Covered this week; The world economy runs on GPS, it needs a backup plan… let’s take a shot at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch… Stan Mikita dead at 78… New York becomes first city to cap Rideshare licenses… Spotify’s quest for global domination… ‘Crackpot’ predictions of James Lovelock, coming to pass… What really happened at Trump Tower, as told by Larry David… Bote ruins Scherzer gem with a walk-off grand slam…
August 6, 2018
“It’s tough to overstate how GPS-dependent the world economy has become since the U.S. Department of Defense started giving the service away to the public in 2000. There are 2 billion GPS receivers in use around the world, a number that Europe’s satellite navigation agency estimates will hit 7 billion by 2022. Along with the telecommunications industry, banks, airlines, electric utilities, cloud computing businesses, and TV broadcasters require constantly precise GPS timing. Emergency services do, too, as do military forces. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has designated 16 sectors of infrastructure as “critical,” and 14 of them depend on GPS.”
This just strikes me as something everyone should know about. Personal lifestyles tend to evolve around using technology that ends up dependent on further technology that we rarely think about… Networks have a multitude of vulnerabilities, how would your day to day be affected if one of those vulnerabilities came to fruition.
August 7, 2018
The purpose of this bizarre gizmo is as laudable as it is head-scratching: to collect millions of tons of garbage from what’s known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This is an issue that’s both fascinated as well as saddened me for a long time now… I’ve been following the story of Boyan Slat for a while now through the pages of Wired Magazine… so happy to see that the project has reached the point of real-world testing…
Stan Mikita, the Chicago Blackhawks’ undersized but smooth-skating and feisty center who teamed with his fellow Hall of Famer Bobby Hull in the 1960s in reviving a long-floundering franchise while popularizing the curved hockey sticks that changed the game, died on Tuesday. He was 78.
August 8, 2018
“Even as Uber has become one of Silicon Valley’s biggest success stories and changed the way people across the globe get around, the company has faced increased scrutiny from government regulators and struggled to overcome its image as a company determined to grow at all costs with little regard for its impact on cities.” New York becomes first American city to cap the issuance of rideshare licenses…
August 9, 2018
The ascent of Spotify has been nothing short of amazing. Before Spotify I had been a person who first collected vinyl and then cassettes before graduating to CD’s… as my CD collecting continues to wind down I had been a person that always wanted a hard copy of the music I wanted to own… but after doing a 30-day trial of Spotify some years back, I was not only sold, I was hooked… any song you want, any album you want, anytime you want it… so this all makes sense to me… and it’s a great read… one thing I’d love to be a fly on the wall for though would be the real reasons behind why the ‘big labels’ are selling off their Spotify interests. The standing reason is that they’re music companies and not holders of stock in publicly traded entities, but that just doesn’t seem to cut it… One day we’ll know I suppose.
August 10, 2018
“I doubt any of this would surprise Lovelock, who is one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century, as well as one of the most articulate prophets of doom. As an inventor, he created a device that helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer and jump-start the environmental movement in the 1970s. And as a scientist, he introduced the revolutionary theory known as Gaia — the idea that our entire planet is a kind of super-organism that is, in a sense, “alive.” Once dismissed as New Age quackery, Lovelock’s vision of a self-regulating Earth now underlies virtually all climate science.”
August 11, 2018
“Everybody wants to know what was said in that Trump Tower meeting with the Russians in June 2016. Well, other than the people in the room, I, Steven Yablonsky, alone know exactly what was said because I worked as a janitor in the building and was hiding in the closet recording all of it on my phone.”
August 12, 2018
THIS… was the highlight of my Sunday… what a game… over the course of the first 7 innings, this was a 1-0 pitching duel between Scherzer and Hamels, 20 strikeouts between them… but then came the 9th inning…
