Items of Interest

TV Review: Catch-22

This week Channel 4 finished airing the 6 week mini-series Catch-22, the TV adaptation of Joseph Heller's 1961 novel. The show was produced by George Clooney, who also directed some episodes and has a cameo role in the show. I haven't read the book, so I can't say how well the TV show compares, but I did find the show entertaining, shocking, emotional and satirically hilarious.

Podcasts Of The Week: Naval

I've been listening to a great podcast this week by Naval Ravikant. The first set of episodes are commentary by Naval on a tweet storm he put out a while ago about how to get rich. Despite the sexy title, the content is actually about wealth creation and how best to leverage oneself into a position to build wealth, be that meaningful work, relationships, money, or all of the above. Each of the initial podcast episodes are tied together into one big megasode which is packed full of wisdom bombs.

Lyft Self Driving Dataset

Lyft have released a huge self driving level 5 dataset comprising 55,000 human labelled 3D annotated frames, a driveable surface map and an underlying spacial semantic map to contextualise the data. The release of the dataset is part of a competition with a prize of $25,000, aimed at researchers to help Lyft train AI algorithms to help them reach their goal of a Level 5 (fully automated) self driving car.

Trennd

Trennd collates the top google searches over time, to show you the popular topics as and when they blow up. You can search from 5 years to 3 months and you can see the monthly growth exponent and curve growth gradient.

Sting & Shaggy!

Sting and Shaggy, a match made in Tiny Desk heaven! You may not initially think that the silky smooth Sting groove would go well with a generous helping of Jamaican timbre from the sensational Shaggy, but you would be wrong my friend! :-) Sit back, relax and crank up the volume on this class Tiny Desk performance! (They also have an album out called 44/876)

Flight Carbon Calculator

The Guardian have released a flight carbon calculator, allowing you to select your starting and destination airports to see how much kilograms of CO2 emmissions are released per passenger on that return flight. it also shows you how many countries emit less CO2 per person per year compared to that flight. Aviation is responsible for 2% of global emissions and are set to at least double by 2050 :-(

Hololens Hologram Language Transaltion

Julia White from Microsoft Azure Marketing demonstrated the use of Hololens 2 to project a motion captured holograph of herself speaking in Japanese using her own speech patterns. The demonstration was created using Azure mixed reality to record the hologram, Azure text to speech and translate to create the spoken content and Azure neural text to speech technology to imprint her speech patterns in Japanese.

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