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Most of us can recognise about 20% of the people we meet later.
Go out of our circle of friends and family to acquaintances and we struggle to recall people we've met even a few months earlier.
There's also this strange context based facial recognition.
We see the lift man in his uniform every day but see him on the street and we have to jog our memory.
Just 1% of the world's people have a unique talent.
They never forget a face.
Even seen from the back or a profile.
Decades later.
And they do it effortlessly.
Recognising friends from school who have changed over the years even if their friends don't!
Face recognition AI has to be trained on the photographs of millions of people before it reaches acceptable accuracy.
But super recognisers, as these people are called, have an aberration in the frontal lobe of their brain.
They just have to see people once and never forget a face.
The police in the UK use them to crack tough cases.
At high profile events, they scan crowds to identify potential troublemakers
But what's strange is that the same people have trouble recalling names and dates!
Baffling? You bet.
Can data centers be set up underwater?
Submarine clouds are making a splash.
The technology evolution is reversing the biological cycle and moving back to water
Datacenters are high security, high cost and high maintenance locations.
So why is Microsoft sending them to the bottom of the ocean?
It started off with an experiment back in 2015.
Popping a working set of servers into the ocean inside a tube to see whether they would survive.
That went well so, they got more ambitious.
In 2018, a data center with over 800 servers handling 27 petabytes of data, of storage was sent to the bottom of the Scottish ocean
Cabling connected the underwater data center to the 100% renewable energy Orkney Island power grid.
When it was fished out two years later, everything still worked fine.
Sea anemones and algae had formed a thin easily-washable layer outside.
But the servers lasted 8 times more than a similar configuration on land.
Airtight capsules filled with nitrogen meant no oxygen and no corrosion.
No humans either. The perfect data center environment.
Looks like data scaling in future will have more to do with fish and the marine ecosystem than the sky.
And undersea deployment drops cooling costs.
But we'll still call it the 'cloud'!
The mosquitoes moved in first
It was billed as back to nature living in an vertical forest apartment complex in Chengdu in China
Where lush greenery softened the harsh edges of the concrete high rises
Creepers lazily hung over balconies.
And residents could look out across the city lights and live in their own version of natural paradise.
The apartments blocks with over 800 apartments were sold out.
There was only one problem.
Mosquitoes were as captivated with the thick growth of plants as well.
And they got there first.
The problem is so widespread only a few residents moved in.
And slapping mosquitoes away drains the appeal of the city landscape.
While we try to get back to sustainable living, we're finding huge gaps.
We can't simply transplant nature into a cityscape.
It has it's own rules and those rules cannot be enforced by housing societies.
We love the hikes through nature. And getting back to our sealed existence when we return.
Architects designing the integration of natural systems into concrete also have to contend with plants growing roots and breaking through pipes.
Our journey back to nature is going to be more eventful than we thought
What's your take?
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider sharing it with friends. Or Tweeting the link. The more people we can get to tune in every week, the merrier. Thank you.
By Connecting the not-so-obvious branding dotsMost of us can recognise about 20% of the people we meet later.
Go out of our circle of friends and family to acquaintances and we struggle to recall people we've met even a few months earlier.
There's also this strange context based facial recognition.
We see the lift man in his uniform every day but see him on the street and we have to jog our memory.
Just 1% of the world's people have a unique talent.
They never forget a face.
Even seen from the back or a profile.
Decades later.
And they do it effortlessly.
Recognising friends from school who have changed over the years even if their friends don't!
Face recognition AI has to be trained on the photographs of millions of people before it reaches acceptable accuracy.
But super recognisers, as these people are called, have an aberration in the frontal lobe of their brain.
They just have to see people once and never forget a face.
The police in the UK use them to crack tough cases.
At high profile events, they scan crowds to identify potential troublemakers
But what's strange is that the same people have trouble recalling names and dates!
Baffling? You bet.
Can data centers be set up underwater?
Submarine clouds are making a splash.
The technology evolution is reversing the biological cycle and moving back to water
Datacenters are high security, high cost and high maintenance locations.
So why is Microsoft sending them to the bottom of the ocean?
It started off with an experiment back in 2015.
Popping a working set of servers into the ocean inside a tube to see whether they would survive.
That went well so, they got more ambitious.
In 2018, a data center with over 800 servers handling 27 petabytes of data, of storage was sent to the bottom of the Scottish ocean
Cabling connected the underwater data center to the 100% renewable energy Orkney Island power grid.
When it was fished out two years later, everything still worked fine.
Sea anemones and algae had formed a thin easily-washable layer outside.
But the servers lasted 8 times more than a similar configuration on land.
Airtight capsules filled with nitrogen meant no oxygen and no corrosion.
No humans either. The perfect data center environment.
Looks like data scaling in future will have more to do with fish and the marine ecosystem than the sky.
And undersea deployment drops cooling costs.
But we'll still call it the 'cloud'!
The mosquitoes moved in first
It was billed as back to nature living in an vertical forest apartment complex in Chengdu in China
Where lush greenery softened the harsh edges of the concrete high rises
Creepers lazily hung over balconies.
And residents could look out across the city lights and live in their own version of natural paradise.
The apartments blocks with over 800 apartments were sold out.
There was only one problem.
Mosquitoes were as captivated with the thick growth of plants as well.
And they got there first.
The problem is so widespread only a few residents moved in.
And slapping mosquitoes away drains the appeal of the city landscape.
While we try to get back to sustainable living, we're finding huge gaps.
We can't simply transplant nature into a cityscape.
It has it's own rules and those rules cannot be enforced by housing societies.
We love the hikes through nature. And getting back to our sealed existence when we return.
Architects designing the integration of natural systems into concrete also have to contend with plants growing roots and breaking through pipes.
Our journey back to nature is going to be more eventful than we thought
What's your take?
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider sharing it with friends. Or Tweeting the link. The more people we can get to tune in every week, the merrier. Thank you.