On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Sony has designed a collar for your cat that can interact with Twitter. This way you can keep track of your pet's activities. The device is pre-programmed with 11 phrases that will be sent out as tweets each time your cat get up to something. "This Tastes Good" is Tweeted each time your cat eats something. It's called Cat@Log . The scientists say that it is part of a new area of research on “human-pet interaction.” The so-called 'lifelogging" device is a small camera, GPS and Bluetooth that is attached around the cat's neck. [Image Courtesy myfoxny.com] "These devices comprise various sensing units such as a camera, a GPS, an accelerometer, and a Bluetooth module. Here, we attempted to determine an optimum design of the devices such that they can be attached to a pet without causing discomfort to it; for determining this design, we considered parameters such as the device’s form factor and way of attachment." Currently there are 11 phrases l...