Build a City, Curator Economy, Hacking Tractors and Microneedles.
#8 of 10+1 Things
Hello,
Welcome to Issue #8 of 10+1 Things.
Here are 10+1 Things that I thought were worth sharing this week:
📈 Curator Economy
With the creator economy booming, sorting content from the vast universe of information is becoming harder day by day. In an era of information overdose, the information you want to read is buried in the vast piles of content. The Curator Economy is born to fill this gap between creators and consumers. A curator wades through the vastness of information, chooses the best content and presents it in a relevant context to the consumers. Over the last couple of years, the curator economy has been booming and has become a sustainable business model. For example, Flowstate charges $5/month for daily curated music content.
[Read more about Curator Economy on my blog]
📝 Not-To-Do List
Lately, I have been exploring the concept of Not-To-Do list. It is a conscious way to break your bad habits. To simply put, it is a list of things that you don't want to do in a day. Things on this list are things that you know and feel deep down that you shouldn't be spending time on. Some items in my Not-To-Do List are Do not watch videos while eating, Do not spend more than 1 hour on Reddit every day, Do not try to please everyone and Do not sleep later than 12AM.
[Read more about Not-To-Do Lists]
🚪 Single Room with a Single Book
Since we already talked about the Curator Economy, I thought of writing about this small bookshop in Tokyo, Japan. Marioka Shoten is a bookstore that sells only one book at a time (but sells multiple copies of it) for a week. The bookseller Yoshiyuki Morioka carefully selects a title from novels, manga, biographies and graphic novels for showcasing every week. With the extreme approach to curation, the bookstore is a blend of a shop, a gallery and a meeting place with an essence of minimalism.
[Read more about the book store]
The idea of a curated bookstore is wonderful and I'm even planning to set up something like this someday. What do you think of the idea of a curated bookstore?
🧍Human IPO
You can invest now in humans on the market platform, Human IPO. The platform lets users sell their time up to 500 hours in the open market, at one hour per share, at a price they fix. Shareowners can redeem their time at their own discretion and a person's value goes up and down depending on the market conditions. To give you a context, let’s say you bought 10 shares /10 hours — of Mark Zuckerberg’s time back in 2003, way before Facebook was launched. At that time, it would have been pretty cheap, but now that 10 hours with Mark is worth millions. I decided to give the platform a try for fun and you can now buy my time pretty cheap on Human IPO.
To me, the whole concept feels like an episode from Black Mirror!
🌱 Micro Needles
Researchers have developed a new sensor, a tiny needle-like structure made from polymers that can be inserted into plants. The sensor design originally borrowed from medicine, are used to measure bioimpedance, which gives an idea of the state of health of the plant. These sensors will be used in precision agriculture, a field of research aiming to gather as much plant data as possible for optimum growth and maximum yield with the help of sensors. The sensors are easy to manufacture and are tiny enough so that they don't cause any permanent damage to the plant.
[Read more about the study]
How cool it would be if we could monitor the growth and health of our indoor plant on an app on our phone in the near future?
🏙 How to Build a City
The Guardian has summarized learnings from reviewing multiple urban planning projects around the world into a 20 step DIY guide to building a city. The guide includes several practical steps like ensuring water supply, managing waste, integrating transport, aspiring carbon neutrality and more. The guide takes inspiration from the ancient city of Fatehpur Sikri to modern cities like Rawabi and Lavasa.
[Check out the Guide]
📚 Happy by Derren Brown
I've recently found that the concept of Stoicism resonates a lot with me and I decided to start reading 'Happy: Why More or Less Everything Is Fine' by Derren Brown. In the book Derren explores the history of happiness from ancient philosophies, psychological methods and general observation, telling us to think differently. This is an enormous book with 400+ pages, packed with wisdom.
[Check out the book]
My favourite quote so far from the book is “What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgements about these things.”
🧵 Reinventing your Career
Greg Campion gives 10 lessons on reinventing your career from his experience of transforming from a lucrative investment banker to MD at a $300 billion asset company. From taking the first step of quitting the job to investing in yourselves, Greg has compiled wisdom into bit sized tweets for quick consumption.
[Read more about the story in his newsletter]
🚜 Hacking Tractors
The tractor of today is a complex computerized system that relies on software to function. While the technology has made tractors efficient, it has made repair impossible for farmers to perform. Vice showcases American Farmers who are now hacking John Deere tractors using cracked firmware from Eastern Europe so that they can repair it themselves. Tractor Hacking is now common because manufacturers like John Deere have made it impossible to perform any unauthorized repair on farming equipment by locking down engine control modules. Nebraskan farmers are now joining Right to Repair, a movement fighting large tech companies for access to the diagnostic software to fix things. [Read more ]
📸 I shoot for the Common Man
Danish Siddiqui was an Indian photo-journalist working for Reuters. A Pulitzer Prize winner of 2018, for his work on the Rohingya Refugee Crisis, Danish was shot dead while covering a clash between Afghan forces and Taliban recently. He was a self-taught photographer who climbed the heights of the profession by documenting wars, riots and human suffering. Over the last year, Siddiqui has captured critical moments in India - the tension during the protests against the citizenship amendment act, Delhi riots, the migrant worker exodus and mass cremations during the second wave of the pandemic. Check out Siddiqui's coverage of the Rohingya Crisis and Reuter's gallery of finest work by him.
🎶 We are all Astronauts
I'm lately listening to We are all Astronauts, a one-man band birthed in the UK and based in the USA. Even though their genre is Ambient, a better word to describe would be 'Astro-electronic'. With a blend of cinematic and bass-laden sounds, the music ventures into ambient, electronica, progressive, techno, and beyond, searching for a connection to something deeper, something meaningful in the vastness.
My favourite tracks are 'Ether' and 'Doves'
Listen to them on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music or Bandcamp.
That’s 10+1 Things for the week.
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See you next week!
With Love,
Rishikesh
Quote of the week: “ Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don't need to escape from." ~ Seth Godin
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This is really great rishikesh! I liked your article on curator economy and your way to organize curated content every week. kudos.
Love how you compress these deep ideas into such digestable info