤙🏽

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Disclaimer.

I can’t believe it’s February already, please go easy on yourself, don’t feel guilty for not having achieved something in any day, heck even in the last year. Just focus on the little things, celebrate the little wins, oh and also, talk to your friends, they miss you as much as you miss them.


I can’t wait to share a film project I’ve been working so hard on, but it’s just taking so much longer to write than I ever anticipated 📷🎞 I’ve everything set up to shoot, but I want to make doubly sure what I think I know about film photography is actually true before I start preaching it.


Proper research just takes ages 📚 — Ever put something really trivial into a calculator during an exam? that’s how I feel, I’m doubting everything I know I know.




Anyway, C’mere to me…

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Scottish independence?

The Scots look increasingly in favor of leaving the United Kingdom.

“The polls, which now show a consistent lead for independence, have followed a bleak year for the United Kingdom in which it has suffered one of the highest coronavirus death tolls and worst recessions of any country.

It has also coincided with Britain's exit from the European Union, which a clear majority of Scots voted against.”

(read more - Business Insider)

“How would you vote in a Scottish independence referendum if held now?

This graph runs from Jul 2016 - Jan 2021, using data from 88 polls taken since the Brexit referendum, and since June 2020 the ‘Yes’ blue line has been consistently in front - WhatScotlandThinks

Above are the most recent polls & percentages.

Mad 💸

Lost the password to $230M? 🔐

Stefan Thomas, a programmer from San Francisco, is locked out of his Bitcoin ‘IronKey’ wallet - an encrypted digital wallet.

Back in 2011, he was given 7,002 Bitcoins to make an animated video explaining how cryptocurrency works.

A decade later, those coins, as of writing this, are worth over $230M, over €190M, yep that’s M for million.

And he has got just 2 guesses left… or that’s it gone…

The problem is that Mr. Thomas years ago lost the paper where he wrote down the password for his IronKey, which gives users 10 guesses before it seizes up and encrypts its contents forever. He has since tried eight of his most commonly used password formulations — to no avail.

“I would just lay in bed and think about it,” Mr. Thomas said. “Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again.”

—

Of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin, around 20 percent — currently worth around $140 billion — appear to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets, according to the cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis. 

(read more - New York Times)

Mad right? what would you do?

For those of you who don’t understand it at all, the system is essentially held together by maths, there is no bank or government that can just ‘issue' him a new password.

The system is not controlled by one entity, which is actually a big factor driving the success of all cryptocurrencies.

“The manufacturer of the IronKey drive, Kingston Technology, has since confirmed it has no power to assist Thomas in retrieving his private key, even if it wanted to.

“Kingston’s entire line of encrypted USB flash drive - including the military-grade IronKey line with additional tampering protections - allow a maximum of ten password attempts, after which the encryption key is erased and the data, therefore, is not retrievable,” a company spokesperson told TechRadar Pro.

“The drive then forces a reformat and requires a new password to start over. This policy helps thwart potential brute-force attacks. Kingston has no way to recover the data, as designed.”

(read more - TechRadar)

I think crypto does have a strong future, exactly which coin is still hard to call, bitcoin has some technical issues with transaction speeds and caps, so people are currently buying it more as an asset — its scarcity is modeled on the rate at which gold is taken out of the ground.

Personally, I’ve been very interested in crypto since I was quite young, I tried to mine them at one point in the early days, I don’t actually own anything at all at the moment, just as I don’t have the cash to invest, but if I did…

Anyway, if you find it interesting I’d love to try to explain different bits of how it works, the practical side of it but in easy layman’s terms, so just let me know.

P.s. - This is the video Stefan made back in 2011, to earn those 7,002 Bitcoins - YouTube

Smile 😊

On Tuesday I was so ready to write something cool on the GameStop situation but by Thursday there wasn’t a soul who hadn’t heard about it or offered to ‘explain it’.

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

Most people's handwriting shows that doing something mindlessly a million times over does not yield improvement, unless you actively try to improve

That’s all 🤙🏽

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Disclaimer.

The next few months really are going to be a long haul, but we got this 💪🏼😷


If you ever stumble upon any cool stories or links you please do share them using the new form (linked at the bottom of all new posts 🕺🏼), or share them directly with guyb@cmeretome.ie



Anyway, C’mere to me…

Interesting

Intern Discovers a New Planet 🚀

So a 17-year-old kid, Wolf Cukier, discovered a new planet in his first week on an Internship with NASA…

How is your internship going?

“His job was to scrutinize data that had been beamed back from outer space by TESS, or the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.

A unique aspect of the TESS project is that it invites regular people to volunteer to watch the online transmission for patterns in star brightness that might suggest the existence of a new planet, a sort of crowdsourcing of the universe.

During the first week of the internship, as he sifted through data that had been flagged by citizen-scientists, he zeroed in on a system that included two orbiting stars. He identified a body in that system that was later verified as a planet about 6.9 times as large as Earth. His colleagues gave the system a name, TOI 1338, an acronym for TESS Object of Interest, and then called the planet TOI 1338 b.

(read more - NYT)

It’s the first time that a planet has been discovered through the TESS system since the project began in April 2018.

The TESS project uses tiny regular dips in starlight, know as transits, to look for planets. TOI 1338 b is orbiting two stars that orbit each other, and from our earthly perspective, it is detected when it crosses the path of the stars causing a slight dip in the light emitted.

Despite all the data collected, it was actually quite a feat on Wolf’s part to identify the likelihood of a planet amongst it.

A Twitter user shared computer renders of what the planet could look like, they are generated by AI by @AmongBot, but boy is she pretty.

At 1,300 light-years away it’s a hard task to snap a pic.

🧠

A Focus on Process Vs Outcome

Hopefully, you can read this without clicking into it, someone shared this I really liked this sentiment.

I figured it was particularly relevant to those grinding away during this lockdown, with a lot of time to think about where they want to be and where they aren’t yet.

… although don’t overcomplicate the process either, process for the sake of process will inevitably slow things down, it’s a balance 😋

Smile 😊

An art installation of pink seesaws that allow kids to interact across the US-Mexico border has won the ‘Beazley 2020 Design of the Year’ award, presented by The Design Museum in London. (See BBC)

This is both heartwarming and heartbreaking…

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

Golf carts are much cheaper than cars, but if someone is driving around in a golf cart it’s safe to assume they’re disgustingly rich.

I’m listening to

Good context on recent events.

That’s all 🤙🏽

Feel free to reply to this email ↩️

I love to hear your thoughts, if you ever want to get in touch you can email guyb@cmeretome.ie or simply reply to any of these emails!

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Thank you so much ❤

Guy

Disclaimer.

Long email today and tonnes of cool topics in the pipeline.

A bit of a tech theme going on at the moment too, but I assure you things will be as sporadic as ever very soon.


Despite my own facination with following the tech world, I will hold off discussing anything unless I feel it has crossed into the releam of normal society and I think it’s worth paying attention to, no matter who you are.



ps. thank you so much for your support those of you who’ve bought me coffees and even got yourselves some clothing 🌟, that truly does not go unnoticed 💜



Anyway, C’mere to me…


Interesting

Clubhouse 👋🏼

The new, invite-only social media platform

At the end of 2019, I wrote an email on the growth of TikTok, which had amassed a huge user base but completely unbeknownst to those in Ireland, and well… hindsight is 2020.

There’s a new social network on the block, although it’s tiny still and you can’t access yet…

Maybe this will be the next big thing, either way, it certainly seems like the idea of an audio-only platform could take off, just depends on who gets it right first.


Clubhouse is essentially like a live podcast combined with a panel discussion, it’s being used for chats on all sorts of topics. You can meet like-minded people and develop ideas, it has a sort of networking vibe to it.

Back in May with just 1,500 users on the platform they already managed a $100M evaluation, so clearly people see the potential. Several Celebs were first to be invited on, including Oprah Winfrey, Kevin Hart and Drake.

Image: TechCrunch

The app features ‘rooms’ where you can jump in and out of chats on different topics.

There is definitely an air of Houseparty to it the way you can hop into live chats, but also it seems a little like Zoom with people’s mics on mute whilst others are in discussion, but again it is audio-only. Nothing is recorded and chats are not saved.

You can listen to any public room but you can’t contribute to a group unless you start it or you’ve been invited to participate ‘on the stage’. Anyone can ‘put their hand up’ to ask to contribute, but this feature can be turned off by group admins, for example, if the listening audience was very large it would be just unfeasible to allow input from thousands of people.

The bad news is that it is still in private beta, so you have to get invited…

Once you get on the App you can invite one other person and then through using the app, hosting discussions etc, you can earn more precious invites!

In fact, when you invite someone to the app, your name appears at the bottom of their profile as the person who nominated them to join, almost in an accountability way?

Currently, it’s only available on IOS, and if you go searching for it, it’s not the productivity app with the purple branding, that’s an entirely different app.

“What an interesting personality looks like on Clubhouse is different than what it looks like on other platforms,” Ms. Connors said. Several people in the pilot program are in their 40s or 50s.”

Clubhouse has yet to set up a revenue/monetization platform and there are few analytics tools available to creators either.

“The pressure for Clubhouse to crack the creator ecosystem is high. Failing to prioritize the needs of power users can drive them away. In 2015, nearly 20 of Vine’s top 50 creators left the app after a meeting in which the company refused to pay $1.2 million dollars to retain them. The app shut down a year later.”

/

“I feel like something has palpably shifted in the past year among investors, and it seems like everyone is talking about the creator economy now and investing in creator tools,” said Li Jin, founder of Atelier, a V.C. firm investing in the influencer economy.

She pointed to TikTok as a platform that had defied the widely held notions among investors that “consumer social” — platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram — was a thing of the past. “TikTok accomplished that in large part by treating creators as first-class citizens and making them feel like they’re served for and cared for,” Ms. Jin said. “I think that made investors realize serving creators was a good business strategy.”

(read more - New York Times)

Clubhouse is also having lots of issues with abuse on the platform and they have been slow to get policies and safeguards in place to manage it.

It will be interesting to see if it can scale, having a small user base, particularly those with credentials seems like a strength, one that can only deplete as the app grows.


It is not the only audio-only app currently trying to make a splash, with ‘Space’ being another.

Quarantine

Hotel Training 🎾

The Australian Open is due to start on the 8th of February but it is surrounded by some early controversy, which I’ll try to summarise really briefly.

Australians and politicians are angered that allowing foreign athletes in or giving them special treatment would undermine all of the country’s strict efforts to keep it free of the virus.

There is controversy amongst the many athletes who on arrival were locked into a strict 14-day hotel room quarantine, due to positive cases on their flights. Some claim that the rules were not made clear by officials and that they changed on arrival, with the initial perception being from some that they would have access to training facilities even if restricting their movements.

Others are happy to quarantine as necessary but are more worried about injury since they cannot prepare properly in just a tiny room before competing at the highest level in a Grand Slam. Also controversially, depending on where and how players arrived, they have been given different luxuries, with some of the top players having access to the hotel gym.

You can read more elsewhere but I actually wanted to share the positive videos being shared by athletes making the most of their situation, like this one.

(I wish videos could play natively in an email)

“Switzerland’s Belinda Bencic, Uruguay’s Pablo Cuevas, Kazakhstan’s Yulia Putintseva and Britain’s Heather Watson are among more than 100 players and staff now in hard lockdown in Melbourne, after four new positive cases linked to the tournament were revealed on Monday.

The quartet – along with other players – shared footage of themselves training inside their hotel rooms. Within these makeshift training centres, balls have been smashed into bed linen, volleys practised against high-rise windows and 5km run in tiny hallways.”

(read more - The Guardian)

The Guardian put together a compilation video of the makeshift hotel training.

Saved 📷

Think 🌊

In the first Harry Potter the security for the philosopher's stone was so weak it was broken by eleven year old kids and yet these people still kept their jobs

That’s all 🤙🏽

Feel free to reply to this email ↩️

I love to hear your thoughts, if you ever want to get in touch you can email guyb@cmeretome.ie or simply reply to any of these emails!

Please Share 📩🤝🏼

If you enjoy reading this every week I’m sure your friends would too.

Consider Supporting ☕

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Buy Me A Coffee

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Thank you so much ❤

Guy

Disclaimer.