Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 49
October 24, 2023
New Wiggles Documentary Offers Up Exactly the Radical Optimism the World Needs Right Now
They say meeting your heroes never ends well. But they have never met the Wiggles. This week at SXSW Sydney I was able to attend the world premiere of a new documentary called “Hot Potato” which tells the story of the unlikely rise of the renowned children’s entertainment group and rock band, The Wiggles. During the pre-show conversation, the film’s director suggested that the movie itself might be a celebration of radical optimism in exactly the way the world needs. It really is.
Aside ...
October 21, 2023
The Search for the Realest Person on Earth Starts with … Social Media?
Social media today is often the home of negative emotions and addictive outrage. It’s no wonder many surveys are showing a mass exodus with shrinking usage on the top platforms alongside observations that “social media is falling apart.”
One platform trying to shift this perception is BeReal, a popular app that sends users prompts once a day to share an image within two minutes of what they are doing at that moment. The urgency discourages staging photos or trying for perfection and instead rewar...
October 19, 2023
How the Liquid Tree Might Be a Game-Changer for Urban Air Pollution
“We are not trying to replace trees. We are trying to replace benches.”
That’s the clever pitch of a project imagined and created by Serbian scientist Dr. Ivan Spasojevic who invented an urban photo-bioreactor called a “Liquid Tree” which uses a combination of water and microalgae to produce pure oxygen through the process of photosynthesis. As Dr. Spasojevic explains:
“Microalgae are 10 to 50 times more efficient than trees in binding CO2. This is equivalent to the CO2-binding capacity of two 10-...
October 17, 2023
The Las Vegas Sphere Could “Change Live Entertainment Forever”
I don’t often buy into the cringe-worthy hyperbole you often get from press releases, but the opening of The Sphere in Las Vegas might not be exaggerating (much). The Sphere is a huge dome structure covered by LED lights and large enough to fit the Statue of Liberty inside. The opening show is a new live set from rock band U2 and the ambition among those involved is to reinvent live entertainment itself.
The venue cost more than $2B to build and features a “3D Audio-Beamforming technology to ensu...
October 14, 2023
SXSW Sydney and a Sneak Peek at the Non-Obvious Podcast
Next week I’ll be back in Australia speaking at the international edition of SXSW in Sydney. It will be my first visit back in quite some time but I spent 5 years living there in my 20s so it was the ideal chance to do something different and launch a new project from the stage while down under.
In addition to doing a Featured Session, I’ll be recording two episodes LIVE from the stage for my upcoming Non-Obvious Show podcast (launching later this year). Every episode invites two guests to debate...
October 12, 2023
How “Blamevertising” Explains The Modern American Healthcare Crisis
The industry trade group that represents the Pharma industry (PhRMA) is running a series of attack ads on “middlemen” – blaming Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) for high drug prices, suggesting they are making record profits by pocketing the discounts they are supposed to negotiate on behalf of patients.
In response, the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association who represents the PBMs has launched attack ads of their own. The trade group for insurance plans, AHIP, is involved too and long r...
October 10, 2023
Welcome to Fat Bear Week, Which Is Exactly What It Sounds Like
“Think of Fat Bear Week as a March Madness meets Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest.” That’s the way one article describes the annual habits of 12 brown bears in southwest Alaska’s remote Katmai National Park and Preserve who will spend the next week gorging on about 40 salmon a day as they prepare for their winter hibernation. You can watch their feasting in a live cam from Explore.org and there is even an entire competition bracket with matches between bears to see who can eat the most fis...
October 7, 2023
Is AI Creating More Monoculturalism?
The opposite of multiculturalism is monoculturalism – a society in which there is only one acceptable religion, mindset or system of behavior. Academic researchers around the world have warned against the dangers of monoculturalism for years, from the “thick” national identity of Bulgarians to political shifts in Malaysia. In the world of agriculture, monoculture (also known as monocropping) has led to disastrous results.
Recently, tech commentator Shelly Palmer shared his own reflections on ...
October 5, 2023
The Binge Blanket and More Of The Year’s Best Data Visualizations
Every year the Data Visualization Society considers hundreds of entries to select its Information Is Beautiful Awards Shortlist winners. This year’s honorees include some fascinating entries such as an illustrated explanation of Russia’s deportation of Ukrainians, a digital double infopoem “reflecting on the insanely specific and biased inferences algorithms make about us,” and a graphic of plastic bag usage at UK supermarkets over a five year period.
Several projects took personal screen ti...
October 3, 2023
The Man Who Thinks He Can Live Forever
Bryan Johnson is technically 46 years old, but his biological age is eighteen. The life he leads to maintain this statistic has all the joy of an incarcerated monkey. For the past three years, he has built a life-extension system he calls Blueprint and combines extreme data collection with a mindset that considers eating a cookie or getting less than 8 hours of sleep as an “act of violence” against his body. The “system” for attempting to halt the aging process involves “downing 111 pills every ...
