Year end weekend slices: Honk and you will be heard, Cow milk without the milk, 3M's 15% rule's origins unmasked, FB vs Apple's latest privacy tweaks, 384 ways to help
Some of us remember actually chatting with friends in person when we didn’t have to wait to ‘hear’ what the other person was saying, you heard ‘live’. No backspace to edit. Horror! A new app called Honk is trying to reimagine that. As Techcrunch reports:
“..friends on Honk communicate via messages that are shown live as you type, with no saved chat history and no send button. The end result is a feeling of being more present in a conversation..”
None of the conversations are stored and there’s no history to look back on. This is similar to messaging apps like Snapchat or Messenger’s Vanish Mode, for instance.
Honestly, friends need to just get back to meeting. In person.
I was getting all excited about lab-grown meat being approved for the public in Singapore when I stumbled on this PopSci article about milk without a cow. It’s been a strange year.
Butter ranks third, below beef and lamb, for carbon dioxide emissions per pound of food. Cheese comes fifth. That’s why the next generation of lab-grown animal products isn’t meat—it’s dairy. To achieve their synthesized milk, Perfect Day inserted a bit of cow DNA into Trichoderma reesei fungus. When fed sugar, the engineered microbes churn out the dairy proteins, casein and whey. Combine those with water, plant-based fats, vitamins, and minerals, and you get dairy products—without having a cow.
Have you ever wondered what inspired 3M to come up with the 15% rule. You know the one where you were officially allowed to spend a part of your working time pursuing whatever fanciful thoughts came to you. It has all to do with the ubiquitous Scotch tape, as the Smithsonian magazine informs us.
Richard Drew never wanted an office job. Yet the banjo-playing college dropout, born 120 years ago this Saturday, would go on to spend some four decades working at one of America’s largest multinationals, and would invent one of the best-selling and most iconic household products in history.
That product is Scotch transparent tape, the tape that looks matte on the roll but turns invisible when you smooth it with your finger. Every year its manufacturer, 3M, sells enough of it to circle Earth 165 times.
William McKnight, the executive who told Drew to stop working on Scotch tape, eventually became chairman of 3M’s board. Through Drew, McKnight came to understand that letting researchers experiment freely could lead to innovation. He developed a policy known as the 15 percent rule, which allows engineers to spend 15 percent of their work hours on passion projects.
“Encourage experimental doodling,” McKnight said. “If you put fences around people, you get sheep. Give people the room they need.”
Facebook released full page ads in the NYT, Washington Post and the WSJ criticising Apple’s move to change privacy settings in iOS 14. Something that Apple has been talking about for a while. In simple terms, it’s a switch from opt-out to opt-in choice for the consumer. That two letter word ‘in’ after the opt seems harmless but it is a gamechanger as when presented with the choice, most of us will deny access to most apps. While Apple’s noble story on privacy needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, Facebook’s pitch that they are standing up for small business is well... Read more in the Verge.
What does a person who is suddenly richer by US $38 billion do? She decides to give it away. But in a way that is disrupting the world of philanthropy. MacKenzie Scott has given away $6 billion, mostly to small charities and non profits. She doesn’t even have a proper office, working with a set of advisors.
The New York Times Reports:
On a Monday evening in November, Dorri McWhorter, the chief executive of the Y.W.C.A. Metropolitan Chicago, got a phone call from a representative of the billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott. The news was almost too good to be true: Her group would be receiving a $9 million gift.
Between the pandemic and the recession, it had been a difficult year for the Chicago Y.W.C.A., which runs a rape crisis hotline and provides counseling to women on jobs, mortgages and other issues. Money was tight. Ms. McWhorter shed tears of joy on the call.
Similar scenes were playing out at charities nationwide. Ms. Scott’s team recently sent out hundreds of out-of-the-blue emails to charities, notifying them of an incoming gift.
What was her plan? Was there a design? Well, seems like she found 384 ways to help. From Ms Scott’s 13 min read on Medium:
Emily Dickinson lived much of her life isolated in a single room, and I’ve found her poetry coming to me a lot this year. Though her isolation was voluntary, I doubt it was easy. Her room overlooked a cemetery, and many of her poems are focused on death.
As the winter of 2020 approached, I might have expected one of those poems to keep floating to mind, but instead it was her writing on hope: “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” it begins, “/ That perches in the soul / And sings the song without the words / And never stops — at all -”
Maybe it was the unspoken question she posed at the end from her solitary room: “I’ve heard it in the chillest land / And on the strangest Sea / Yet — never — in Extremity / It asked a crumb — of me.”
Life asks for crumbs from us, not much more. In this holiday season, will leave you with that to sip on.
And hence, I do my very best to call friends and relatives on birthdays and anniversaries - rather than send a bland WhatsApp message. To say the very least ... the reactions are precious :-). I submit that for me - one or maybe two, or at a max. three substantive telephone / video conversations in a day are more fulfilling and substantive than a zillion 'chats' on WhatsApp and its ilk. And then, the fun of just calling someone or dropping into a friend, relative, or neighbour's home is still so much more fun. There are moments when one detests the need to 'calendarise' calls, meetings, chats, addas. Thankfully, there are those whose homes and time into which one can still just drop in / by without scheduling an appointment :-).
Dear Suprio,
Absolutely fantastic. I love the content, presentation ... just about everything. This beats the senseless and mindless forwards and copy/paste that folks do. By this effort, you demonstrate that you have indeed read the material ... and have a point of view too. Thereby, you do not pretend to be well read and 'with it'. Rather that you share material you've re I'ad, liked, and most important of all - share a bit of your view too. Your view, personalises the material and makes it richer. I've begun looking forward to 'Slice of Bread' posts now :-).
Thank you.