It had to happen.
From the automated Roomba that cleans floors and sold like vada pau during the pandemic, robots are chipping away at tasks one at a time.
At the high end, they're assembling cars and managing warehouses.
So, what's a robot doing painting nails?
It's quite a clever repurposing of the ink-jet printer.
Or at least that's the way it looks.
You place your fingers, one at a time and the jet sprays the preferred shade of nail polish in a matter of minutes.
The way they describe it is - No slip ups. No slowdowns. No small talk.
Another leisure activity, the one that women do in company or as a community has now become a 'task' to be automated.
Clinical efficiency needs to come into nail polishing. Too much time wasted is the admonition.
Couldn't they have focused on the fact that you can get patterns which can't be done by hand, for example?
Or trying out colours that you wouldn't do normally.
Why talk about saving time, when it's something women do happily?
I guess it's because robots don't have feelings.
And it's all about getting a job done - a man must have thought this up!
The long running fascination with bank robberies
It looks like banks have always been prized targets whether they were remote or centrally located.
The earliest film on the theme is 'The Asphalt Jungle' and it was made back in 1950. The success led to a new genre.
Dog Day Afternoon and the recent series Money Heist continue to make money by telling tales about robbing cash.
Now, which was the earliest known online bank break in?
You probably think it was in the early 2000s, but it went back to 1994.
Large companies and banks were on a global network run by X.25 protocol.
This was nowhere as friendly as the current internet and finding companies was a task in itself.
The dominoes started tumbling with a magazine called Phrack publishing the addresses of companies.
And hackers started surveying the systems to understand how it worked.
They got through to the money transfer messaging that banks used and managed to get some usernames and logins.
The first hack transferred $400,000 to an account in Finland by a Russian hacker named Vladimir.
But then, the affected bank struck back. They ensured that he was never able to siphon money out again.
A great episode from the Darknet Diaries podcast.
From the sun to Singapore via Australia
It's a cool idea.
Singapore wants to rid itself of its reliance on natural gas and switch to renewable energy.
But space is at a premium in this country.
So, it's struck a deal with Australia to supply power generated from a solar farm set up in the outback.
Through a cable running underwater, the power will be transmitted to Singapore to meet 20% of its needs.
Think of the sheer scale of the idea. Setting up a solar plant over 4000 kilometers away.
For Australia, it's a chance to make use of land that has no commercial value.
The solar farm will cover an area of 120 square kms and generate over 14 gigawatts of energy per year, making it the world's largest, by far.
On the Australian outback, this is among the most arid stretches of land and sparsely populated, making it the ideal location.
It's being built by a company called Sun Cable, which can then supply the power to several countries in South East Asia.
So, it's not the broadband internet industry alone that will thrive underwater.
Power generation and transmission are set to be transformed with this project.
Solar power is evolving in unpredictable ways.
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