The Grey Swan Guild News Wrap — The Week That Was March 12, 2021
Volume #1, Edition #8
These are a series of stories and headlines we are tracking in the Grey Swan Guild’s Global League of Sensemakers Newsroom.
Here is The Great, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of what we observed this week.
Legend credits Patrick with teaching the Irish about the doctrine of the
Holy Trinity by showing people the shamrock, a three-leafed plant, using it to illustrate the Christian teaching of three persons in one God.
This story first appears in writing in 1726, though it may be older.
The shamrock has since become a central symbol for Saint Patrick’s Day.
☘☘☘
March 17 just in the middle of next week!
The Great 😇
1.”Quit playing games with my heart”. Artificial hearts. Now there’s another solution for cardiac patients, and this one goes beyond fixing just an arrhythmia or single artery: a total artificial heart. The artificial heart is made by a French company called Carmat, and is designed for people with end-stage biventricular heart failure. That’s when both of the heart’s ventricles — chambers near the bottom of the heart that pull in and push out blood between the lungs and the rest of the body — are too weak to carry out their function.
2.”Fly me to the moon. Let me play among the stars. Let me see what spring is like on A-Jupiter and Mars. In other words, hold my hand.”
She Beat Cancer at 10. Now She’s Set to Be the Youngest American in Space. Hayley Arceneaux, 29, a physician assistant at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, will be one of four people on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Florida. Scheduled to launch late this year, it is to be the first crewed mission to circle Earth in which no one on board is a professional astronaut.
3.”Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the latest action RPG titles that came out at the end of 2020. The story in this game revolves around Night City, which is set in the Cyberpunk universe. The game was developed using the REDengine 4 by a team of around 500 people by CDProjekt.”
A ‘youtuber’ creates a ‘cyberpunk’ style necklace that blocks the microphones and prevents them from spying on them.
The digital content creator shows in detail the development process of the device called “Cyberpunk Ultrasonic Microphone Jammer”. The collar strap was 3D printed and the microphone blocker from ‘youtuber’ is inspired by a Bracelet filled with ultrasonic transducers developed by the University of Chicago (USA).
The Good 😀
1.The singularity is nigh!? Graphene ‘Nano-Origami’ Could Take Us Past the End of Moore’s Law.
For decades our ability to miniaturize electronic components improved exponentially, and with it the performance of our chips. But in recent years we’ve started approaching the physical limits of the silicon technology we’ve become so reliant on, and progress is slowing.
One of the reasons is that the processes used to create these incredibly thin layers inevitably introduce defects that can change the properties of the material. Typically, these imperfections are seen as problematic, as any components made this way may not behave as expected.
2. SpaceX eyes mobile connectivity market on eve of launching 60 more Starlink satellites. SpaceX has launched 1,205 Starlink satellites to date, including prototypes. More than 1,100 of the Starlink satellites appear to be functioning, discounting test spacecraft and failed satellites, according to a catalog maintained by Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and widely-respected tracker of space activity.
The Starlink network could eventually number more than 10,000 satellites, but the first tranche of Starlinks will have 1,584 satellites orbiting 341 miles (550 kilometers) above Earth on paths tilted 53 degrees to the equator. SpaceX has approval from the Federal Communications Commission for around 12,000 Starlink satellites at a range of altitudes and inclinations, all within a few hundred miles of the planet. The low altitude enables the satellites to deliver high-speed, low-latency connectivity to customers, and helps ensure the spacecraft naturally re-enter the atmosphere faster than if they flew farther from Earth. (https://youtu.be/VSeRR4WpFMg)
3. 69,000,0000 reasons to pay attention to NFTs Golden Boy Beeple.
Or shall we say the Beeps or Beeplicious? What is Banksy gonna do with this toy that has the art world buzzing.
Make something digital that has an emotional connect … And by definition digitally unique. What could go wrong? Nothing unless you store the password on a hard wallet and lose it some how… We are looking forward to the new James Bond or Mission Impossible plot that’s theads in NFT first.
The Bad 😬
1.Netflix wants to stop users from sharing passwords. Bad news for people who share a Netflix account with another household as clampdown begins.
The message states: “If you don’t live with the owner of this account, you need your own account to keep watching.”
2.From fairy tale to culture war: Britain gripped by royal race row. Meghan Markle’s and Prince Harry’s interview on US television splits opinion in the UK
While the revelations were not directed at any member of the royal family, they painted the monarchy in an unflattering light at a difficult time for race relations in Britain — after the Black Lives Matter protests and the high number of black and minority ethnic victims of coronavirus.
3.Denmark suspends use of AstraZeneca vaccine as ‘precautionary measure’. Denmark is suspending the use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine for two weeks as it investigates reports of some patients developing blood clots after being inoculated, days after several other EU countries suspended use of a specific batch of the vaccine.
The Danish Health Authority also confirmed the suspension in a statement, saying its investigation would include looking into one death in Denmark.
The Ugly 😱
1.Google Chrome extension, UberCheats, helps Uber workers spot pay discrepancies. The extension automatically extracts the start and end points of each trip and calculates the shortest travel distance between the two. If that distance doesn’t match up with what Uber paid for, the extension marks it for closer examination. A few hundred workers have installed UberCheats on their browsers and some have taken their push for data to court. A group of British Uber drivers has sued the ride-hail company in Amsterdam under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The drivers say their profiles, obtained through a request to Uber, have gaps, including scant detail on how the company evaluates their performance. Google briefly removed the extension when Uber flagged it as a trademark violation, but reversed its decision after the founder appealed.
2. Republican Party continues to devour itself. The trouble started in earnest late last week with an unexpected letter. Donald Trump’s lawyers sent cease-and-desist letters to the Republican Party’s three most powerful campaign entities — the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Republican Senate Committee — asking that they stop using the former president’s name and likeness in fundraising appeals and merchandise.
3. China’s Tencent Becomes an Investment Powerhouse, Using Deals to Expand Its Empire.
A tech-market boom has yielded huge gains for China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd., which has invested in hundreds of up-and-coming businesses and is now sitting on a portfolio worth roughly a quarter of a trillion dollars.
“Tencent’s investment team maintains a low profile. Nonetheless, everyone knows they are the 800-pound gorilla in the room,” said Ms. Lin. She said startups could benefit from being part of the Tencent ecosystem.
Term of the Week: Swirlons!
Swirlons. New behaviour found in particles… We knew that some sub atomic material moves like particles and sometimes they move like waves. The new discovery indicates the move together as locusts do in a swarm, fish in a school and swans in a wedge
Meme of the Week — Nyan Cat
Nyan Cat is the name of an animation uploaded on April 2 2011, and became a viral internet sensation. The design of Nyan Cat was inspired by my cat Marty, who crossed the Rainbow Bridge but lives on in spirit.
The creator of the Nyan Cat, Chris Torres, has organized an informal collection of meme originators — the creators or original popularizers of meme images — into a two-week-long auction of their works. Under the hashtag #memeconomy the creators of memes like Bad Luck Brian, Coughing Cat, Kitty Cat Dance, Scumbag Steve, Twerky Pepe and some others are finally finding a way to monetize the creation of genuine cultural phenomena that have been used freely for decades.
They’re mostly being hosted on booming new crypto art and collectibles platform Foundation, which launched in February and has already hosted $6 million in sales of over 1,000 NFTs. I have a lot to say about NFTs and can’t say them all here, but I found this project fascinating and wanted to note it. The fact is that memes are internet art (sorry). They are unique creations that took elements of participatory and performance art and injected them into the veins of the internet. In many ways, they have millions of creators, as the original editions may have planted the seed but every use and permutation gave them additional strands of DNA, crafting their cultural importance upload by upload. They have let us express ourselves — our desire, disgust, joy and lust — when words just wouldn’t suffice.
Chart of the Week: The coming consumer boom.
The GSG Medium is The Message
Visit our Medium channel every Friday for a weekly wrap on the world’s biggest challenges and other fresh articles and points of view The Guild is sharing. Please drop by our Grey Swan Guild website (greyswanguild.org) for more publications and articles about how we make sense of the world ongoing and also the raft of possibilities to participate as a Sensemaker.
This Week’s Grey Swan News Wrap Editor: Agustín Borrazás core member and collaborator at the guild and this week’s news wrap editor with help from @sylvia, @doyle, @ben, @sean and @rob.
Grey Swan Guild — Making Sense of What’s Next
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