Pea Bee #4: Speak the time to me
Google search
Searching on Google is becoming increasingly difficult because of all the SEO-engineered commercial smog that’s thrown up by Google.
The front page is usually flooded with low-quality Pinterest or Quora links. And they require a forced sign-up to view their garbage. In my opinion, Google should drop or penalize all the websites appearing on the front page that have content behind walled gardens from their search results. There used to be a way to blacklist domains, but not anymore (thanks google!). But there are a few extensions that can still do that.
Nowadays, whenever I want to search for recommendations or read reviews or find new things, I suffix the search term with “stackexchange” or “reddit” or other sets of a few websites. Sometimes, I also use “Advanced search” on Twitter - which even works without signing up (at least for now). I’ve found that the results are more relevant and honest.
Today I learned
There used to be a thing called a speaking clock. You dialed a number and a recorded or a live human voice would narrate you the correct time. I checked, in India, we never ran this service but it still operates in the UK - and sometimes, on special occasions, a celebrity will give their voice.
We’ve come very far in terms of making it easy to access the correct time at any given time. But I really wish I could dial a number right now and have someone speak the time to me, preferably with a Doordarshan tune playing in the background for the whole vibe. Yes, I am doing fine why do you ask?
NASA’s Mars 2020
NASA’s Perseverance rover recently landed on Mars. This is their most ambitious project yet for researching ancient life on Mars. A year ago, NASA ran a campaign to invite people to send in their names to be sent to Mars. The names get stenciled on a fingernail-sized microchip which will be carried inside the Perseverence rover. I randomly decided to submit my name and completely forgot about it. Fast-forward to now, I received an email from NASA that my name is on Mars!
In spite of the insignificance of it, I must admit it’s quite thrilling to know that my name, along with 10,932,295 other names on a silicon chip are chilling on the neighbouring red planet as you read this. [Link]
They even sent me a neat boarding pass. Here is the picture:
Related recommendation: I recently listened to a podcast series on the history of the Indian space program. It is called Mission ISRO. It’s a Spotify Original podcast and it is really well made and narrated brilliantly by Harsha Bhogle. [Link]
New Zealand sports team names
I recently learned that the New Zealand badminton team used to be called, umm, Black Cocks. They did this to attract publicity and apparently, there was some sponsorship interest from condom companies. The International Badminton Federation didn’t see the funny side and they had to drop the name. This is according to the reference link in their Wikipedia entry which is titled - “NZ finds Black Cocks hard to swallow”. [Link]
The awkward naming is not just restricted to their Badminton team. Their basketball team name is called “Tall Blacks” and their soccer team is called “All Whites”. I can only assume that they were all named before the outrage era, otherwise, I don’t see how they could’ve escaped the social media police. [Link]
A couple of weeks back, I bought the New Zealand cricket team’s (also knows as “Black Caps”) jersey t-shirt on Amazon. I’ve always loved their cricket jerseys.
The quality is okayish but it looks pretty cool. [Link]
NFTs
Someone recently bought an NFT of a digital artwork created by an artist named Beeple for a whopping $69 million. This is the third-highest sale price ever for a living artist. But what’s being sold here is not the art but the NFT of the art. NFT stands for non-fungible token. It’s a way to uniquely associate a token on a blockchain with a digital artefact - like a picture, a video, or any other file. The person who “bought” this, actually paid for the token. It is proof that they “own” the unique token that’s associated with the picture. I only learned today that the buyer of this was token is a Tamilian, who is pseudonymously known as MetaKovan (Kovan means King in Tamil, which makes him MetaKing). [Link]
This is the artwork:
Jack Dorsey, the CEO, and founder of Twitter, recently sold the NFT of his first tweet, which was also the first tweet ever, for a lowly sum of $2.5 million dollars. The NFT of the famous meme cat, a 3 and a half minute YouTube video from 2011 fetched about $600,000.
I still can’t wrap my head around how such sums of money could be paid for something you can right-click on your web browser and download for free. It’s a weird flex and a very expensive way of showing your clout. Anyway, when all the hype dies down, it remains to be seen how useful it will be for digital artists as a parallel market for their artwork. While the iron is still hot, I have a few digital artefacts of my own that maybe I should convert into NFTs. 😬
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