Early in my career, one of my editors bluntly declared: “Mate, all cars are shitboxes until proven otherwise.” Around the same time, a veteran colleague offered an alternative take: “I want every car to be great,” he said. “And I’m disappointed if they’re not.”
— Read on www.motortrend.com/news/worst-cars-tested-by-angus-mackenzie/
If you’re not using video in your marketing strategy today you are lost in the maze of everyone else.
Think different / Crazy ones speech (with real subtitles) – YouTube
— Read on www.youtube.com/embed/keCwRdbwNQY
2020 | MIT Technology Review
In chaotic times it can be reassuring to see so many people working toward a better world. That’s true for medical professionals fighting a pandemic and for ordinary citizens fighting for social justice. And it’s true for those among us striving to employ technology to address those problems and many others.
The 35 young innovators in these pages aren’t all working to fight a pandemic, though some are: see Omar Abudayyeh and Andreas Puschnik. And they’re not all looking to remedy social injustices though some are: see Inioluwa Deborah Raji and Mohamed Dhaouafi.
But even those who aren’t tackling those specific problems are seeking ways to use technology to help people. They’re trying to solve our climate crisis, find a cure for Parkinson’s, or make drinking water available to those who are desperate for it.
We’ve been presenting our list of innovators under 35 for the past 20 years. We do it to highlight the things young innovators are working on, to show at least some of the possible directions that technology will take in the coming decade.
This contest generates more than 500 nominations each year. The editors then face the task of picking 100 semifinalists to put in front of our 25 judges, who have expertise in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, software, energy, materials, and so on. With the invaluable help of these rankings, the editors pick the final list of 35.

— Read on www.technologyreview.com/innovators-under-35/2020/
As late as April 2019, Origin, an independent research firm, found that 75% of consumers still carried cash.
Restaurants and retailers all over the country have stopped accepting cash. And you can blame COVID-19 for this rapid shift away from paper to plastic.
Techcrunch reported that Google is experimenting with a debit card. Ultimately, it could make cash obsolete for more than a billion Android phone users worldwide.
— Read on www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2020/05/24/pandemic-rings-death-knell-for-paper-cash/
How to Build a Brand Story That Buyers Emotionally Connect With
— Read on www.entrepreneur.com/amphtml/351408
Michael Gibson still remembers his first day working for Peter Thiel. Like many of Thiel’s hires, he’d met the contrarian investor through several of the PayPal founder’s variously eccentric political ventures. A onetime self-described “unemployed writer in L.A.,” who’d left a doctoral program in philosophy at Oxford, Gibson had met Thiel through his work at the Seasteading Institute, a Thiel-funded attempt to create a libertarian “floating city” in international waters. Then Thiel asked him to help teach a class at Stanford Law School on philosophy, technology, and politics. And then Thiel asked him to work for his hedge fund. Gibson had no intention of working in finance, or any experience in doing so, but he and Thiel had, he felt, “gelled philosophically,”
— Read on www.city-journal.org/peter-thiel
Events are a bundle of content, networking and meetings, and aggregate
people in one place at one time. When you try to take this online, half of
it breaks and most of it makes no sense bundled together. We need new tools
and new ways to think about networks, not ‘virtual conferences’.
— Read on www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/6/4/solving-online-events
The impact of COVID-19 on the physical health of the world’s citizens is extraordinary. By mid-May there were upward of four million cases spread across more than 180 countries. The pandemic’s effect on mental health could be even more far-reaching. At one point roughly one third of the planet’s population was under orders to stay home. That means 2.6 billion people–more than were alive during World War II–were experiencing the emotional and financial reverberations of this new coronavirus. “[The lockdown] is arguably the largest psychological experiment ever conducted,” wrote health psychologist Elke Van Hoof of Free University of Brussels-VUB in Belgium. The results of this unwitting experiment are only beginning to be calculated.
The science of resilience, which investigates how people weather adversity, offers some clues. A resilient individual, wrote Harvard University psychiatrist George Vaillant, resembles a twig with a fresh, green living core. “When twisted out of shape, such a twig bends, but it does not break; instead it springs back and continues growing.” The metaphor describes a surprising number of people: As many as two thirds of individuals recover from difficult experiences without prolonged psychological effects, even when they have lived through events such as violent crime or being a prisoner of war. Some even go on to grow and learn from what happened to them. But the other third suffers real psychological distress–some people for a few months, others for years.
Leo Rodgers is in flight. He’s bouncing and sliding in soft sand along an abandoned railway line that runs north from downtown St. Petersburg. As we zigzag past castaway boxcars plastered with graffiti and the agitated guests at a dog kennel, Rodgers hucks his bike off every huckable curb.
Many people who ride a lot know what it’s like to sit on the wheel of someone like Leo Rodgers—someone you can trust to pick a good line and call out obstacles and do his or her share of the work and probably drop your ass if they wanted to. Someone who emanates delight. Someone who sits on a bike like that’s where they belong, their upper body still and relaxed as the miles click by.
https://www.bicycling.com/culture/a32346213/leo-rodgers-amputee-cyclist/?utm_source=digg
Going without sleep for too long kills animals but scientists haven’t known why. Newly published work suggests that the answer lies in an unexpected part of the body.
— Read on www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation-kills-20200604/
#TeamNoSleep
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