Have we really made any progress since 1962?

Fascinating but chance convergence of genres in that 1962 album by jazz legend Bill Evans. The model on the cover artwork is Christa Päffgen. Better known by her stage name of Nico, she had roles in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966). At Warhol's instigation she sang on the Velvet Underground's 1967 debut album The Velvet Underground & Nico. Nico went on to a successful solo career before dying tragically young in Ibiza in 1988. 

In the intervening years moonbeam has become a portmateau word. A Google search for 'Moonbeam' reveals that "Moonbeam is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on the Polkadot network that makes it easy to build natively interoperable applications... the Ethereum compatibility allows developers to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and dApp frontends to Moonbeam with minimal changes". 

Listening again to Bill Evan's sublime album with its inspired graphics while pondering on how easy it is today to to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and dApp frontends does raise serious questions about our definition of progress.

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