This Watch Wants to Curb Ocean Plastic Pollution

· · Cool Stuff Found

There’s a watch that wants to help curb ocean plastic pollution. Awake Watch’s mission is to prove that there is a smarter and more sustainable way to consume goods. It wants to show that it can create objects with innovative design and very high quality, while still limiting its environmental impact as much as possible. And give people the opportunity to make a difference. The fabric the company uses for the strap is made from plastic waste, which has been collected from South East Asian seas and Japan. It turns the plastic into pellets, and then into nylon yarn. It creates the straps directly from rolls of this material, which is made using no chemical dyes, and is certified by the Global Recycled Standard label. The leather straps are made by a French company that uses Italian leather tanned in a vegetable tanning process. The Kickstarter was fully funded in an hour. To get a watch, rewards start at US$229.

This Watch Wants to Curb Ocean Plastic Pollution

Should Apple Create a Video Platform for Creators?

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In 9to5Mac‘s Reddit-esque Change My View series, Ben Lovejoy writes that Apple should have a video platform for creators.

What I’m proposing is that Apple create a platform for creators of original content. Like YouTube or Vimeo, but with greater control and focus…I’d love to see someone do YouTube properly. Take it back to its roots as a true platform for original content providers. And there are two reasons I think Apple could be the right company to do it.

I can’t decide if I agree or not. I don’t think Apple needs to do everything, and if there’s already a size-able contender like YouTube, it would be hard for Apple’s platform to compete. This is similar to why Apple doesn’t have its own search engine. It might be easier for Apple to just buy Vimeo than create a platform from the ground up.

How to Choose the Best Mesh Wireless System For Your Home

· · How-To

Sorting through the mesh wireless systems available today can be tricky. Read on, and we’ll teach you how to decide which one is best for you. [Update: Added new Plume SuperPods and Deco M9 Plus hardware to the list, and started tracking Plume overall (and I’m impressed!). Updated a note in the buying advice section comparing the robustness of eero, Plume, Velop, and Orbi. – Dave]

An Artist Re-Envisions Modern U.S. Currency, and They're Works of Art

· · Cool Stuff Found

I love money. Wait, I don’t mean “money,” because of course, yeah money—w00t! I mean currency and coins. Fun fact: my favorite coin is a 1853-O Seated Liberty quarter with arrows and rays. Anyhoo…the Greenback is iconic, and the U.S. likes it that way. It helps makes the U.S. dollar the de facto global currency, and it’s a big reason it has looked largely the same for roughly a century. Paper made with rag cloth, the whole green thing, dead presidents. But other countries have been doing a lot with plastic and holograms and such in their own efforts to combat counterfeiting. Enter Belarusian artist Andrey Avgust (via The Next Web). Mr. Avgust did a project completely re-imagining U.S. currency using state of the art technologies. Specifically, he conceptualized layered polymers, with each layer of the plastic adding something to the overall bill. He also turned them sideways (the $10 bill would still be in landscape mode). I’m not advocating a change to U.S. currency, but his work is gorgeous, and his concept art is just amazing. Check it out.

Why are Powerful Women Still Rare in Google Images?

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So asks Melissa Locker. When you type in the word “CEO” for example, in Google Images, most of the results you see are men. Women “made up only 11% of the CEOs that show up in a Google Image search.”

Granted, Google Image search results are not frozen in time (they change based on things such as the news cycle, for instance), but the lack of women CEOs in these results raises important questions about the lack of representation of women leaders in media, and how that relates to their lack of representation in the real world.