SITALWeek #266

Welcome to Stuff I Thought About Last Week, a collection of topics on tech, innovation, science, the digital economic transition, the finance industry, the Wu-Tang Clan, and whatever else made me think last week. Please grab me on Twitter with any thoughts or feedback.

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In today’s post: graphene-powered electronics; Jen-Hsun’s kitchen; digitizing accounts payable; the IoT of cold transport; Vonnegut on tribalism; Star Trek transporters; ancient footprints; cracks in Xi’s dictatorship; and lots more below...

Stuff about Innovation and Technology
Free Energy
Physicists at the University of Arkansas have built a circuit that harvests energy from graphene, a sheet formed by a single layer of carbon atoms. Suspended atoms in thermal equilibrium follow what’s called Brownian motion, which describes their movements probabilistically; the Brownian motion of freestanding graphene can be described as random “ripples and buckles”. It’s long been thought that atoms cannot do work as they move in this manner. However, the team found that graphene could induce a DC current in their two-diode circuit at room temperature. Theoretically, if enough of these graphene circuits could be deposited on a silicon wafer, they could serve as an energy source for low-power electronics. 

Unreal EV
Gaming development engine Unreal from Epic Games will be the in-dash platform for the new electric Hummer vehicle made by GM. Unreal will also be bringing its embedded interface to QNX, the popular platform owned by Blackberry that is used in well over half of new vehicles. And, Epic is working on other integrations such as mapping with Mapbox. This outreach is part of a broader trend of gaming engines like Unreal and Unity expanding their utility and user interfaces.

Twitch Dominates Live Streaming
When Microsoft shut down its live game streaming platform, Mixer, in June, Twitch picked up almost 100% of Microsoft’s 15% market share. That puts Twitch at 91% share of live hours watched in Q3. When you include total hours viewed (i.e., live plus previously recorded), Twitch had 64% share compared to their next closest rival – YouTube Gaming at 23%; however, market share for Twitch was relatively flat, up only 3% from the end of 2019. Twitch’s streaming strength comes as the overall live-stream gaming market grew 70% y/y – well ahead of other forms of video entertainment. The growth in live-streaming share could portend a growth in overall viewing share ahead for Twitch. And, Twitch continues to thrive on fast-growing niche content. Back in SITALWeek #233, we talked about the popularity of live chess streaming on Twitch; and, this weekend Wu-Tang Clan legends GZA and RZA faced off against Twitch stars and chess grandmaster Maurice Ashley in a live chess tournament sponsored by Chess.com and Hennessy; “The adage goes that ‘Wu-Tang is for the children’ and GZA tells us that children can learn important life lessons in chess, things that can be applied to our predicament today.”

Browser-Based Game Pass for iOS
Microsoft will follow Amazon’s lead by introducing Xbox Game Pass in the browser for iOS, likely using a progressive web app. As I wrote in SITALWeek #264, “It’s like [Apple and Google] are demanding developers abandon the app store for the web browser, which will ultimately cause Apple and Google to forgo a lot of lucrative app store ad revenue and make it much easier for users to switch platforms.” Since I wrote that a couple weeks ago, Google announced it would work to allow 3rd-party app stores to function better in their next iteration of Android (set to launch next year), which would allow Microsoft and others to launch their game stores on Android. That solution will give users a much better experience than being relegated to browsers on the iPhone.

Jen-Hsun’s Kitchen
I’ve spent more time in Jen-Hsun Huang’s kitchen than any other kitchen this year besides my own. That’s thanks to the high cadence of new product and deal announcements broadcast from the Nvidia co-founder’s spatula-filled, culinary command center. Recently, the Next Platform interviewed him about an array of topics, including FPGAs. In an answer seemingly prescient to the rumor last week that AMD is looking to buy Xilinx, Jen-Hsun explained his view that developers shouldn’t be programming chips, or, for that matter, software; instead, AI should be increasingly taking over the task of programming (in other words, Nvidia doesn’t think FPGAs, like Xilinx, will feature prominently in the future of accelerated computing). Next Platform also weighed in on why the DPU is more important for Nvidia than the CPU. In other news, Nvidia announced Jetson Nano, a $59 GPU-accelerated development kit (which resembles a spiritual successor to the very popular Raspberry Pi board), Omniverse (a metaverse for engineers to virtually collaborate), and a new video conferencing AI compression that could significantly improve quality and enable competition. The latter tool changes your image to make it look like you are looking directly at the camera, creating the illusion of eye contact. Rounding out Nvidia news, this Semiwiki article suggests Nvidia and Arm could have a compelling solution for Open-RAN as cellular networks increasingly move into the datacenter. 

Accounts Payable Going Digital
Not surprisingly, the $125T annual commercial payment market hit bumps in the road during the pandemic, as 98%+ of payments between companies are still analog. Tipalti raised $150M last week and Sapphire recently invested $35M into AvidXchange. Both platforms use virtual card numbers on top of the existing credit card systems from companies such as Mastercard and Visa.

Vertically-Integrated Ecommerce Winning
A big theme for SITALWeek is the importance of vertical integration as industries go from the Industrial Age to the Information Age – and now into the AI Age. Amazon’s new electric delivery van, developed with Rivian, is one such example. The specialized van features Alexa integration for live routing and weather, a suite of sensors and driver-assist technology, and several safety improvements. Amazon is now delivering well over half of its own packages – a vertical integration that is increasingly the key to their market-dominating ecommerce operations, especially with shipageddon coming this holiday season. 

Improving Transport of Perishable Goods
Last week, I wrote about online-grocer Picnic’s extensive use of sensors and cloud analytics to track and ensure food safety from warehouse to customer. In a similar vein, Amazon announced last week a collaboration with Carrier, a global cooling supplier, to co-develop Lynx – a “suite of tools...with enhanced visibility, increased connectivity, and actionable intelligence across their cold chain operations to improve outcomes for temperature-sensitive cargo, including food, medicine, and vaccines” – by leveraging AWS’ machine learning and Carrier’s monitoring solutions. This is a great example of connected devices that throw off a lot of data creating long-term demand for semiconductors, sensors, connectivity, and AI in the cloud.

Miscellaneous Stuff
Fossil Tracks Record Prehistoric Journey
Around 12,000 years ago, in what is now White Sands National Park in New Mexico, a person carrying a child made their way hastily across a muddy flat in a straight, 1.5km+ journey, and then, several hours later, retraced their steps back, seemingly without the child (who was perhaps dropped off at another camp?). On the outward journey, sometimes the child walked for small stretches, and, at other times, the main tracks show evidence of a toddler-sized encumbrance. Perhaps they were in a hurry due to the area’s active megafauna, which included saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, bison, camels, mammoths, and giant sloths, some of which left tracks that crossed the trail of human footprints in between the outbound and return journeys. This remarkable record tells a story, but it mostly raises more questions about what life was like for these ancient humans. Another set of prints records children playing in the puddles formed by giant sloth tracks and jumping between mammoth tracks. Those images will be with me next time I see a kid splashing in a rain puddle.

Radiative Cooling
The Earth’s atmosphere has a transmission window between wavelengths of 8 and 13 microns. In this infrared (IR) part of the electromagnetic spectrum, radiation escapes the Earth without being bounced back by the atmosphere. Ancient desert dwellers leveraged this radiation escape hole thousands of years ago to make ice at night, even with temperatures above freezing (up to 41℉ / 5℃). The trick works because terrestrial surfaces, including water, radiate heat via IR waves largely within the transmission window, thus losing more heat to the freezing cosmos than what is returned via the atmosphere. Indeed, greenhouse gasses, including ozone and water vapor, can absorb thermal radiation within the transmission window, thus trapping the energy within the bounds of Earth’s atmosphere (which is why you can make ice in an arid desert on a clear night, but not in places with much higher humidity/cloud cover). Aaswath Raman at UCLA is working on a specialized film to take advantage of this asymmetry, possibly even during the day. Radiative cooling would work on the same principle as solar thermal heating, just in the opposite direction. Instead of using a solar concentrator to capture the sun’s rays to heat a transfer fluid (e.g., water), a radiative cooling system would block absorption of solar/other energy while optimizing the release of thermal radiation, thus cooling the transfer fluid below ambient temperatures. Subsequently, that liquid could be circulated for cooling with less overall electricity usage than conventional air conditioning.

Social Media Subverts Shared Cultural Identity
There is a Vonnegut quote I have been thinking a lot about lately from a 2004 essay:
“Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.”
Like TV – and, indeed, every other information transfer medium that has arisen since the printing press – social media amplifies tribalism, just on a much grander and more rapid scale than ever before. I am also reminded of this Vonnegut interview (discussed in SITALWeek #255) where he talks about us lacking a common culture in the US:
“What I say didactically in the introduction to Breakfast of Champions is that I can’t live without a culture anymore, that I realize I don’t have one. What passes for a culture in my head is really a bunch of commercials, and this is intolerable. It may be impossible to live without a culture.”
I think Vonnegut was right – it’s not possible to live without a culture, and the US is currently searching for a common culture that it never seems to have found in its short history. Social networking has taken the torch from TV and fragmented culture into two big cohorts and a million different little slices. From the perspective of fostering community and a sense of belonging, it’s great to unite like-minded folks; however, in the process, social media seems to have left the country bereft of any common ground or shared identity, sending our natural-selection-derived programming for tribalism into overdrive.

Thar's Too Much Gold in Them Thar Hills 
The element gold is formed by binding together 79 protons and 118 neutrons in a major nuclear fusion reaction. Previously, scientists thought collisions between neutron stars were sufficient to explain the gold present in our solar system; but, a new paper suggests those relatively rare celestial events come up short of being able to generate the amount of gold we observe. Physicists theorize the gold could have come from supernova star explosions, but that still doesn’t seem to account for it all (because if a star is massive enough to fuse gold, it's overwhelmingly likely to end up as a black hole, which would, well, eat the gold). And, then there are magneto-rotational supernovae, which turn themselves inside out and jet off matter into space, but, again, there aren’t enough of those events to account for the gold either. So, we're left wondering, why is all this gold lying around, and where in the history of the universe was it forged?

“Spooky Action at a Distance”
We can “entangle” two or more disparate objects by using our understanding of quantum mechanics to tie their properties together, even though they may be separated by a great distance. For example, if two electrons on opposite sides of a room (or a continent) were entangled (i.e., described by the same quantum wave function), you could change the state of one, and the other would change instantaneously. Intuitively, this is a hard concept to understand because it seems to violate the idea that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. It’s tricky. However, you can think about entanglement in terms of a simple math equation: if you have an equation (which is all a “wave function” is) with two variables, like a = 7b, and you set the value of b, then the value of a is instantly set too. Entangled objects are just variables in a single (albeit more complex) equation, and when you define one it automatically defines the other. See? Easy (heh heh).  Here is a long video from Caltech and SFI professor Sean Carroll explaining entanglement. We generally think of quantum mechanics as something that operates on the atomic (or sub-atomic) level; but, recently, physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute successfully entangled a millimeter-sized drum with a disparate cloud of atoms. That’s a big deal because the macro-sized drum is the largest object that’s been entangled so far. Quantum communication networks leverage entanglement as well. And, entanglement at the macroscopic level is a very good candidate for powering the Star Trek transporter!

Stuff about Geopolitics, Economics, and the Finance Industry
Squawking Robots
I was on CNBC’s Squawk Alley last week talking about tech, robotics, and security software. The video is available for CNBC Pro subscribers. And, if you missed it, I got to use one of my favorite lines: “Pessimists and cynics always sound smart, but the optimists are always right in the long term”.

CCP Showing Signs of Dissension? 
I don’t think anyone has particular insight into the inner workings of the Chinese Communist Party, (which, of course, is by design), but this article in The Diplomat makes some interesting points about a potential crisis of faith percolating for Xi: 
“It is not entirely uncommon for waves of internal criticism or factional fighting to peek through the cracks of the CCP’s opaque armor, but the thoughtful nature of the recent critiques and the profile of those voicing them should give pause to anyone inside or outside China who is attempting to assess the country’s direction. The fact that professors from top academic institutions — including the party’s own national training center — are calling Xi’s leadership a failure, urging his removal from power, and explicitly envisioning a transition to a more democratic and federally structured political system is simply incredible. It indicates that Xi is facing a serious crisis of faith within the party, even if no one has the power to act on it at present. It also underscores the reality that Xi and his enforcers do not speak for all Chinese. There are many, many people who would like to see China change course.”

The article also reminds me of this May 11, 2020 interview with George Soros by Gregor Peter Schmitz where they discuss the CCP's handling of the COVID-19 crisis:
Schmitz: “Could Xi’s grip on power weaken as Chinese come to recognize that the handling of the crisis was sub-optimal?”

Soros: “Very much so. When Xi abolished term limits and named himself, in essence, President for life, he destroyed the political future of the most important and ambitious men in a very narrow and competitive elite. It was a big mistake on his part. So, yes, he is very strong in a way, but at the same time extremely weak, and now perhaps vulnerable.
The struggle within the Chinese leadership is something that I follow very closely because I am on the side of those who believe in an open society. And there are many people in China who are very much in favor of an open society, too.”

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Disclaimers:

The content of this newsletter is my personal opinion as of the date published and is subject to change without notice and may not reflect the opinion of NZS Capital, LLC.  This newsletter is simply an informal gathering of topics I’ve recently read and thought about. It generally covers topics related to the digitization of the global economy, technology and innovation, macro and geopolitics, as well as scientific progress, especially in the fields of cosmology and the brain. I will frequently state things in the newsletter that contradict my own views in order to be provocative. Often I try to make jokes, and they aren’t very funny – sorry. 

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