Hello all – Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning. Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works. Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
Corporations are the dominant mechanism by which social economic activity is organized in the developed countries. Whether there are opportunities for true social innovation in the corporate world is hence a key question for the future of democracy.
In an economy, people essentially produce goods and services for people. Companies are intermediary organizational forms that arrange the development, production and logistics processes. The present ways of working have historically been based on a very different environment than the one that is emerging. The earlier high cost of coordination, communication and contracting is the reason behind many of the organizational forms that are still taken for granted and which we experience daily.
The digital world we live in is totally different when it comes to the quality and costs associated with these three drivers behind organizing, and allows us to imagine and experiment with totally new value creation architectures.
Because of the higher quality and lower costs of communication and coordination the content of work is changing from generic, repetitive practices to contextual, creative practices.
When knowledge, interaction and creativity are the decisive factors of value creation and when work takes place in digital, decentralized environments, this top-down process is increasingly inefficient. Network knowledge can merge into temporary bundles whenever and wherever necessary to solve problems. The network makes it possible to pool the knowledge residing in millions of nodes into an ad hoc front end with massive problem-solving capacity. There is very little or no centralized control. It is an updated version of participation, opportunity and democracy. The role of the manager changes dramatically and often disappears completely. There does not need to be any single point of oversight - that may turn into a single point of failure.
Firms are social and legal constructs. They are what we think firms are. It is time to renew our old construct of the firm as a newer version, a creativity- and interaction-based view of the firm.
The place to begin in trying to save democracy is not trying to convince the political leaders who lack the vision and ideas, or the populists who seek to replace them with empty promises, but in truly renewing the world of work.
Saving democracy
Just to clarify here for our readers, obviously, you’re poking holes in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution but you’re saying it only tells the story up to a certain point. What do you mean by that?
Well that he believed that evolution was driven by selection. That’s essentially Darwin’s contribution. And it’s true for big populations, but it has limits.
The limits are you need big populations in order for selection to be dominant. If you have small populations, then random drift is actually more important than selection. That’s the Kimura theory. Kimura called it the neutral theory of evolution and he wrote a book about it which was widely ignored by all the orthodox biologists.
But I think he was right. And in fact, it happens that small populations are very important in evolution. In fact, you have to have a small population to start a new species, almost by definition. So small populations have a controlling effect on starting new species and also in the extension of old species.
So this neutral regime where the selection is not important may, in fact, be the real driving force of evolution when you come to a new species. And of course, if that’s true, it changes the picture in many ways.
Freeman Dyson "I kept quiet for thirty years, maybe it’s time to speak."
The market is so fragmented that it’s hard to get precise numbers, but the best estimates are that over 40 billion microcontrollers will be sold this year, and given the persistence of the products they’re in, there’s likely to be hundreds of billions of them in service. Microcontrollers (or MCUs) are packages containing a small CPU with possibly just a few kilobytes of RAM, and are embedded in consumer, medical, automotive and industrial devices. They are designed to use very small amounts of energy, and to be cheap enough to include in almost any object that’s sold, with average prices expected to dip below 50 cents this year.
They don’t get much attention because they’re often used to replace functionality that older electro-mechanical systems could do, in cars, washing machines, or remote controls. The logic for controlling the devices is almost unchanged from the analog circuits and relays that used to be used, except possibly with a few tweaks like programmable remote control buttons or windshield wipers that vary their speed with rain intensity. The biggest benefit for the manufacturer is that standard controllers can be programmed with software rather than requiring custom electronics for each task, so they make the manufacturing process cheaper and easier.
I want to see a voice interface component that’s less than fifty cents that runs on a coin battery for a year, and I believe it’s very possible with the technology we have right now.
Why the Future of Machine Learning is Tiny
Management scholars have lately made interesting claims saying that although the product is the same, different customers experience the value potential of the product differently. They say that it is in fact wrong to say that companies create value. It is the way the offering is (contextually) experienced that creates value, more value or less value. The bad news is that our present conceptualizations of work make it very hard to do anything about it. The good news is that for the first time in history we can do something about it. Companies can connect with users and be digitally present when and where their products are used.
But we need a new conceptualization of communication if we want to have a new conceptualization of work.
Luckily, there is one.
A completely different approach to communication exists. The alternative view is based on the work of George Herbert Mead. This model does not see communication as messages that are transmitted between senders and receivers, but as complex social action.
Gestures call forth responses and products call forth and evoke responses. Value lies not in the product but in the (customer) response. Accordingly, work should then be conceptualized as an interactive process, a social act.
Work will be described as complex patterns of communicative interaction between interdependent individuals.
Work is Interaction
Another startling signal about the advance of AI in the ‘uncanny valley’.
“Project Debater could be the ultimate fact-based sounding board without the bias that often comes from humans,” said Arvind Krishna, director of IBM Research.
An audience survey taken before and after each debate found that Project Debater better enriched the audience’s knowledge as it argued in favor of subsidies for space exploration and in favor of telemedicine, but that the human debaters did a better job delivering their speeches.
New IBM robot holds its own in a debate with a human
Project Debater gets its knowledge from hundreds of millions of journal articles, but humans still have one key advantage.
IBM’s Project Debater made its public debut in San Francisco Monday afternoon, where it squared off against Noa Ovadia, the 2016 Israeli debate champion, and in a second debate against Dan Zafrir, a nationally renowned debater in Israel. The new AI system is the latest grand challenge from IBM, which previously created Deep Blue, the program that beat chess champion Garry Kasparov, and Watson, which bested humans on the game show Jeopardy.
In its first public outing, Project Debater turned out to be a formidable opponent, scanning the hundreds of millions of newspaper and journal articles in its memory to quickly synthesize an argument on a topic and position it was assigned on the spot. The skinny, black, rectangular screen stands about five and a half feet tall, putting it around the same height as a human opponent.
The AI isn’t trained on topics — it’s trained on the art of debate. For the most part, Project Debater spoke in natural language, choosing the same words and sentence structures as a native English speaker. It even dropped the odd joke, but with the expected robotic delivery.
This is a good 10 min video summarizing the latest development in the alternatives to blockchain technologies - worth the view for anyone interested in distributed ledgers
How is consensus created? (blockchains vs. IOTA tangle vs. hashgraph vs. sharding vs. COMIT)
This next 17 min video is an very good explanation of how IOTA proposes to solve the scaling problem of the current blockchain. Well worth the view.
IOTA BREAKDOWN: The Tangle Vs. Blockchain Explained
After two months of research and production, we finally have the breakdown on IOTA. We didn't expect such a long video, but the more we dug into IOTA, the more we realized the technology could be revolutionary and we couldn't do it justice with a short video. We discuss no fees, scalability, security, and quantum resistance. We also describe the inner workings of the tangle and how we can apply it to the internet of things.
And an article on an emerging new approach to distributed currencies.
Hedera Hashgraph Thinks It Can One-Up Bitcoin And Ethereum With Faster Transactions
Cryptocurrency startup Hedera announced plans to launch a new virtual currency platform in the second half of this year. So far, Hedera has raised $18 million in funding from accredited investors, including cryptocurrency holding company Digital Currency Group.
The Hedera Hashgraph Platform, formerly known as Hashgraph, is not built on a blockchain, the technology that underpins most crypto networks. It uses a different mathematical approach called a directed acyclic graph (DAG). CEO Mance Harmon says it will be able to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. By comparison, Bitcoin typically processes less than 10 transactions per second, and Ethereum usually processes less than 25.
This is a major signal of the phase transition in global communication and media consumption - heralding the emergence of a new paradigm. I cut the cord from TV about 3 years ago - now I get everything from the Internet - including movies and serial TV - because it’s cheaper (even when I upgraded to 100 mb unlimited) and my household of 3 can watch what and when we want). Renewable energy with its distributed paradigm will also accelerate Internet access.
Recently - I was able to watch TV because I was traveling - I was again shocked at how a substantial portion of any TV is dedicated to attention disruption of ads - ads that will repeat more than twice in the same advertising slot. So many are concerned with social media as a force of disruptive attention - but ads on TV are ‘involuntary’ forced interjections in watchers attention - that was ubiquitous before the Internet - today that disruption is increasing in a way that seems to indicate an hysteria for hijacking watchers attention.
Nearly one-quarter of all media consumption across the globe will be through mobile this year, up from 5% in 2011. The average person will spend a total of about eight hours per day consuming media in its many forms this year, Zenith forecasts.
In some parts of the world, TV will remain on top—for now. Zenith forecasted media consumption through 2020 and did not expect the internet to overtake TV in Europe, Latin America, and the whole of North America in that time. In the US, it was projected to surpass TV in the US in two years.
The internet is finally going to be bigger than TV worldwide
Next year, for the first time, we’ll spend more time using the internet than watching TV.
People will spend an average of 170.6 minutes a day, or nearly three hours, using the internet for things like shopping, browsing social media, chatting with friends, and streaming music and video in 2019, a recent report by media agency Zenith estimated. That’s a tad more than the 170.3 minutes they’re expected to spend watching TV.
Zenith measured media by how they are transmitted or distributed, such as broadcasts via TV signals and newspapers in print. Watching videos on the web through platforms like Netflix and YouTube, or reading a newspaper’s website, counted as internet consumption.
This is a great analysis signaling a category change in media consumption - because mobile device now replace printed media for ‘filling in the spaces of our lives’ with video - not just print. This is a very thoughtful piece - signaling the ‘intention economy’ (pay attention knowledge managers) - a level up from the attention economy. Worth the read.
The World Needs Netflix Minis
To understand how viewing habits have changed, consider the difference between the couch show and the phone show.
It’s well known by now that Americans have changed the way they watch TV. People pull content from Hulu rather than have it pushed to us by CBS. DVRs allow for shifted viewing times and skipping ads. But those behaviors are just surface manifestations of a deeper transformation in modern media habits. Consumers are now, often unconsciously, sorting every media product—from podcasts to magazine stories to video—into three categories: intentional, interstitial, and invisible. The implications of these changes are huge, especially for the people who create what we watch.
Intentional media are the handful of offerings that we plan in advance to experience and then carve out particular chunks of time to enjoy. For me, these are the couch shows like Better Call Saul and very little else. Interstitial media, meanwhile, constitutes a far larger category. This is programming we use to fill the spaces in our lives—10 minutes in a grocery store line, 5 minutes waiting to pick up a kid at practice, 35 minutes on a train or bus. For me, these are the articles saved on Instapaper, audiobooks, and phone shows like Billions, which I enjoy immensely but have never seen inside my own home and have rarely watched in segments longer than a half hour. Invisible media, finally, is the largest category of all—the stuff we never see, that we’re scarcely aware even exists.
Examining the media ecosystem through these three lenses—which focus less on the technologies of distribution and more on the patterns of consumption—yields new clues about both the economics of media and the design principles of its creation. For example, economists and consultants have long pushed the idea of an “attention economy.” In the old days, their reasoning goes, information was scarce and therefore valuable. In the modern world, though, information is ubiquitous—which means the scarcest resource is human attention. It’s a good argument, but times have dislodged some of its foundational bricks.
Mike Judge, the creator of Silicon Valley, and Brian Koppelman, David Levien, and Andrew Ross Sorkin, the creators of Billions, might be miffed that I haven’t deemed their brilliance worth a trip to the couch. They shouldn’t be. I watch their shows religiously. It’s just that my practice is more Reform than Orthodox. This is key: Interstitial media isn’t a lesser category. It’s just a different category.
This is a great 10 min video signaling the emerging Internet-of-Things and the world of ubiquitous sensor and more.
CogX 2018 - Machine Learning on Tiny, Cheap Devices
The only reason to have an in-person meeting instead sending around a document is to communicate the emotion behind the information. What I want to share with the CogX audience is my excitement and conviction about the future of ML on tiny devices, and while a blog post is a poor substitute for real presence, I hope I’ve got across some of that here. I don’t know the details of what the future will bring, but I know ML on tiny, cheap battery powered chips is coming and will open the door for some amazing new applications!
For anyone following the trajectory of renewable energy this is a strong signal of the emerging phase transition in global energy geopolitics.
Trillions could be lost from fossil fuel investment
Researchers have said that dwindling fossil fuel demand would mean exporters, such as the US, Russia and Canada, could suffer a severe financial loss of around $1tn-$4tn if they continued to invest in the industry. A loss on this scale is comparable with that which catalysed the 2007 financial crisis.
The study, conducted by analysts from Radboud University, the University of Cambridge (C-EENRG), Cambridge Econometrics, the University of Macao, and the UK Open University, demonstrates the steady decline of fossil fuel consumption as a result of ongoing clean energy developments, as well as the tight carbon budget set in the Paris Agreement.
Results, published in Nature Climate Change, were obtained using a novel modelling technique that tracked the diffusion of low-carbon technologies based on empirical data.
In the report, Dr Jean-Francois Mercure of Radboud University/C-EENRG says countries should work to “deflate the carbon bubble” through investment in green energy sources, working towards early decarbonising and steady divestment.
This is really a no brainer - one of the easiest things a government or municipality should be able to do.
If a school district could save $80 million in 25 years, imagine how well this amount of money would be applied to helping students and teachers. Many schools are cash-strapped and resource-poor so any savings would help them operate more robustly.
More Than 5,000 US Schools Have Solar Power Installations
Approximately 5,489 K-12 schools in the US now have solar power installations, according to a report created by the Solar Foundation titled Brighter Future: A Study on Solar in U.S. Schools, 2nd Edition. (This report is somewhat dated now, so it is likely there are even more schools with solar.) The total capacity of all the school installations is 910 megawatts, which produces enough electricity each year to power about 190,000 homes. With 1,946 solar schools and 489 megawatts of capacity, California is the national leader in school solar power.
This is an interesting summary and discussion of the near future of currency (systems of exchange that embody how we value our values).
Digitalisation of money and the future of monetary policy
The digitalisation of money has the potential to change traditional structures of the financial system. This column discusses four areas in which it may have an impact, and argues that while digitalisation will not erode the importance of central banks, banks could be massively challenged by new forms of intermediation.
Most economists will agree that the future of money will be more digital than today. But while everybody speaks of ‘digitalisation’, the concrete meaning of this term remains very often unclear. There are four major areas where digitalisation could modify the traditional forms of money and credit and as consequence modify the theory and practice of monetary policy:
- the substitution of cash with electronic money;
- the substitution of traditional bank deposits and bank notes with cryptocurrencies;
- the substitution of bank deposits with central bank deposits for everyone (‘universal reserves’);
- the substitution of bank lending with peer-to-peer lending on the basis of digital platforms.
One more signal that we really are in a phase transition in global energy geopolitics and energy paradigms.
Ultra-capacitor hybrid radically boosts power and efficiency of lithium batteries
Combining the unique strengths of lithium batteries with crazy-fast charging, carbon ultra-capacitors could save a ton of weight and add significant range and power to electric vehicles, according to Nawa Technologies. Based outside Marseilles, this fascinating French startup is working on a new type of battery it believes could offer some huge advantages in the EV space, among many others.
To start with, as a capacitor, its charge and discharge rates are absolutely spectacular compared with batteries – up to 1,000 times faster. We're talking about charging an entire car battery in a matter of seconds, maybe three times quicker than filling a tank with fossil fuel.
And since there's no chemical reaction taking place, merely a physical separation of protons and electrons, super-fast charging doesn't cause any heat build-up or swelling of the battery. That gives the carbon ultra-capacitor an exceptionally long lifetime, up to a million charge cycles.
The Nawa team believes that the full potential of the ultra-capacitor, at least in the EV space, becomes unlocked when it's combined with a lithium battery.
A hybrid lithium/carbon battery system could offer the best of both worlds – long-range continuous driving and long-term power storage thanks to the lithium unit, plus ultra-fast partial charging and extreme power output thanks to the ultra-capacitor.
Here’s another powerful signal of the emerging world of Smart AI-Logistics - while this 3 min video shows only one warehouse - it apparently needs only 4 workers (who knows how many workers are necessary to bring things to it and away from it?) - the real message of the global Logistics Internet can be grasped when we imagine this warehouse as a global network.
JD.com Fully Automated Warehouse in Shanghai
JD.com (Nasdaq: JD) is the largest online retailer in China. With over 292.5 million customers, we have a vast network of warehouses and delivery stations, and deliver most orders in less than a day.
Ten years ago - I thought the possibility of regrowing teeth from stem cells was ten years away - now I think it’s only ten years away. However, this is a good signal for all of us who are tired of fillings.
Scientists develop material that could regenerate dental enamel
Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have developed a new way to grow mineralised materials which could regenerate hard tissues such as dental enamel and bone.
Enamel, located on the outer part of our teeth, is the hardest tissue in the body and enables our teeth to function for a large part of our lifetime despite biting forces, exposure to acidic foods and drinks and extreme temperatures. This remarkable performance results from its highly organised structure.
However, unlike other tissues of the body, enamel cannot regenerate once it is lost, which can lead to pain and tooth loss. These problems affect more than 50 per cent of the world’s population and so finding ways to recreate enamel has long been a major need in dentistry.
The study, published in Nature Communications, shows that this new approach can create materials with remarkable precision and order that look and behave like dental enamel.
The materials could be used for a wide variety of dental complications such as the prevention and treatment of tooth decay or tooth sensitivity - also known as dentin hypersensitivity.
While the emerging agricultural paradigm of urban farming will not replace the current paradigm - it has the promise of transforming agriculture - because global population more urban than rural.
“What if every city can grow 10 percent of its food indoors?” he asks, and then answers himself: That shift could free up 881,000 km2 worth of farmland, which could then revert to hardwood forest. That’s enough, Despommier claims, “to take 25 years’ worth of carbon out of the atmosphere.”
Lettuce grown in the field takes about 60 days from seed to harvest. In the VegetaFarm, it takes 40 days. Other plant factories claim faster rates, in the 30-day range. So instead of one to three harvests per year on a conventional farm in the middle latitudes, a plant factory can produce one harvest every month or so. And unlike field-grown lettuce, which is harvested all at once, the indoor harvest is continual and the yields extremely high, with no loss from pests or inclement weather.
The Green Promise of Vertical Farms
Indoor farms run by AI and lit by LEDs can be more efficient than field agriculture, but can they significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions?
I emerge from the Tokyo Monorail station on Shōwajima, a small island in Tokyo Bay that’s nestled between downtown Tokyo and Haneda Airport. Disoriented and dodging cargo trucks exiting a busy overpass, I duck under a bridge and consult the map on my phone, which leads me deeper into a warren of warehouses. I eventually find Espec Mic Corp.’s VegetaFarm, in a dilapidated 1960s office building tucked between a printing plant and a beer distributor. Stepping inside the glass-walled lobby on the second floor, I see racks upon racks of leafy green lettuce and kale growing in hydroponic solutions of water and a precisely calibrated mix of nutrients. Energy-efficient LEDs emit a pinkish light within a spectral range of 400 to 700 nanometers, the sweet spot for photosynthesis.
According to the World Bank, 48.6 million square kilometers of land were farmed worldwide in 2015. Collectively, agriculture, forestry, and other land uses contributed 21 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, per a 2017 report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, mostly through releases of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide.
Vertical farms avoid much of these emissions, despite the fact that they rely on artificial light and have to be carefully climate-controlled. Indeed, according to vertical farms evangelist Dickson Despommier, who’s widely credited with taking the fledging industry mainstream, these kinds of farms could significantly reduce the amount of land devoted to farming and thereby make a serious dent in our climate change problem.
This is a longish article transcribing a 38 min video - the accelerating knowledge of our neuro-biology.
The Connectomic Revolution
What the Insect Brain Can Tell Us About Ourselves
An even more recent and exciting revolution happening now is this connectomic revolution, where we’re able to map in exquisite detail the connections of a part of the brain, and soon even an entire insect brain. It’s giving us absolute answers to questions that we would have debated even just a few years ago; for example, does the insect brain work as an integrated system? And because we now have a draft of a connectome for the full insect brain, we can absolutely answer that question. That completely changes not just the questions that we’re asking, but our capacity to answer questions. There’s a whole new generation of questions that become accessible.
When I say a connectome, what I mean is an absolute map of the neural connections in a brain. That’s not a trivial problem. It's okay at one level to, for example with a light microscope, get a sense of the structure of neurons, to reconstruct some neurons and see where they go, but knowing which neurons connect with other neurons requires another level of detail. You need electron microscopy to look at the synapses.
ANDREW BARRON is the Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Deputy Head of the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University. He is a neuroethologist with a particular focus on studying the neural mechanisms of honey bees
This is a fascinating signal about our explorations into both intelligence and other species. What is surprising is that Zero as a concept (at least in the ‘West’) is only about Eight Hundred years old - a special sort of phase transition from a pre-Zero consciousness to a post-Zero consciousness - an epiphany that ‘nothing’ is ‘something’. It is hard to imagine not knowing about zero. This can make us wonder - what we don’t know now but will be so obvious in the future?
The earliest record of the symbolic zero (0) we are familiar with today is from an Indian inscription on the wall of a temple in Gwalior, India (AD 876). Arabic numerals, along with the modern idea of zero, did not reach the West until 1200 AD.
Bees join an elite group of species that understands the concept of zero as a number
it seems that nothing really does matter.
As shown in a paper published today, our research demonstrates that the honeybee can understand the quantitative value of nothing, and place zero in the correct position along a line of sequential numbers.
This is the first evidence showing that an insect brain can understand the concept of zero, and has implications for our understanding of how complex number processing evolved. More broadly, it may help us design better artificial intelligence solutions for operating in complex environments.
The honeybee now joins the elite few species which have demonstrated an understanding of zero to this advanced level. While rhesus monkeys, vervet monkeys, a single chimpanzee, and one African grey parrot have demonstrated the ability to learn or spontaneously understand the concept of zero, this is the first time that such a high level of cognitive number processing has been observed in an insect.
And thinking about evolution - this is a must see 5 min TED Talk - delightful in the way he reframes evolution as NOT a linear process of primitive to sophisticated - but rather as a simultaneously multipath process of each life form continuing to evolve.
Four billion years of evolution in six minutes
Did humans evolve from monkeys or from fish? In this enlightening talk, ichthyologist and TED Fellow Prosanta Chakrabarty dispels some hardwired myths about evolution, encouraging us to remember that we're a small part of a complex, four-billion-year process -- and not the end of the line. "We're not the goal of evolution," Chakrabarty says. "Think of us all as young leaves on this ancient and gigantic tree of life -- connected by invisible branches not just to each other, but to our extinct relatives and our evolutionary ancestors."
Another AI breakthrough signaling greater imaginative visualizations
DeepMind’s Computer Vision Algorithm Brings the Power of Imagination to Build 3D Scenes from 2D Images
The DeepMind team has built a Generative Query Network (GQN) that has the ability to imagine objects from different angles, just like humans
This AI system can re-create 3D objects based on a few 2D images, without having the full overall picture
The GQN can also generate new scenes based on these 2D images
Fundamental advance in basic science - the ‘spooky action at a distance’ computing is emerging very closer on the horizon.
Scientists at QuTech in Delft have are now the first to experimentally generate entanglement over a distance of two metres in a fraction of a second, on demand, and theoretically maintain this entanglement long enough to enable entanglement to a third node. "The challenge is now to be the first to create a network of multiple entangled nodes—the first version of a quantum internet,"
Scientists make first 'on demand' entanglement link
Researchers at QuTech in Delft have succeeded in generating quantum entanglement between two quantum chips faster than the entanglement is lost. Via a novel smart entanglement protocol and careful protection of the entanglement, the scientists led by Prof. Ronald Hanson are the first in the world to deliver such a quantum link on demand. This opens the door to connect multiple quantum nodes and create the very first quantum network in the world. Their results are published in Nature.
By exploiting the power of quantum entanglement, it is theoretically possible to build a quantum internet invulnerable to eavesdropping. However, the realization of such a quantum network is a real challenge—it is necessary to create entanglement reliably on demand, and maintain it long enough to pass the entangled information to the next node. So far, this has been beyond the capabilities of quantum experiments.
This may be good news - understanding the key sources of where plastic enters the oceans may make it easier to find a solution.
Eight of them are in Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger.
90% of plastic polluting our oceans comes from just 10 rivers
Over the last decade we have become increasingly alarmed at the amount of plastic in our oceans.
More than 8 million tons of it ends up in the ocean every year. If we continue to pollute at this rate, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050.
But where does all this plastic waste come from?
Most of it is washed into the ocean by rivers. And 90% of it comes from just 10 of them, according to a study.
For Fun
There is a service called What3Words - that provides a 3 word address for every grids cell on earth - so to have a global address - visit this site and enter you address and get your 3 word address - some may find mine uncannily funny = Enigma-Stumps-Locals :)
What3Words
To find you 'address' 750 million years ago - check out this site
