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Thursday 27th May 2021

 Here's some of what you missed at The Thirsty Robot:

Technical Musings

Technology Topic - Patents

Protecting intellectual property is one of those fascinating backwaters of technology. Hugely important, and capable of bringing even the biggest of companies to their knees, but also very likely to be immediately ignored when a 'tech news' headline mentioning PS5s, or GPUs appears. You can see this with NFTs: combine Cryptocurrencies with Art and you have that strangest of strangenesses: a topic where the number of people who actually know something useful about both is only just above zero. 

The Thirsty Robot has a way of doing right angle turns (Not like the recent US news, where the Department of Defense said that the UFO/UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) VIDEOS they had released were real, which was immediately misinterpreted by the news media as meaning that UFOs were real...), which is how patents came up. Someone mentioned a monopoly, someone else mentioned the board game, and then we were off into the interesting stuff.

So, let's start with a patent!:


Look familiar? 

Ah, but this is 'The Landlord's Game', not what you were actually thinking. 


Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

As Wikipedia reports, the history of the 'Monopoly' board game is complicated. The idea of a non-monopolistic version, where the idea is NOT to crush your opponents by building hotels on the two most expensive properties and then waiting for people to land on them as they try to get past Go (and other ways), sounds almost like something that the current politically correct mindset might be interested in. Would you buy a 'friendly' version of Monopoly?

Then there are the pieces/tokens: the top hat, racing car, thimble, etc. Except that they have changed over time. In the 50s, they were a train, a sailing ship, a bulldozer... Hang on, a 'sailing' ship, not a battleship? Yep. (couldn't find a permalink!) The Wikipedia link shows a timeline for some of the pieces/tokens) but not all. there's a lot of hidden complexity here, and as with many things, the deeper you dive, the more detail you discover...

Technology Topic - Acquisitions...

The photos that are used to illustrate The Thirsty Robot are all from Unsplash, which has long been one of the best places on the InterWeb for finding freely-usable pictures/photos/images... But recently, Unsplash was acquired by Getty Images, who are one of the best places on the InterWeb for finding and licencing commercially-priced pictures/photos/images. 

One of the more or less immediate side effects of this was exactly what you probably imagined would happen, and, yes, it was there when the image above was found:

Photo from Unsplash web-site search page result on Unsplash

So, whereas the Unsplash web-site search results used to have only the pictures/photos/images matching your search, there is now also an advert for a Getty images product... What is intriguing is that it doesn't feature anything to do with 'Monopoly', so it isn't a particularly relevant advert... But there's tech for that, you might say...

The Thirsty Robot will continue using Unsplash images wherever we can, of course. As a special treat, we are now going to give you the chance to predict the future! What do you think will happen to Unsplash in the future?  Will there be more ads? More free photos? You might like to jot down your thoughts and revisit them in ten years time...

Recommended Media - Movies

[Army of the Dead (Zack Snyder) - Currently streaming on Netflix in the UK ]

We remain convinced that the best way to watch a movie is to not watch a trailer or know anything about it in advance. So here's the Mark Kermode review...  which you should not watch, of course.

Recommended Media - 'Almost Vintage' TV

[ Space Cadets (Channel 4) - Parts available on YouTube ]

Although only from 2012, a lot of the people at The Thirsty Robot had not heard of this. If you haven't seen it, then you should. 

Completely unconnected, and probably more linked to the Unsplash advert section above, is this URL...

Recommended Media - Gaming

Sometimes the notes give a link, but it isn't clear what the context was...


Recommended Media - Amusement Parks

[ Gyro Drop in South Korea - Fake and real ]

The problem with 'myth-busting' articles, particularly for amusement parks and theme parks, is that the goalposts for the design of 'rides' are ever changing. So today's fake is tomorrow's leading edge design. You have been warned. On this topic, the following series may be interesting:



Quote of the Week: 'Do Fish See In Colour?'

Definitely one of the best quotes so far!




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A lot of discussion happens at The Thirsty Robot. This blog is an edited, biased summary of just a small fraction of the conversation, links/URLs and references that were mentioned. It is an imperfect record and is definitely not complete - for that you should visit The Thirsty Robot!

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The next online meeting at The Thirsty Robot is on Thursday 10th June 2021 at 7:30pm GMT.













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