QUIK, it looks nice, really really nice...

http://www.nordicsemi.com/

https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/blogs/487/quicklogic-announces-tag-n-wearable-sensor-hub-eva/


commentary
OK this is a LOT more that it seems

S Johnson

At the core of his alternative history is the notion of the "adjacent possible", one of those ideas that seems, at first, like common sense, then gradually reveals itself as an entirely new way of looking at almost everything. Coined by the biologist Stuart Kauffman, it refers to the fact that at any given time – in science and technology, but perhaps also in culture and politics – only certain kinds of next steps are feasible. "The history of cultural progress," Johnson writes, "is, almost without exception, a story of one door leading to another door, exploring the palace one room at a time."

Think of playing chess: at any point in the game, several ingenious moves may be possible, but countless others won't be. Likewise with inventions: the printing press was only possible – and perhaps only thinkable – once moveable type, paper and ink all existed. YouTube, when it was launched in 2005, was a brilliant idea; had it been launched in 1995, before broadband and cheap video cameras were widespread, it would have been a terrible one. Or take culture: to 1950s viewers, Johnson argues, complex TV shows such as Lost or The Wire would have been borderline incomprehensible, like some kind of avant-garde art, because certain ways of engaging with the medium hadn't yet been learned. And all this applies, too, to the most basic innovation: life itself. At some point, back in the primordial soup, a bunch of fatty acids gave rise to a cell membrane, which made possible the simplest organisms, and so on. What those acids couldn't do was spontaneously form into a fish, or a mouse: it wasn't part of their adjacent possible.

If this seems completely obvious, consider, Johnson says, how it explains the otherwise spooky phenomenon of the "multiple" – the way certain inventions or discoveries occur in several places simultaneously, apparently by chance. Sun-spots were discovered in 1611 by four different scientists in four different countries; electrical batteries were invented twice, separately, one year apart. (Similar things happened in the earliest days of the steam engine and telephone.) People have tried to explain this using vague terms such as the "zeitgeist", or of certain ideas just being "in the air". But there's a simpler possibility, which is that the innovation in question had simply become part of the adjacent possible. Good ideas, as Johnson puts it, "are built out of a collection of existing parts", both literally and metaphorically speaking. Take the isolation of oxygen as a component of air, which was another multiple. It couldn't have happened before the invention of ultra-sensitive weighing scales. But it also couldn't have happened before the birth of the idea that air is something, rather than nothing, and that it might be made up of gases.

What all this means, in practical terms, is that the best way to encourage (or to have) new ideas isn't to fetishise the "spark of genius", to retreat to a mountain cabin in order to "be creative", or to blabber interminably about "blue-sky", "out-of-the-box" thinking. Rather, it's to expand the range of your possible next moves – the perimeter of your potential – by exposing yourself to as much serendipity, as much argument and conversation, as many rival and related ideas as possible; to borrow, to repurpose, to recombine. This is one way of explaining the creativity generated by cities, by Europe's 17th-century coffee-houses, and by the internet. Good ideas happen in networks; in one rather brain-bending sense, you could even say that "good ideas are networks". Or as Johnson also puts it: "Chance favours the connected mind."

QUIK + Nordic expands the range of possible nest moves- the perimeter of their potential not by some 10 %, but a nice multiple.

Thanks QUIK/Nordic.  Also based on reading S Johnson's book I did expect this to happen.