Tuesday Trash Day
Well, you know what they say: One man’s trash is another man’s poison. No, wait, that’s not it. A bird in the hand isn’t worth much, and it’s messier than one in the bush. Hmm. I don’t think that’s it either. Waste not, why not? That also seems off-kilter somehow. I know, don’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes. You’ll be a mile away, and you’ve got his shoes. What a sucker that guy was.
At any rate, it’s Tuesday. Trash day. It’s the day I clean out the bookmarks I’ve been saving for later, which never comes. So in the bin it goes.
Hey. look: You can buy your own Terminator for sixteen grand these days:
Well, it can terminate walnuts and breakfast and soda and stuff. I’m not sure about Sarah Connor just yet. Note to the guy kicking and punching the robot: The time to start being nice to these things is long since passed. You don’t want your face scan floating around in this thing’s RAM when it gets its hand on a club, never mind a gun.
Of course we’re supposed to be enemies of the Chinese all of a sudden. They’re recently uncool, I hear. Luckily, we’re way ahead of them in this sort of tech.
Errr, I might have spoken too soon:
“If social media and Internet and mobile-phone use is really such a devastating force in our society, we should see it on this bird’s-eye view [study] — but we don’t.” Such concerns are typically related to behaviours linked to social-media use, such as cyberbullying, social-media addiction and body-image issues. But the best studies have so far shown small negative effects, if any2,3, of Internet use on well-being
They’re being slightly obtuse here. Sure, I guess the internet is fine. I mean, If you’re using a desktop computer, which no one is. It’s the Pocket Pandora’s Portal that’s the problem, and always has been, from the minute girls started clutching it:
So it appears Francis Ford Coppola couldn’t get a movie studio to pony up the bucks for his Megalopolis movie, an idea he’s been tinkering with on and off since the ’70s. So he sold his winery and put up the $120 million himself. It’ll be screened in Cannes in a couple of days, and be released later in the year. And it’s really, really weird. I guess Francis will find out if weird sells these days:
It kinda looks like Metropolis, boned for weak teeth. But what do I know? The trailer got 308,000 views in about 9 hours after it was posted, so I gather the general public is at least interested. Maybe Francis won’t end up eating dogfood in a second floor walkup on Skid Row after all.
New gel breaks down alcohol in the body
Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a protein-based gel that breaks down alcohol in the gastrointestinal tract without harming the body. In the future, people who take the gel could reduce the harmful and intoxicating effects of alcohol.
So you eat like a trencherman and shoot yourself full of Wegovy, and then binge drink like an Irish poet without getting drunk. This just sounds like dieting and sobriety with extra steps to my ear. Then again, I drink to forget. I can’t remember what I’m trying to forget, so I’ll pass on the gel, thanks. When something’s working, you stick with it.
Permira is taking Squarespace private in a $6.9 billion deal
Website builder Squarespace is being taken private by U.K.-based private equity firm Permira in an all-cash deal that gives the company an enterprise valuation of $6.9 billion. Founded in 2004 by CEO Anthony Casalena, Squarespace is best known for its no-code platform designed to help SMEs and freelancers build websites, blogs and online stores. It includes customizable templates and a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) interface that users can configure by dragging and dropping different elements.
So Google Domains sold all their customers down the river to Squarespace a few short months ago. Now some faceless vulture capitalist fund owns the whole shebang. As far as their WYSIWYG interface is concerned, I have two customers who hired me to get their websites the hell out of Squarespace. It’s actually become rather complicated to host a website, and simplifying it with a no-code WYSIWYG only seems to make it more complicated.
The hot business of cold storage
Dominated by a handful of big owners and operators — including Americold Industries and Lineage Logistics, who together corner roughly 70% of the market — the industry has state-of-the-art facilities that can run $350 a square foot to build, four times the national average for warehouse space. Another significant room-temperature real-estate player, Related, which traditionally focuses on commercial spaces and housing, launched a $1 billion affiliate business, RealCold, last fall. In March 2023, Newmark estimated there were 9.8 million square feet of new cold storage under construction in the US.
There’s even expansive demand for new space to store the incredible amount of beef, pork, and chicken industrialized US agriculture sends around the world (we grow a quarter of the world’s poultry). The GCCA has recently been lobbying for the Fortifying Refrigeration Infrastructure and Developing Global Exports Act, or FRIDGE Act, which would give the US Department of Agriculture funds to help train staff and build out cold-storage capacity in emerging markets.
File that under stuff the news media isn’t likely to be interested in, but maybe should be. The world is being divided into two camps, and the United States owns one of the two tents. We make natural gas and food and weapons and pretty little oblong pieces of greenish paper, and business is good all over. Or else, generally.
Ancient Egyptian Stone-Drilling. An Experimental Perspective on a Scholarly Disagreement
The purpose of our paper is to present experimental evidence which partly resolves this disagreement. Our evidence resulted from the functional analysis of a drilled granite lid from an Old Kingdom sarcophagus ca. 2500 B.C., now in the Brooklyn Museum (Fig. 2). It probably belonged to Prince Akhet-Hotep of Dynasty IV. The sarcophagus weighs about four tons, the lid two tons. The lid has two holes on each end that were (probably) used to raise and lower it. The holes are 24 cm. long; their diameter on the outside is 5.3 cm. and tapers to 4.3 cm. on the inside.
One guy thinks the Egyptians used a kind of of slurry paste of quartz sand to abrade a hole. The other dude thinks they had cylindrical bores with teeth covered with something pretty hard. There’s no written record of how they did it, so they’re both guessing. If guessing is allowed, I’m going to say aliens did it. You know they just love probing of any kind.
Chatbots tell people what they want to hear
“Because people are reading a summary paragraph generated by AI, they think they’re getting unbiased, fact-based answers,” said lead author Ziang Xiao, an assistant professor of computer science in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins who studies human-AI interactions. “Even if a chatbot isn’t designed to be biased, its answers reflect the biases or leanings of the person asking the questions. So really, people are getting the answers they want to hear.”
This assistant sooper genius with the eyechart name seems to have discovered the answer to that eternal riddle: Why are my eyeglasses always in the last place I look? Shhh. No one tell poindexter that when you find what you’re looking for, you stop looking. Of course it’s in the last place you looked.
Well, there you have it. My bookmarks toolbar has gone from 12,781 items to 12,773, and I owe it all to you, my fine readers. Whittling it down under 10,000 is going to feel like cutting holes in granite, but I’ll keep trying.
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