Curated Commons // Edition 68
Thank you for subscribing and welcome to the 68th edition of Curated Commons. My best wishes to you and your loved ones for a healthy, happy, and successful 2022.
If you are new, or if you received this newsletter as a forward, I send this once a week and each edition focuses on tech/business/science/algorithmic future/Internet weirdness/anything-else-that-catches-my-eye. Let’s dive right in ($ indicates potential paywall).
Space jam
SpaceX is coming in for some heat
China complained to the UN that Beijing had to take evasive action twice to avoid coming in the path of a Starlink satellite. - Read here
Space is getting crowded. It’s not just satellites from Starlink, but more from Amazon too. Good FT piece pointing out an important shift in power dynamic - balance of space power is moving from countries to companies. - Read here ($)
Musk, obviously, does not agree with this argument. Coming up with a rather funny analogy! - Read here ($)
Nothing sells like nostalgia
Vinyl sales are at a three-decade high in the UK. Accounting for nearly a quarter of all 2021 album purchases! - Read here
Is onshoring beginning to gain momentum?
The pandemic has wreaked havoc on supply chains. And now some companies are beginning to take steps to think beyond lowest-cost-sourcing. Hug Boss in this case. - Read here ($)
Can a bio-enzyme be the solution to North India’s stubble burning, air pollution problem?
Very interesting approach to the challenge of farmers burning stubble in their farms leading to heavy pollution in Delhi and elsewhere - a bio-enzyme that decomposes crop residue in about three weeks. - Read here
The struggle was real
Kids these days only contend with USB A/C and a couple others. Take a trip down memory lane and tell your kids why you were a legend for remembering all these formats!
On a related nostalgic note, the Japanese Govt is finally bidding goodbye to floppy disks - “The disks almost never broke and lost data" - Read here
Check your incentives
File this in one of the more amusing impact of incentives. The state of Michigan in the US apparently offers 10 cents for every beverage container that’s returned. That encourages people to bring them from out of state and return in Michigan. The state has now passed a law to classify such an act as a felony. - Read here
Autonomous trucks are coming
A semitruck just completed an 80-mile journey without human intervention. That’s a pretty big leap for an industry that’s heavily dependent on humans - humans that don’t want to do that job. - Read here
What do you do when you are #2 or #3 in a market? Buy customers?
At least that’s what Google and Microsoft are apparently doing to drive their cloud business. Reminded of how some big companies gave loans to their suppliers to ensure their own production lines kept humming along. This is a new one though! - Read here ($)
Unwrapping an Egyptian Mummy, digitally
Interesting approach of using 3D CT scanning to reveal the wrapped remains of a fragile 3,500-year old fragile artefact. - Read here
Direct air capture firms are here. Will they succeed?
Companies want to suck carbon out of air. Some want to keep the carbon buried in there. Others want to use this captured carbon to drive extraction of more oil - capturing carbon to put more carbon in the air - some cycle it is! - Read here
On a related note, an interesting experiment to capture carbon using…fake whale poo - Read here
The (Chinese) digital transformation of shipping data
The shipping industry has always been a laggard when it comes to digitizing their process. And there now seems to be some big industry-wide moves thro’ a company that’s owned by the Chinese Govt. And that’s causing a lot of concern globally. Good deep-dive on this important area. - Read here ($)
Brain machine interfaces are truly amazing
The tweet says it all! - Read here
More interesting reads
Brilliant investigative read on how Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs took donations from the UAE to research ‘happiness’ and the whitewashing attempts thereafter. - Read here
Vending machines in Japan are getting a second wind, thanks to the pandemic - Read here
Everybody loves dogfooding, till it’s their turn. Doordash now requires all non-delivery employees to do a “dash” once a month. Some employees are apparently furious - Read here
MIT scientists have pulled together a detailed 3D “atlas” of the ocean’s oxygen-starved waters to help predict response of oceans to climate change - Read here
The insane engineering behind the James Webb telescope - See here
Interesting piece from earlier in the year on parenting styles - Read here
More ammunition in the fight against HIV - Read here
An oral history of the The Matrix video games - Read here
And finally, the tweet of the year
Stay safe, and happy reading! And if you liked the newsletter, please do share on your social networks. My DMs on Twitter are always open for any feedback.