How much is a petabyte?

More than you can read or see in a whole lifetime.

Since 1996, the Internet Archive has put together the combined output of humanity in knowledge, thought and action.

75 years of pulp fiction are part of the collections.

Just in case anyone thinks that all it has are classics of literature only a few people read.

We have this image of a library in our head.

A quiet place filled with books where we spend hours learning about things.

Or falling in love, going by the number of movies where the couple meet each other across tables and shelves.

Or we imagine the classic Library of Alexandria which held the cumulative knowledge of early civilization.

We probably create more material in a day of the internet than humanity did in all the previous thousands of years.

There's no way any library can hope to archive everything.

And they shouldn't - most of it isn't worth preserving for a couple of seconds leave alone centuries.

But take a look sometime.

It's a library open to anyone on earth with an internet connection.

Knowledge is no longer the preserve of the fortunate few.

How was the party last night?

In the age of Instagram, a reality check.

Dispo gives you the option of clicking pictures at parties through a rectangular lens.

You can't see what the photos look like.

It replicates the disposable cameras with pictures captured in the midst of the party. Fuzzy, real and without filters.

They only show up on  phones the next morning. Slightly delayed gratification and building the anticipation.

It's like re-living the parts you remember - and the ones you don't.

How quickly the pendulum swings. A decade ago, Instagram got you to use filters to mask blemishes and beautify pictures.

Now, there's an app that does exactly the opposite.

And it has built up a sizeable following already.

I guess the gloss and perfect world is less than welcoming.

And that makes smudgy reality relatable and memorable

Capturing more of the character and the mood at the party rather than the highly touched up version.

What's curious is how quickly the glitter fades. The perfectly composed and curated feeds feel like an overdose of cream pastries.

There's only so much sweetness you can take at one sitting.

Are you ready for reality yet?

Then hit up Dispo for an invite.

Watch out for porch pirates

You've ordered online.

And the package arrives on your doorstep.

Only to be whisked away by the fleet-footed porch pirate!

As ecommerce has boomed, so have the opportunities for  enterprising thieves.

They are even keeping a lookout  for ecommerce delivery guys on their rounds.

The packages that get looted the most are mid-sized, easy to swoop in and steal in deserted neighborhoods

If there's no one at home to receive doorstep deliveries, the package left out in the open can disappear without a trace if no cameras are installed.

It's a huge problem in the US. where 1.5 million packages valued at $25 million are lost everyday.

Its easy pickings for porch pirates who operate by stealth and make a getaway with the package in less than 30 seconds

So what's the way out?

Amazon Key allows delivery guys to open homes and leave the packages inside homes or garages.

The other option is setting up secure locations in neighborhoods where the company gives a password to customers to retrieve packages delivered close by.

The thieves may not know what they will get.

But when the risks are low, and rewards high, it's a tough problem to solve.

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There's no guarantee a college graduate is going to get a job.

However, the  cost of education continues to rise every year.

The Bloom Institute of Technology is going in the opposite direction.

Tuitions can be paid from income earned after graduation. Or upfront.

The institute teaches courses in data sciences and full stack web. And instead of interviews, companies can try out students for a month without paying them

It's like bypassing the interview process altogether to see if the student delivers.

A risk-free way to determine the aptitude, the ability and the work ethic of students before committing to hire them.

Then, they can be absorbed for a full-time role

There must be a catch.

The condition is that students pay back  17.5% of their salaries for two years - after they start earning over $50,000 dollars a year.

If they don't make it in 60 months after graduating, they pay nothing.

Obviously this model works best in rapidly emerging technology areas where there is a mismatch between high demand and availability.

It seems like a win for everyone - the students, the school and for the companies that employ them.

Sad that this won't work for the vast majority of career options out there.

Are you a forwarder?

Of messages, not logistics.

Shooting them off with a flick of the thumb.

In the connected world of never-ending messages, how many breathless breakthroughs do you receive everyday?

A cure for asthma or cancer.

A set of exercises to make you lose weight overnight.

Or the key to a political conspiracy revealed.

If it was news, would the newspapers not be scooping it and broadcasting it for the world to hear?

Remember the emails that used to threaten ruin if you didn't forward them to friends?

Just select 10 people to send it to and you will be rewarded. Or condemned to eternal damnation.

Most of the time, the payoff is spiritual, beyond the control of mere mortals 

Gossip always traveled faster than real news.

That's still true of all offices

Work deadlines may be pushed. But affairs and linkups spread faster than butter on toast.

Our fondness for the sensational always wins over reasonable explanations.

Like ghost stories that spring up around empty houses.

Passed around from ear to ear and growing steadily in gory detail.

And with each narration, another saucy detail is added, another irresistible morsel that makes it all the more 'viral'

Spice is not for cooks alone

Responsive design for architects

Think of a simple blueprint for floor plans.

But imagine that architects could make their designs fluid as well.

Exactly like web designers who create wireframes that change shape when the desktop design is adapted to tablets or mobiles.

There's no reason architectural drawings cannot be transformed with the elements being moved around.

Want the room to be narrower? Or broader?

The entire house to fit within a narrow boundary or a broad one.

In a GIF on Twitter a home design adapts to any kind of space and the elements within fluidly arrange themselves.

With current software you have to draw out the dimensions of a room and then add textures or materials or furniture.

Then, if you want to change the width or the length of the space, there's no way to do it with the same design.

Yes, it is a lot easier than the earlier generation of software but in our mind, web spaces can be fluid, but buildings cannot be.

Maybe it is simply a stunt. No one wants to live in a shape shifting house.

But at the design stage, shape shifts can open up minds to new possibilities.

Take a look.

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The extreme opposite of Amazon

Only one title is on sale in this bookstore at a time.

Where else but Japan?

In Ginza, in a single room,  Morioka Shoten, transforms book retailing to high art.

The clientele is invited to interact with authors and absorb the creative atmosphere around the title.

Book readings and interactions with the author are all part of the package.

The books are changed only once a week

That limits the number of titles to just over 50 in a single year - which makes every book an experience.

It is the brainchild of a former bookstore clerk who arrived at this concept after two decades of experience in the industry.

Amazon, within a few years of launching had over 2 million titles.

This bookshop will never sell as many in a lifetime.

Like bookends on a shelf, it represents business models that are poles apart.

Abundance with minimal attention or scarcity with maximum attention.

The idea is to delve into the mind of the author who wrote the book.

Get to know the creative process and the drive that made the book possible.

A labor of love gets the love it deserves.

A remix of a remix

One of the earliest viral videos on YouTube was a lip-synch

A young man sitting in front of his screen recorded himself mouthing inane lyrics to a peppy tune.

For all those wandering down the evolving genres of YouTube, this was one of those happy intermissions.

The Moldovan pop group who recorded the original were never in the limelight but their song took off.

47 million views for a version voiced by a guy recording it in his dorm room and uploading it to YouTube, just for kicks.

But the group capitalized on the popularity with a video in 2011 that went to 75 million views

That may have been the end of that story but it was recently revived in a tweet.

And this time, the faces are famous across the world - Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffet and Jack Ma. 

There are 9 faces on screen. And they change expressions in perfect synch to the same song.

Mark Zuckerberg looks more animated than he has ever been in real life. 

This whole sequence was created by an AI program. 

The remix of a remix looks like it's here to stay.

Talk about a random route to success.

Update: That particular tweet was taken down and the account suspended. Sorry.

Solve one problem at a time

Building a product requires several steps.

Identify a problem, then create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) find the product market fit and so on.

What if you had no such ambitions but simply solved whatever was bugging you?

A web designer who knew a thing or two about building websites and banner ads had to keep finding new clients. Revenues were ok but stagnant for nearly five years.

Then he took a hard look at the features most clients were requesting.

Back in 2000, it was the ability to create an email list and send out email promotions.

It was a side project but it was already paying more than web design 

The revenue was negligible - $50 per client but the number of clients who required this increased steadily.

Now billing those clients for this service brought up the next problem to be solved.

A monthly invoicing system that included a credit card debit feature.

That was one of the earliest executions of Software as a Service. No one knew that it would become so big of course.

The company? Mail Chimp. Built with zero investment from outside.

To a current value of $4.2 billion.

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If you chew on your nails, don't bother reading this.

A nail cutter is the last thing you need because your teeth do the job just as effectively.

The humble nail cutter is standard in households.

Stainless steel with concave clipper blades and a functional design. It's a lot like the office clip. The look hasn't been updated in decades.

The slightly rough pattern on the back to smooth out the snipped nail edges is also standard.

But have you noticed how it is always easier to cut the nails on your left hand? If you're naturally right-handed, that is.

Left handed, when cutting the nails on your right, is awkward. It's like you're back to being a novice

Much like trying to write with your left hand.

The first time I saw a nail cutter with scissor handles on an online store, I laughed.

It looked like a freak.

A design experiment gone wrong.

Then, I went ahead and ordered them, because I wondered who would go so far as to manufacture something as ridiculous as this.

I'm a fan now. It gives you a grip that the earlier design never could.

But it still looks funny.

Stuff some cotton into your ears

Has your hearing reduced by about 70% or more?

Does it feel disorienting?

The Sound of Metal explores what it means to go deaf.

The premise is that a drummer loses his hearing practically overnight.

Riz Ahmed plays the lead and his performance forces you to confront what he's facing - a world going silent.

It's terrifying and the scenes where a garbled set of distant sounds confuse, then mystify him, drive home what he's going through

One of the crucial aspects of making the film work is the sound design by Nicholas Becker

He had to imagine what is was like to live through the journey

At a musical research center IRCAM, he went into a sound studio where every trace of sound can be banished. With the lights turned off, he wanted to understand the experience of a complete absence of sound.

Close your eyes and concentrate on the world around you.

It's never silent. The ear has a remarkable capacity for depth we don't appreciate.

That's what the film does to you.

It brings you up close to living in total, unending silence.

Maybe we'll give our senses the respect they deserve.

Can you replace bits of your laptop?

Let's say, your display goes blank

Most of the time, that's a sign of a deeper problem and buying a replacement is expensive.

A new brand of laptops is being launched to tackle precisely this problem.

The laptops we discard every year because they aren't fast enough, sleek enough or because repairs are simply too time-consuming could be a thing of the past if the idea works.

Hardware replacements are a lot tougher because they come from diverse sources and optimising every part of the supply chain is a sticky problem to solve.

Framework has created laptops we can customize - how many ports we want or add memory slots and other specific bits to keep them running longer.

It goes against existing business models where you simply dispose of it and don't really care where it goes.

In most cases, they go to landfills creating a bigger problem.

It's not as if  our new laptops work very differently from the ones we already have. Delaying an upgrade cuts those e-waste figures 

And Framework has thought through the entire process of manufacture, replacement and repairs.

The modular laptop has arrived.

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What if you could change the patterns on the clothes you are wearing?

Simply by tapping a few places.

This was demonstrated at the CES booth in 2015

A model wore 'clothes' that changed right in front of the bystanders.

It was more like she was wearing strips of panels and not cloth.

The clothes were under this and they didn't change colour.

The idea was to demonstrate that it was possible to get designs to change based on what was programmed into fabrics.

Would people actually prefer to wear clothes that changed depending on the time of day?

For example, go from work wear to party wear at the touch of a few buttons?

The idea is in its infant stages because these clothes don't seem comfortable.

To make it happen, flexible panels will have to be woven into the fabric and respond to touch or temperature.

It should be easy to wear and style, otherwise there won't be takers.

The human form needs skills to drape and pulling off a look takes more than just great styling.

Otherwise people wearing them could end up looking like walking billboards.

We're not there yet, even for casual wear.

What a difference 60 years can make to design

The all-electric home was a major selling point.

Electricity could be used for everything - cooking, baking and laundering.

The video from Westinghouse Electric captures the aspirations of upwardly mobile customers.

And the constraints as well.

The man of the house takes his friend on a tour of the electronic heating, cooling and filtering of the entire house.

The women discuss the latest makeup advances and the cooking and laundry conveniences.

But the user experience and design is where the projections fall woefully short.

The prevailing design trends dominate

The TV is a boxy swivel that can be turned in any direction. No hint of flatness.

The buttons on the music system are huge. And  the ones on the washing machine panel. The washer and dryer are in separate compartments.

The thermostat that controls temperatures is an industrial design control and command centre. No IoT on the horizon.

What will a home in 2050 look like? That will be an interesting exercise.

Back then, they missed the internet and the mobile phone revolution that changed everything

We can't predict what AI and machine learning will change in the decades to come.

It will accelerate the changes we can't see.

Storytelling through text messages

Books have a setup. Messages don't.

They pop on the phone and a stream of responses follow.

So, can you tell stories with messages alone?

Phony Texts has a small base on YouTube.

But on Snapchat, there are over 6.5 million subscribers.

They're called Text Message Movies - which is accurate. 

All that happens is a flow of messages scrolling upwards with sound effects and notifications

The atmosphere is built using plain text.

And that's the power of narration.

You're drawn right into the texts playing out in unpredictable ways

Imagine eavesdropping on private conversations.

They're perfect for the mobile phone.

Banter between bosses and employees, girlfriends and boyfriends

They seem normal to begin with but then, some creepy elements pop up.

The conversations veer off in tangential directions.

Obsessive behavior and odd observations.

Not the regular placid ones you have with friends.

One of them asks for an introduction to a date.

And the response is that a payment has to be made for the introduction to happen.

Where does it go from there?

Try it out

This won't work as a book. Or even as a short story.

It has an intrusive quality that's hard to pin down.

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It's the single biggest mistake made by a bank.

Citibank transferred $500 million instead of $ 5 million, acting as an agent for Revlon.

It was part of an ongoing repayment plan.

It was like any other transaction - except that the term used in the form was misunderstood

The error was detected a day later - by then, it was too late

A tale of bad UI.

High value transactions like these pass through three levels of approval. And the box ticked seemed to be the right one. So, everyone concerned approved it.

There's a detailed explanation available in the article.

The creditors who benefited were delighted. They were expecting a protracted delay in getting the money back from Revlon.

Instead, they hit the jackpot

Citibank was aghast at the turn of events and tried to reverse the transfer. No luck.

Ordinarily, this would be reversed. But there is a provision in the law which says that if creditors are paid back by mistake they can keep it. And the transfer was equal to the money owed to them

The judge ruled in the creditors favour.

There's a crater to fill in the bank's accounts now.

In defence of boredom

Over the years, it has acquired a stigma

Boredom is to be avoided at all costs.

It has come to be equated with 'nothing to do' - a state of idleness which is frowned upon

Sometimes, the mind needs to wander aimlessly.

Without a looming deadline. Or toiling through a thicket of doubt.

There are proverbial warnings - An idle mind is the devil's workshop'

As if the exploring mind will immediately be oriented towards destruction and deviousness.

It's a time when the ideas in your head get a chance to interact and come up with fresh ways of looking at things.

When you lie on the ground and watch passing clouds, you see shapes and patterns that would never occur to you otherwise.

If you sat at the water's edge on a beach and listened to the waves chase each other endlessly, you'd get a sense of eternity a clock could never display.

Living life means many things - and all experiences don't have to be collected and stored in memories.

Boredom needs to be welcomed, not feared.

It's the space minds need to grow, without being driven to perform at every hour of the day.

It's your choice.

In corona times, creating safer public spaces

The coronavirus is not disappearing anytime soon

As governments struggle to help businesses open, an Israeli company, Protouch may have found a solution

Helping businesses operate and signal to people the places that are safe to enter

The original product was simply an LED lighting pole for exhibitions.

They collaborated with an American company Synect to install sensors and use AI to monitor crowd numbers in an area

As numbers increase beyond defined safe levels, the light indicator goes from green to orange to red.

The traffic light principle which everyone understands being applied to a new situation altogether.

These poles have been installed at the airport in Orlando and without using cameras or any other tracking technology, people instinctively move to the areas which show up as green

The light sensors can be altered to change depending on what is deemed safe.

So, if restaurants are allowed to operate at 25%, the numbers can be calibrated accordingly.

Or even entry into cinemas or malls.

It is applicable to all public spaces - and it can scale to just about anywhere because the components are easily assembled and deployed.

And it's what people easily understand and follow.

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They couldn't be more different

An onion and a potato.

But a restaurant in the US has managed to fry onions in a way that makes it irresistible.

It's not the familiar onion rings.

Dipped into batter and then deep fried.

There is no batter here.

It looks like a sunflower you can eat with the right dip.

There are several origin stories.

But it begins with an onion sliced deep in several directions but not all the way through.

Calls for some slick technique and preparation.

Expect it to arrive on hotel menus as its fame spreads.

The presentation is practically the story.

It's called a 'blooming onion' - a pretty accurate description if you can think of a fried flower in your head.

The chef who invented it was thinking of something inexpensive that would be a unique dish.

And the onion sort of popped into his head.

There is already a controversy on where it first came about and who stole what from whom.

The recipe involves using food colors and keeping the 'flowered onion' in a fridge overnight before it is dunked into the deep fryer.

Another sin food option for those who don't count calories.

Burt's Bees - a crazy brand story

Hat rakishly placed at an angle.

A face etched by the experience of living outdoors

An old world authenticity has made Burt's Bees a massive business in several countries.

Producing everything from lip balm to a range of cosmetics.

Burt is real. He's not a figment of some Art and Copy team's imagination.

His life story is full of contradictions and there are strange twists and turns to the brand story - or probably what sustains it.

He's a living mascot for the brand.

There's an opening sequence in the documentary where he arrives in Taiwan to a rockstar welcome.

Young people swarm all over him and pose for selfies.

He's got a straggly beard, speaks in a long-drawn drawl and seems to have the audience eating out of his hand.

To them, he's the very embodiment of a natural lifestyle.

Burt is happiest when he's left in a small shack from where his brand story began.

It has no running water and he has only recently upgraded to a place with normal conveniences available in modern homes.

He sold honey by the roadside for years to sustain himself.

And he still doesn't understand what the fuss is about.

Carbon farming

The best ideas are the simplest ones.

Several have been proposed to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

But there's a low-tech one which shows great promise

Kelp is a large brown seaweed that grows abundantly under the sea

It is a favorite in the nutrient business because of a high level of antioxidants which help the fight against disease-causing free radicals.

It has a slightly salty taste and is a favorite on the gourmet food circuit.

But the most important kelp benefit is what it does to the atmosphere.

As it grows, it absorbs an enormous amount of carbon from the air through photosynthesis.

And the bottom of the ocean is the best way to store carbon for millions of years.

A company called Running Tide Technologies is doing a simple experiment.

It's wrapping buoys with kelp seeds and floating them far out into the ocean.

As kelp grows in its natural environment, the weight sinks the buoys to the bottom, trapping the carbon as a massive benefit.

The genius of the method is that nothing needs to be manufactured.

It's just helping nature do the job it has done for billion of years.

Let's hope it works.

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The pandemic threw movie theaters into steep decline.

Through lockdowns and social distancing norms, it looked as if theaters would have a hard time springing back.

But they have an asset no home theater can replicate

A 650 ft screen.

The older games would not have stood up to this level of magnification.

But the new generation has amazing graphics that are rarely exploited to their full potential.

That's where the idea clicked.

A group of competitive X Boxers approached a closed movie theater in Singapore 

The idea was to compete and have the game play out on the movie screen.

The theater agreed and they paid $325 for a 3 hour experience.

Of sitting in the darkened movie theater with Dolby sound and the thrills of the game playing out on an impossibly big screen.

Is this sustainable?

Can movie theaters thrive by renting space to gamers?

Well, they'll never know unless they try.

The initial reports are that the experience was 'epic' and 'awesome'

That will whet the appetite of other gamers

And with games overall being bigger than the movie business, there's a new model in the offing.

 A pure adrenalin rush on a giant screen.

So, you're doing the daily grind?

It's a form of expression.

The cliché describing how life is stuck at a particular point.

Let's go back to a time when the daily grind really existed -  thousands of years ago.

At the dawn of agriculture

Women spent five hours a day grinding stubborn grains on stones to prepare food for families.

There was no choice. It was either that or starvation.

So, for all those interested in time travel, it may not be wise to go back more than a few centuries.

Our soft, sensitive bodies and psyches certainly cannot endure the hardship.

And here's the thing.

An electric mill set up in one of the remote villages prevents more starvation deaths than any other form of development or progress.

Even today.

The ancient industrial systems, a precursor to the information age, started out only in the late nineteenth century.

It's hardly the stuff bestsellers and hits are written about.

As humans today, some of us are living in an impossibly fortunate period of history.

Our daily grind is boredom, not survival.

Women living at the time had shoulders which rivalled those of competitive rowers who train for 5 hours a day

And it wasn't a sport.

Finally, archeologists make an exciting discovery

It wasn't another tomb.

Or an ancient chalice of gold

It's something that would be considered a treasure even today.

The discovery of a 5000 year old beer factory 

In Egypt, of all places.

Not England or Germany where you would have expected the find, going by the tipple's current popularity.

They found a unit with a large number of pots in which grain and water were heated.

So, humans knew pretty early on the secret of a good time. Along with grains as food, they experimented with fermented grain as mood elevators.

Back then, of course, there were no pubs.

This spirit was meant for royal rituals within the funeral facilities of kings.

We would certainly like some of our earthly delights in the afterlife as well!

Beer has traveled a long way through civilization.

And settled into the large, comfortable bellies of the faithful.

They will argue the finer points of hops and the perfect 'head' of froth while it is poured.

As well as the bitter accent.

Back then, beer was meant only for the royals.

And Egypt can claim the original recipe.

You can't expect the English to be ecstatic about a historical twist in the tale.

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Skyscrapers that stick out like needles on the New York skyline.

The haunt of the well-heeled crowd.

Looking for the perfect address in the middle of the swankiest neighborhoods.

But large vacant spaces were hard to come by.

And so, architects designed dazzling needles going as high as 1400 feet into the air.

Promoted as marvels of design and engineering.

The needles would tower over the older remnants of the neighborhood.

And they got across zoning locations that limited the height of buildings by going around a loophole - if the floors have structural and mechanical equipment, they are not counted.

So a building with nearly 90 floors has about 25 floors filled with equipment and structural artefacts - and the rest could be sold

Gleaming palaces of glass and metal priced at tens of millions for a single apartment within.

But nature's forces have their own rules.

The buildings face unexpected water damages and plumbing issues due to the immense height.

High winds cause the buildings to sway and while the design accounts for certain tolerances, it's deeply unsettling.

The view is incredible. And being on top of the world should feel absolutely great.

That's the whole point, isn't it?

Will smart cities be built around street lights?

It's an enduring image in film plots.

Students without means studying under a street light.

We don't pay much attention to them in the normal course. Except when they aren't there.

Then the darkness seems to paint frightening shadows.

So what do smart cities have to do with street lights?

Its early days but the plan is to make light poles the central point of a smart network

The new LED lights save a a considerable amount of power compared to Sodium vapour lamps.

However, that's just the beginning.

A whitepaper from Intel sees street lights as the core around which smart cities can be built.

They are already placed at a defined distance from each other.

Now, they can be networked to do far more.

Image sensors can measure the volume of traffic passing at different times of day

Parking violations can be caught from cameras mounted on the lights

Air and water quality measured with another set of sensors.

Even emergency responses coordinated by showing public the way to exit the city. Much like the pre-flight announcements by the hostess.

And of course, outdoor advertising on the poles could subsidize the expense to be incurred.

Smart thinking?

'V' and 'W'

They are right next to each other on the alphabet lineup.

But in primary school, we had a teacher who built a wall between them

She would pick out words starting with each of the letters and make us say it with emphasis.

At that age, we didn't see any difference between 'verb' and 'word'

But she underlined it with the expressions on her face.

All words starting with 'v', she would bite her lower lip and blow out her breath.

All words starting with 'w', she'd purse her lips like today's duckfaces for selfies.

Imagine a whole class of little kids with pursed lips trying to form 'world'. Or biting their lips to say 'very'

She persisted.

Almost like a drill sergeant making men out of boys.

Pronunciation  was her passion, not just grammar. It didn't matter if you spelt the words right. You also had to say them right.

We'd realise why only much later. Catch people routinely stumbling on 'world' and 'very' and 'went' and 'vent'. Or 'won't' and 'vault' - there was no difference.

Try this with words from the dictionary. And then, see how it impacts the way people understand what you say.

Thank you Miss Doctor. 

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Does your mobile phone wake you up with the tune of your choice?

And do you press 'snooze' several times before you finally get out of bed?

A look at how people used to wake up before alarm clocks were invented reveals some far-fetched solutions.

A lit candle, placed in a metallic plate, had nails pierced into it at regular intervals. When it melted to reach the nail, it would clatter down, waking people up.

The 'Knocker up' was a real job for people . They went around knocking on doors in the mornings as human alarm clocks in the early industrial era

The factory whistle was a loud, high-pitched sound that could be heard far away. It must have been the most hated sound of its time.

Bladder control was a thing for a time. People figured out how much water they had to drink every night before the pressure to relieve themselves snapped them awake. The ultimate personal alarm system.

Whatever the method, the snooze button on alarms was probably the most gratifying innovation - introduced by GE in the 1950s

We may have our favourite alarm tunes but we still want those precious additional minutes every morning.

Gamers have competition. Blockchain miners

As usual, competition comes from the places you least expect.

Gamers now compete with miners for high end laptops.

Their objectives could not be more different.

Gamers want to have the best sensory experience.

And blockchain miners want the firepower to crack complex algorithms to  authenticate Ethereum transactions.

As elements along blockchains get more valuable, the resources required to mine them have risen.

The miners are after PCs with Nvidia RTX 30 series GPU to give them an edge.

The gaming PCs are connected in stacks and play another game altogether - away from the public eye.

Market demand is unpredictable and this is a quirky example.

Nvidia is creating GPUs to enhance the gaming experience but they're being used to solve complex algorithmic puzzles.

The miners are willing to outbid gamers in order to lay their hands on the GPUs

They have to constantly reinvent themselves as cryptocurrency mining is energy intensive - first, they had to find the countries with spare capacities or where power is cheap.

Now, they have to compete using superior processing power

It's Ethereum mining vs Geshin Impact and Guild Wars

And there's no end game in sight - or rules. It's winner take all.

Training the mind to win

2020's French Open champion came out of nowhere in October

She was ranked 54 but she didn't lose a single set in all the matches she played.

Then she won the championship.

Iga Swiatek is from Poland. But the most unusual thing about this 19 year old?

Her association with a sports psychologist from the earliest stages of her career.

We've gone past the era of coaches who drilled hard work and methodical progress to get to the top.

It's now a mind game as much as a physical one 

What separates the top seeds now is not technique or game play alone but tenacity.

And that comes from shaping the mind to win.

The sports psychologist she works with builds her emotional anchors. A former sailor, she's at the helm of bringing sports psychology into the mainstream for sports in Poland.

It won't be long before other countries jump on the bandwagon.

The retinue for a champion is going to grow.

Raw talent will be molded, shaped and directed to victory.

So, the ones who seek to win on sheer talent may have a bigger mountain to climb.

The focus will shift to subtleties of the mind game.

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