In Venezuela’s faltering economy, prices rose by 223.1% last month alone, according to Ángel Alvarado, an economist and opposition politician (the government has long ceased publishing official statistics). Inflation could reach 1m percent for the full year, according to a (somewhat loose) forecast by the IMF. Such a figure is far from unprecedented, however. In the worst month of its postwar hyperinflation, Hungarian prices rose by 41,900,000,000,000,000%. The government had to print a 100 quintillion note (with 20 zeroes), the highest denomination ever produced.

Here's something fun for your start of the new work week: »Conserve the sound« is an online museum for vanishing and endangered sounds. The sound of a dial telephone, a walkman, a analog typewriter, a pay phone, a 56k modem, a nuclear power plant or even a cell phone keypad are partially already gone or are about to disappear from our daily life.
https://www.conservethesound.de/en/

Mooncakes have long given off a whiff of corruption in China. Businesses seeking favors from officials send lavishly wrapped boxes of them. When Xi Jinping, China’s powerful president, intensified his anti-graft campaign in 2013, the mooncake market shrank by more than 20%. A rebound over the past three years has naturally fuelled talk of a rebound in bribery, too. The government has denied this. Yet it is clearly worried. The front page of the newspaper published by the Communist Party’s anti-graft agency warned on September 17th that although mooncakes are small, they can point to much bigger problems.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/09/22/what-a-controversial-pastry-says-about-chinas-economy?cid1=cust/ednew/n/bl/n/2018/09/20n/owned/n/n/nwl/n/n/NA/152652/n

Brain asymmetry research holds, among other things, that spoken language is mainly processed by the left hemisphere of the brain, and music by the right. There is some overlap – when it comes to recognizing tones of voice, for instance - but basically they're seen as separate. So how does the brain process a language in which syllables are rendered as whistled tones instead of spoken words?
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/09/26/443434027/in-a-turkish-village-a-conversation-with-whistles-not-words

Happy September 21, everyone! 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPpUYXZb2AA&feature=youtu.be

Ten years ago, Steve Jobs stood on stage with the iPhone and we got a glimpse of the future. A supercomputer in every pocket, everywhere in the world. Now there are almost as many smartphones as humans. And yet, by the numbers, the smartphone pales in comparison to the hardware revolution that comes next; by 2025, there will be ten times more non-mobile phone connected devices in the world than humans...
The connected things revolution is on its way and will be powered by billions of tiny connected microcontrollers. They cover nearly every conceivable IoT use case, many of which can’t be practically supported by any other chip architecture, and they do so at a fraction of the total cost of ownership. And while microcontroller tooling may largely still be primitive, the field is changing fast in response to the growing demand for microcontroller solutions.
https://medium.com/@bryancostanich/the-future-is-tiny-44dea02e4517

LocLabs founders and management grew through the Apple ranks since the late 1999, always in the Infinite Loop buildings 3 and 5. We loved this Wired article and read nostalgically the stories by our good friends and managers like Cheryl Thomas, Tony Fadell, Avie Tevanian, Scott Forstall, Jon Rubinstein and Fred Anderson
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-infinite-loop-oral-history/

Here is a fun study for the start of your work week
http://time.com/4989850/alcohol-foreign-language-speak/

Congratulations to our client Apple on the release of the new products this morning! We are all beyond excited about the new XS and XS Max.

A wonderful story about how puppets saved Czech language from being forgotten during the Austrian rule: "... The act of building puppets has long been a form of protest for the Czech people. Seventeenth-Century wood-carvers, who were more versed in sculpting Baroque seats for churches than human facsimiles, started making puppets for the actors of Bohemia soon after Ferdinand II came to power, as puppets were the only remaining entities that had the right to speak Czech in public places. While the rest of the country and its people adhered to the newly imposed German language, wandering actors and puppet-masters spoke through the puppets in their native Slavic tongue."
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180820-why-czechs-dont-speak-german