~ Welcome to the #thebalance 35 ~
Keeping it light up here this week. Be sure not to miss ‘other things’ below - I have a little nugget of my family history featured this week. Thanks for reading, as always 💓
♎ this week’s topic summary ♎
🤔🤔 #thinkingthings
Topics to explore this week:
—> #musicalrobots
—> #treeoflife
📲🧑🏽🤝🧑🏻 #followerthings
Smart people saying smart things with different perspectives, this week:
—> @ErikTorenberg (one of my favorite follows, founder/Partner Village Global)
—> @GaryBasin (also a great follow, founder/author of Tiny Newsletter)
📚⏯️🎤 #otherthings
A relevant bit about my family history and our entrepreneurial roots
Any readers out there who have a unique story about their family history to share, pls do! Would love to hear from you.
⬇️ more below ⬇️
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🤔🤔 #thinkingthings
🟥 >>>> #musicalrobots
The digitization of music has happened. It was only a matter of time before music creation was augmented and, eventually, wholly driven by computers. Could the below be the future of music?
(make sure you 👂 the song by ‘Neural Net Frank’ via the Soundcloud link below. Pretty crazy stuff.)
A programmer mimicked Jay-Z’s voice and cadence so effectively that his agency, Roc Nation, got SoundCloud to take the track down. Then, OpenAI released Jukebox, an algorithmic system able to generate music — complete with lyrics — in the style of famous musicians like Elvis and Frank Sinatra.
Essentially, these algorithms analyze large collections of an artist’s songs, find patterns in the audio data that humans would correlate with hallmarks of music style, and then use those patterns to generate new audio.
One sample, found embedded on OpenAI’s website, is a Christmas song about being in a hot tub, sung in the style of Frank Sinatra.
From the technology behind it, called Jukebox, which was created/released by OpenAI:
Jukebox is an artificial intelligence project by OpenAI, a research lab in San Francisco backed by Microsoft and co-chaired by Elon Musk. Prior OpenAI projects have focused on video game esports, robotics and the GPT-2 text generation algorithm, which is so good at producing believable writing that 72 percent of people in one study thought they were reading genuine New York Times articles.
We’re introducing Jukebox, a neural net that generates music, including rudimentary singing, as raw audio in a variety of genres and artist styles. We’re releasing the model weights and code, along with a tool to explore the generated samples.
Having listened to around 1.2 million songs, categorized by artist, album genre, year, moods and keywords, it has begun composing. Using lyrics co-written by a language model and members of the OpenAI team, the team began requesting songs in the style of certain performers, genres and time periods.
The Jukebox AI algorithm works in an interesting way, compressing songs to three different levels of sample compression as it "listens" to them. The top level is super-compressed, losing most of its detail, taking in information on pitch, melody and volume; the algorithm is taking in the overall structure of the song. The lower, less compressed levels add detail and timbre to the sounds, improving quality.
Then, when it comes time to take its lyric sheet and write a song, Jukebox does things the same way, generating a low-resolution backbone for the song, and then filling in detail, color and timbre on top as it goes.
More on OpenAI, who’s structure as a ‘capped-profit’ company, I found interesting:
OpenAI is a research laboratory based in San Francisco, California. Their mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The OpenAI Charter describes the principles that guide us as we execute on our mission.
‘We’ve experienced firsthand that the most dramatic AI systems use the most computational power in addition to algorithmic innovations, and decided to scale much faster than we’d planned when starting OpenAI.’ We’ll need to invest billions of dollars in upcoming years into large-scale cloud compute, attracting and retaining talented people, and building AI supercomputers.
‘We want to increase our ability to raise capital while still serving our mission, and no pre-existing legal structure we know of strikes the right balance. Our solution is to create OpenAI LP as a hybrid of a for-profit and nonprofit—which we are calling a “capped-profit” company.’
🟥 >>>> #treeoflife
These trees are cool AF. Check out a few pics from this photo essay (and why weren’t photo essays ever assigned in school as a project?)
THATS A BIG TREE - ‘Avenue of Baobabs’ in western Madagascar
Baobabs can thrive in standing water but can also be hollowed out to store rainfall in the dry season
On Madagascar’s arid Mahafaly plateau, 20,000 members of the Mahafaly and Tandroy ethnic groups depend on water stored in baobabs
🟥 >>>> #thedirtyhistoryofsoap
Thought this essay on the history of soap was particularly relevant… who knew such a desperately ordinary consumer product had such a dirty backstory?
My aside: Its a pretty crazy thought that, prior to the Civil War, the use of soap/ anti bacterial products was not commonplace among the general public. Now, to be in a world where the polar opposite is true… it raises lots of questions about the right approach for public health going forward. How much of what we believe we know is necessary for the safety of the public vs. a new narrative to sell a product? Could it be both? And where does the all natural/organic movement fit into all of this??? 🤷
“Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds.” That’s what the CDC has advised all Americans to do to prevent the spread of COVID-19 during this pandemic.
It’s common-sense advice. The surfactants found in soap lift germs from the skin, and water then washes them away. Soap is inexpensive and ubiquitous; it’s a consumer product found in every household across the country.
Yet few people know the long and dirty history of making soap, the product we all rely on to clean our skin.
Ancient Mesopotamians were first to produce a kind of soap by cooking fatty acids – like the fat rendered from a slaughtered cow, sheep or goat – together with water and an alkaline like lye, a caustic substance derived from wood ashes. The result was a greasy and smelly goop that lifted away dirt.
Not even the Greeks and Romans, who pioneered running water and public baths, used soap to clean their bodies. Instead, men and women immersed themselves in water baths and then smeared their bodies with scented olive oils. They used a metal or reed scraper called a strigil to remove any remaining oil or grime.
By the Middle Ages, new vegetable-oil-based soaps, which were hailed for their mildness and purity and smelled good, had come into use as luxury items among Europe’s most privileged classes.
The settlement of the American colonies coincided with an age (1500s-1700s) when most Europeans, whether privileged or poor, had turned away from regular bathing out of fear that water actually spread disease. Colonists used soap primarily for domestic cleaning, and soap-making was part of the seasonal domestic routine overseen by women.
In the new nation, the founding of soap factories like New York-based Colgate, founded in 1807, or the Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble, founded in 1837, increased the scale of soap production but did little to alter its ingredients or use. Middle-class Americans had resumed water bathing, but still shunned soap.
Soap-making remained an extension of the tallow trade that was closely allied with candle making. Soap itself was for laundry. At the first P&G factory, laborers used large cauldrons to boil down fat collected from homes, hotels and butchers to make the candles and soap they sold.
From cleaning objects to cleaning bodies
The Civil War was the watershed. Thanks to reformers who touted regular washing with water and soap as a sanitary measure to aid the Union war effort, bathing for personal hygiene caught on. Demand for inexpensive toilet soaps increased dramatically among the masses.
Companies began to develop and market a variety of new products to consumers. In 1879, P&G introduced Ivory soap, one of the first perfumed toilet soaps in the U.S. B.J. Johnson Soap Company of Milwaukee followed with their own palm-and-olive-oil-based Palmolive soap in 1898. It was the world’s best-selling soap by the early 1900s.
Soap chemistry also began to change, paving the way for the modern era. At P&G, decades of laboratory experiments with imported coconut and palm oil, and then with domestically produced cottonseed oil, led to the discovery of hydrogenated fats in 1909. Shortages of fats and oils for soap during World Wars I and II also led to the discovery of synthetic detergents as a “superior” substitute for fat-based laundry soaps, household cleaners and shampoos.
Today’s commercially manufactured soaps are highly specialized, lab-engineered products. Synthesized animal fats and plant-based oils and bases are combined with chemical additives, including moisturizers, conditioners, lathering agents, colors and scents, to make soaps more appealing to the senses. But they cannot fully mask its mostly foul ingredients, including shower gels’ petroleum-based contents.
As a 1947 history of P&G observed: “Soap is a desperately ordinary substance to us.” As unremarkable as it is during normal times, soap has risen to prominence during this pandemic.
📲🧑🏽🤝🧑🏻 #followerthings
+1 too funny
📚⏯️🎤 #otherthings
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Continuing from the above ‘history of soap’— I thought it appropriate to share a unique story on my family history.
We once had a soap making business in the family that manufactured products like Blue Barrel Soap. Sparse info about it can be found about it these days, but here is a little bit about it! —> ‘Haskins’ is a family name that stems from my dad’s mother’s side… 👇
Haskin Brothers and Company sold soap and consumer products and was incorporated in 1921 in Sioux City, Iowa. The company operated a soap factory in Sioux City, IA and Omaha, Nebraska on the banks of the Missouri River. Brands included Trilby, Blue Barrel, Sweetheart (floral perfume) toilet soaps.
The Omaha building was previous operated by the Minnesota Soap Company from the late 1880's. Haskin Brothers operated until the 1950's before merging with the then the Purex Corp. The company eventually merged into the Dial Corp. The Omaha NE factory was closed in the 1990's after over 100 years in continuous operations.
🤔 Curious if any of you have a unique story about your family history… would love for you to share if you do! Hit reply and lemme know :)
Stay safe, keep your distance, and WASH YOUR HANDS.
Curiously,
-Block
A little bit about me:
My friends call me Block. Minnesota born & raised, I now live and work in New York City.
I am endlessly curious and eternally optimistic. I have a passion for new ideas, obsessed with all things technology, and am always seeking to broaden my perspective while striving for balance.
I am an open finance enthusiast, futurist, investor, entrepreneur, builder, advisor, life long learner, hockey player, traveler, podcast addict, hip-hop head, e-newsletter junkie, event planner, and comedic-short producer. Follow me on Twitter here and Instagram here.
“Find a question that makes the world interesting.” - Paul Graham
A little bit about #thebalance:
***The core thesis of this newsletter is to pique your curiosity by aggregating interesting topics in a thematic, bite sized, and relevant manner (w/ original posts occasionally) - ranging from blog posts, books, music, events, podcasts, and ideas on how to stay active, travel or otherwise... Please keep sending feedback my way… the goal is to make this thing worth it for you!***
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