Tuesday Tidy Up

Well, it’s Tuesday. Tuesday is just Monday’s hangover. Everything you tried to ingest and process to start the week makes a re-appearance in a less attractive form. But we must soldier on. Let’s clean up the pixel pavement pizzas in our browser bookmarks and try to get ready for Wednesday, which is just Tuesday’s stepchild.

What we lose when phones take away boredom and interstitial time

Yet the smartphone’s triumph over boredom might prove a Pyrrhic victory. As Jonathan Haidt showed in The Anxious Generation, the rapid adoption of smartphones and social media, particularly by the young, led to many negative unintended consequences such as increased rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and self-harm. So, too, our efforts to vanquish boredom have had deleterious impacts such as on our ability to let our minds wander, to cultivate patience, and to experience anticipation.

Boredom? Yes, yes of course. But it’s frustration that causes people to make profound changes. Boredom has always led to useless amusements.

NY Fed’s “Multivariate Core Trend” Inflation Measure Hits 3.0%, Worst in Over a Year, Predicts Acceleration of PCE Price Index

So now MCT, which attempts to show “persistence” of inflation, is predicting a substantial re-acceleration of inflation – the “persistence” part – driven largely by non-housing services and to a small extent by core goods. So housing cost inflation, as measured by rents, is no longer the driver of this inflation; it’s non-housing services and to a small extent, core goods.

Inflation is going down so let’s count it a different way.

Collections: Why Archers Didn’t Volley Fire

Archers didn’t engage in coordinated all-at-once shooting (called ‘volley fire’), they did not shoot in volleys because there wouldn’t be any point to do so. Indeed, part of the reason there was such confusion over what a general is supposed to shout instead of ‘fire!’ is that historical tactical manuals don’t generally have commands for coordinated bow shooting because armies didn’t do coordinated bow shooting. Instead, archers generated a ‘hail’ or ‘rain’ (those are the typical metaphors) of arrows as each archer shot in their own best time.

If I’m looking for historical research, about the last place I’d look these days would be a university or a news outlet. The internet has legions of geeks who do a better job.

A 1903 Proposal to Preserve the Dead in Glass Cubes

Patented as a “Method of Preserving the Dead,” Karwowski provided diagrams and directions “whereby a corpse may be hermetically incased within a block of transparent glass” and thus “maintained for an indefinite period in a perfect and lifelike condition.” First the corpse would be drenched with “sodium silicate or water-glass,” and then, once dried, covered with “molten glass.”

The appeal of this method, ahem, remains to be seen.

Why I Am not Going To Buy A Computer

Wendell Berry provides writers enslaved by the computer with a handy alternative: Wife – a low-tech energy-saving device. Drop a pile of handwritten notes on Wife and you get back a finished manuscript, edited while it was typed. What computer can do that? Wife meets all of Berry’s uncompromising standards for techno-logical innovation: she’s cheap, repairable near home, and good for the family structure. Best of all, Wife is politically correct because she breaks a writer’s “direct dependence on strip-mined
coal.”

I pasted a short blogpost of mine into Chad AI and didn’t tell it who wrote it, and asked it to look for similar works. It compared it to a half-dozen writers, all either Nobel laureates or Pulitzer winners or similarly exalted so and sos. One was Robert Frost. So far, so good. Another was Wendell Berry. I closed the browser.

Software update makes HDR content “unwatchable” on Roku TVs

Complaints started surfacing on Roku’s community forum a week ago. On May 1, a company representative posted that Roku was “investigating the Disney Plus HDR content that was washed out after the recent update.” However, based on user feedback, it seems that HDR on additional Roku apps, including Apple TV+ and Netflix, are also affected. Roku’s representative has been asking users to share their experiences so that Roku can dig deeper into the problem.

Well, television was unwatchable anyway. I’m immune to further unwatchability. I can’t not watch it any harder.

Auburn University’s help desk is still answering the public’s calls 70 years on

The desk looks different today than it did seventy years ago. For starters, it’s in an expensive, modern-looking student center. The old Foy Hall still exists, and now houses a few small student-engagement offices; but it’s got low ceilings and could use an update. There used to be stacks of books at the desk—encyclopedias and dictionaries, reference texts, phone books, the Farmers’ Almanac, the Guinness Book of World Records, and Emily Post’s Etiquette—but they’ve been replaced by three desktop iMacs, the really nice ones, whose backs are blue and orange, like the school’s colors.

I’ve seen that movie. It was displayed perfectly clearly on my screen, by the way:

Speaking of life imitating art, here’s perhaps the greatest example ever:

Sometimes I wonder what could have been accomplished if all the money and time and effort expended on trying to get famous on social media was channeled into something more productive. Then I got a headache and stopped wondering.

The next chapter: Moving from Skype to Microsoft Teams 

With Teams, users have access to many of the same core features they use in Skype, such as one-on-one calls and group calls, messaging, and file sharing. Additionally, Teams offers enhanced features like hosting meetings, managing calendars, and building and joining communities for free.

My mother loved Skype. She tried to sign on to it over and over to see her grandchildren, and almost always failed. She’d mis-type her login, or give out a malformed Skype address to her friends. Then she’d sign up for it all over again with tiny changes in her logins each time. If someone tried to contact her, she could never figure out which set of credentials went with what. She finally tearfully admitted all this to me, and asked me to fix it. I spent a month trying to get Microsoft to meld all her accounts together. Microsoft said sure, just don’t sign up for any more accounts for 30 days, and they’ll all be under one login. Her grand-daughter-in-law signed her up for another Skype account 29 days later. Mom said it was OK, because GDIL was “good with computers.” I won’t miss Skype.

I Cooked Meat by Launching It To Mach 3

Ever wonder why the Houthis can chase aircraft carriers out of the Red Sea? If YouTube geeks can make their own hibachi rockets, I imagine there are Robert al Abdullah Goddards everywhere at this point. Plan accordingly.

Have a great Wednesday, people. Tuesday? We won’t mention it again.

Tuesday Trash Day Bookmarks Slaughterhouse

Normally when I take out the bookmarks trash, it’s inert. But this batch seems to be more like animals that need to be put down than regular trash. They’re hens that don’t lay, pigs with anorexia, and cows that need a boob job to keep going. They’ve hung on too long, so it’s time to give them the full Chigurgh. Let’s clear out the pixel barn, and put down some fresh straw for next week’s intellectual livestock, shall we?

The $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen

Meet the Slate Truck, a sub-$20,000 (after federal incentives) electric vehicle that enters production next year. It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood. It only does 150 miles on a charge, only comes in gray, and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker. It is the bare minimum of what a modern car can be, and yet it’s taken three years of development to get to this point.

I’ve pointed out many times on this site that a pickup truck is a bench seat, an AM radio, and an open bed that holds a sheet of plywood. Those alleged pickups everyone’s driving nowadays are just Crown Victorias with the trunk lid pried off. Throw away the batteries and the electric motor, and put in an engine from a riding mower, and this thing would be perfect.

To Avoid Deer Strikes, Finland Is Painting Deer Antlers With Reflective Paint

The idea is to spray the antlers of reindeer with reflective paint that reflects motorists’ headlights. “The aim is to prevent traffic accidents. The spray is being tested on fur at the moment, but it may be even more effective on the antlers, because they are seen from every side,” Anne Ollila, chairwoman of the Reindeer Herders Association, told the Finnish news source YLE.

I’ll file that one under “Finland has too much time on its hands.”

Swiss boffins admit to secretly posting AI-penned posts to Reddit in the name of science

“Over the past few months, we used multiple accounts to posts published on CMV. Our experiment assessed LLM’s persuasiveness in an ethical scenario, where people ask for arguments against views they hold. In commenting, we did not disclose that an AI was used to write comments, as this would have rendered the study unfeasible. While we did not write any comments ourselves, we manually reviewed each comment posted to ensure they were not harmful. We recognize that our experiment broke the community rules against AI-generated comments and apologize. We believe, however, that given the high societal importance of this topic, it was crucial to conduct a study of this kind, even if it meant disobeying the rules.”

I’m sure the posts looked fake because AI bots know the difference between there, their, and they’re.

My $6k Advance as a Self-Published Technical Author

I chose $5k as my pre-sale goal because it’s the lowest figure that would feel okay as my total earnings for the book. I’d, of course, enjoy selling more copies of my book later, but I’d still feel good about making $5k from a self-published book. My more realistic expectation was that if I could sell $5k in pre-orders when the book was only 25% complete, I could likely sell another $10-15k worth of copies when I finish the book.

I’d do it for $2,500

IBM Unveils $150 Billion Investment in America to Accelerate Technology Opportunity

Today IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced plans to invest $150 billion in America over the next five years to fuel the economy and to accelerate its role as the global leader in computing. This includes an investment of more than $30 billion in research and development to advance and continue IBM’s American manufacturing of mainframe and quantum computers.

IBM shareholders wondered why “fueling the economy” is mentioned, but making money isn’t. They’ve been wondering that for a while, now.

Beer on Board in the Age of Sail

The records of the British Royal Navy provide the most detail of what food and drink provisions seafarers received in the Age of Sail. Chief Secretary to the Admiralty and diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) drew up a contract in 1677 that was specific in the rations and their substitutes: one pound of biscuits, two pounds of salted pork, six ounces of butter, and a gallon of beer, among other items including cheese, beef and oatmeal, per sailor per day.

I had a sailboat. Those are rookie numbers.

Is Chrome Even a Sellable Asset?

It’s hard to come up with a buyer who could afford to pay a high price for Chrome and who would pass regulatory muster as its new owner. And if Chrome is not worth a high price, or simply isn’t sellable at one because there’s no plausible buyer, then why is the DOJ trying to force Google to sell it? They might as well try to force Google to sell the two o’s from its name.

I’d buy it for $2,500.

Despite All Moaning and Groaning: Layoffs & Discharges Plunge, Hires and Voluntary Quits Rise, Driven by Private Sector Strength

So a low number of quits, layoffs, and discharges leave fewer job openings behind, which explains the drop in job openings. This is not a measure of new jobs being created, but of churn in the labor force — also indicated in the title of the data JOLTS, where the L and T stand for Labor Turnover. And the churn has calmed down.

The charts and information posted daily on Wolf Street are so informative that they should be considered a public service.

AI Is Using Your Likes to Get Inside Your Head

And this is the problem that Levchin thinks could be solved by the like button. He views the accumulated resource that today sits in Facebook’s hands as a godsend to any developer wanting to train an intelligent agent on human preference data. And how big a deal is that? “I would argue that one of the most valuable things Facebook owns is that mountain of liking data,” Levchin told us. Indeed, at this inflection point in the development of artificial intelligence, having access to “what content is liked by humans, to use for training of AI models, is probably one of the singularly most valuable things on the internet.”

Um, there’s a reason why there’s no Dislike button. Because that’s what’s really going on in people’s heads.

The Japanese Fugo Balloon Bomb

But now the Japanese thought they could make practical use of this phenomenon to retaliate against the US for the Doolittle raid. If they could construct large balloons which could carry a load of bombs, they could release these in Japan and have them be carried across the Pacific on the jet stream to deliver their payloads when they reached the United States. Although they could not accurately strike specific targets, the Japanese thought they could at least cause panic among the American population, and perhaps even start some uncontrollable forest fires that would interfere with US war production.

Yeah. This is us, Tojo, panicking. See you in August.

[Update: Thanks to Gerry,  Bob, and Bob D. for their generous donations to the tip jar. It’s greatly appreciated, and I love having Two Bobs on board.]

So Many Tuesdays. So Little Trash

I don’t make anything anymore, except maybe trouble.

I used to build things and make things and cobble things together. This had a tendency to produce leftovers. Trash. While I used to squeeze every bit of use out of everything, and burn whatever was left over from the leftovers for heat, it was inevitable that we produced some trash.

Living in an apartment doesn’t generate trash like that. Of course we’re different from our neighbors. They seem to get everything delivered to them in a cardboard box, including food, and food for their dogs. We’ve never had an Amazon lifestyle, and we’re not going to start now.

I once had over 1,000 square feet of floor space dedicated to table saws and wood racks and lathes and sanders and chop saws and shapers and mortising machines and who knows how many hand tools. There was another 600 feet square of random storage underneath it. I bet I owned 160 different bevel squares, bought one after another after a weekly hour-long session of where is the bevel square. I now have a tool set that fits in a cardboard shoebox on the shelf in the closet.

I’m an environmentalist’s dream. I waste nothing, because I make nothing.

So now I’m reduced to taking out a bag of pixels from my browser bookmarks to the WordPress landfill every week. It’s ain’t much, and I’m not sure I’d call it honest work. But it sure is something.

The complex origin story of domestic cats: Research points to Tunisia

Two new large-scale investigations, one led by the University of Rome Tor Vergata in collaboration with 42 institutions and another led by the University of Exeter with contributors from 37 institutions, reveal a more complex history than previously imagined. Both point to Tunisia as the likely origin of the domestic cat.

Sippican’s research shows that cats are like strippers. They’ll display their belly to you, but I wouldn’t rub it if I were you.

Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training

While athletes endanger their careers and well-being in attempts to gain small benefits with illicit or inconvenient practices, a legal, nonprescription alternative has been largely ignored by athletes, coaches and exercise physiologists alike. Cigarette smoking has been shown to increase serum hemoglobin and hematocrit levels, increase lung volume and stimulate weight loss — characteristics all known to enhance performance in endurance sports.

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please — Twain

Half of Teens Now Say Social Media Hurts Their Generation

Social media connects teens but may break their spirit. A new Pew Research survey reveals 48% of U.S. teens believe social media harms their generation – a sharp rise from 32% in 2022

Half says it hurts, the other half refused to look up from their phones to answer the question.

Car found parked in hangar of sunken WWII ship, baffling historians.

The baffling discovery was made Saturday, April 19, when NOAA Ocean Exploration sent a remotely operated camera inside the massive wreck, about 1,000 miles northwest of Honolulu. Yorktown was an 809-foot-long aircraft carrier, known to host about 2,200 personnel, 90 aircraft … and apparently, one car.

Unusual things in the hold are only baffling if you never watched Kelly’s Heroes.

The Animals That Exist Between Life and Death

“These little animals, which had appeared to be completely dried and lifeless, were restored to motion upon the addition of water, as if they had never suffered any harm,” van Leeuwenhoek wrote. Microbiologists would later find that some species of rotifers are able to reanimate after up to nine years of desiccation.

When I first read the headline, I thought they might be referring to married men.

Simultaneous alcohol, cannabis use may fuel more drinking

A recent study from the University of Missouri School of Medicine found that people may perceive fewer negative effects of alcohol if they are also using cannabis at the same time, potentially leading to alcohol use disorder, alcohol-related harms and drunk driving.

I’ll consider this study as incomplete until they add the simultaneous use of alcohol, cannabis, and Cool Ranch Doritos to their data.

Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M to ‘cheat on everything’

The startup was born after Lee posted in a viral X thread that he was suspended by Columbia University after he and his co-founder developed a tool to cheat on job interviews for software engineers. That tool, originally called Interview Coder, is now part of their San Francisco-based startup Cluely. It offers its users the chance to “cheat” on things like exams, sales calls, and job interviews thanks to a hidden in-browser window that can’t be viewed by the interviewer or test giver.

If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying — Eddie Guerrero

No needles needed: Wearable glucose monitors could reveal early diabetes warning signs missed by blood tests

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have identified a simple, noninvasive method for assessing blood glucose regulation—an essential factor in diabetes risk. Their approach, based on continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) data, could improve early detection and risk assessment for diabetes without relying on blood samples and expensive or complex procedures.

Once again, I’ll wait until they integrate the simultaneous use of alcohol, cannabis, and Cool Ranch Doritos to their data

The Rise of Scotland Yard in Victorian England

As Scotland Yard became a larger, organized force, they made consistent innovations in the work of policing. Scientific and forensic attempts made elsewhere were taken, used, and refined. The study of ballistics, of using blood hounds to track and identify evidence (and criminals!), blood spatter and blood stain analysis, as well as toxicology. The modern Victorian home was a quagmire of poison waiting for its next victim, from the arsenic used in fashionable wallpaper and clothing to the white lead powder contained in cosmetics, and police had to discern accidental poisoning from intentional poisoning. This led to advances in understanding poisons and toxins.

I’m not sure if Scotland Yard adumbrated, or simply perfected the cry, “Stop! Or I shall yell Stop! again!”

The 21-Day Myth

In 1960, Dr. Maxwell Maltz published his bestseller book “Psycho-Cybernetics” in which he defines happiness as a habit and claims that “it usually requires a minimum of about 21 days” to form a new habit.

Once again, I’ll have to wait until the author integrates the simultaneous use of alcohol, cannabis, and Cool Ranch Doritos to their data

Well, that’s it for this week’s cleanup. Feel free to try the simultaneous use of alcohol, cannabis, Cool Ranch Doritos, and the commenting box down below.

Tuesday. Let’s Take Out the Trash, Pixel Style

Well, the bookmarks are overflowing again. I really did intend to read them. I guess. Whatever. I’ve been reading Huckleberry Finn in Spanish, and it’s giving me an aneurysm, so I’ve fallen behind, or lost interest, or something. Pike County accents don’t seem to translate well into castellano, never mind what Jim adds to the mix. I feel like I’m tilting at windmills. Oops, that’s the other book I’m reading. I read it fifty years ago, but I can’t recite it anymore, so I thought I’d brush up. Funny, the Don doesn’t seem the least bit unhinged this time around. Maybe it’s me. On to the bookmarks!

Researchers recently sequenced the genomes of two naturally mummified women found in Libya

Their analyses revealed the green Sahara individuals likely branched off from the ancestors of sub-Saharan Africans roughly 50,000 years ago. Then, somehow, they remained genetically isolated for tens of thousands of years—a revelation that still perplexes researchers.

I thought it was in very bad taste for the article to lead off with a picture of Nancy Pelosi.

Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court

“Acquiring these competitive threats has enabled Facebook to sustain its dominance—to the detriment of competition and users—not by competing on the merits, but by avoiding competition,” the FTC wrote in a filing.

Duh. I can solve this problem easily. It is hereby illegal for one corporation to buy another corporation. See? Now you can close the antitrust division, and save some dough.

Intel sells 51% of Altera to Silver Lake; CEO Rivera replaced

Specifically, Intel is selling 51% of Altera for roughly $4.46 billion in a deal that values the full company at around $8.75 billion, a far cry from the $16.7 billion Intel paid for Altera 10 years ago in what remains the largest acquisition in the history of the company. Also, Altera is replacing Sandra Rivera, who had guided the company as CEO through its lengthy process of transforming from Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group into a newly-independent company.

It seems to me that the word “guided” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that last sentence. Maybe she can go start a business with Ginni Rometty and Marissa Mayer.

N. Korean smartphones add screenshot function with notable exceptions

Previously, North Korean smartphones lacked screenshot capabilities. Authorities likely blocked this function to prevent information from being shared with or leaked to the outside world. However, as smartphone usage has grown in North Korea, screenshot functionality appears to have been added to improve user experience.

We’re reading a news item about North Korean smartphones. These are truly the End Times.

What Is the Song of Solomon About?

Many readers believe Solomon wrote the book, though it seems more likely that it is a compilation of poems that a woman and her man had written for each other. The female voice contributes most of the content, and the male voice responds. He does not seem to be Solomon, though the book mentions his name seven times. The book depicts an exclusive relationship where the lovers only have eyes for one another, and Solomon, who had 700 wives and 300 concubines, is not a likely contender (1 Kings 11:1-3). Some scholars have suggested that the Song of Songs should be understood as a book in the wisdom tradition of Solomon, rather than authored by him.

I imagine Solomon stopped at 700 wives, because more than that might be considered bigamy.

Meet Boston Corbett, the self-castrated hatmaker who was John Wilkes Booth’s Jack Ruby.

His rash tendencies exhibited themselves in strange ways. One day while he was ministering in the summer of 1858, Corbett was ogled by a pair of prostitutes, and the lower half of his body responded invitingly. He went home, took a pair of scissors, snipped an incision under his scrotum, and removed his testicles, then headed out to a prayer meeting.

Mercury is a helluva drug.

Man Hospitalized After Sniffing Dirty Socks Made Fungus Grow in His Lungs

During questioning, the man—identified in local media reports under the pseudonym Li Qi—casually revealed that he had a habit of sniffing his used socks after taking them off at the end of the day. And it wasn’t just a one-off. This was apparently part of his everyday routine. Years of sock-sniffing.

A Mexican man enters a department store in the US, looking for socks. He walks up to the woman at the counter and says, “Quiero calcetines.” The woman can’t understand him, but won’t admit it, and she starts showing him everything in the store. The man keeps saying, “No. Quiero calcetines!” After going through the whole store, the man starts to leave, but he sees some socks as he passes the underwear counter. He looks at the woman and says, “Eso si que es.” The woman says, “Why didn’t you spell it in the first place?”

CT scans could cause 5% of cancers, study finds; experts note uncertainty

Based on data from 93 million CT scans performed on 62 million people in 2023, the researchers estimated that the CT scans would lead to 103,000 future cancers. To put that in context, those 103,000 cancers would account for about 5 percent of cancers diagnosed each year, based on the current cancer rates and the current usage of CT scans. And the estimate puts CT scans on par with alcohol consumption and obesity in terms of risk factors for developing cancer.

According to my mother, the other 95% would be caused by sitting too close to the television.

Normal boyhood is ADHD

Nearly a quarter of seventeen-year-old boys in America have an ADHD diagnosis. That’s crazy. But worse than the diagnosis is that the majority of them end up on amphetamines, like Adderall or Ritalin. These drugs allow especially teenage boys (diagnosed at 2-3x the rate of girls) to do what their mind would otherwise resist: Study subjects they find boring for long stretches of time. Hurray?

School is for girls now, and that’s that.

China accuses US of launching ‘advanced’ cyberattacks, names alleged NSA agents

Police in the northeastern city of Harbin said three alleged NSA agents to a wanted list and also accused the University of California and Virginia Tech of being involved in the attacks after carrying out investigations, according to a report by state news agency Xinhua on Tuesday. The NSA agents were identified by Xinhua as Katheryn A. Wilson, Robert J. Snelling and Stephen W. Johnson. The three were also found to have “repeatedly carried out cyber attacks on China’s critical information infrastructure and participated in cyber attacks on Huawei and other enterprises.”

That’s silly. The NSA is not about to take time away from spying on US citizens to bother with Chinese people.

Late Tuesday Trash Day

Well, it’s not late, because it’s still Tuesday. It’s later on Tuesday. Wednesday would make it late. English is damned fussy, sometimes. Anyway, let’s clean out our browser bookmarks together. Here’s a roundup of stuff I meant to read, but didn’t, but had to to make this list, so I guess I did after all. Man, procrastination is damned fussy sometimes.

Middle-Aged Man Trading Cards Go Viral in Rural Japan Town

While kids in most parts of Japan are obsessed with Pokémon cards — or perhaps the franchise’s latest smartphone game, Pokémon TCG Pocket — the children of Kawara are clutching to something a little closer to home. They are playing a trading card game (TCG) where the stars aren’t fantasy creatures, anime heroes or even famous baseball players, but ojisan (middle-aged or older men) from the local community of Saidosho.

Article is strangely reticent about whether you get a stick of that awful dusty gum in the package. Loved that stuff.

The narrowest escalator in New York

Have you ever wondered where the skinniest escalator is in NYC? An escalator that literally has no room to pass on either side? An escalator that is only able to accommodate a single-file line of passengers? Wouldn’t you love to see and ride one just like this?

No.

The Greatest Motorcycle Photo Ever

The key to setting the record for Free was cutting down on wind resistance. So when the 47-year-old accelerated his Vincent HRD Black Shadow, he positioned his body to be as horizontal as it could. Also, he wore only swim trunks as he whipped across the hard pack of the Bonneville Salt Flats. His plan worked to perfection, setting a record of 150.313 miles per hour.

It’s a swell picture and all, but I have to respectfully disagree. As long as this snapshot is out there, there can be only one, and the motorcycle is barely in it:

“Final Usonian home” by Frank Lloyd Wright completed in Ohio

“The quest was to build Frank Lloyd Wright’s final design true to his plan, its intent and spirit, while also ensuring that the home would meet current building regulations.”

It’s one or the other, honey. Frank never played nice with the building inspector.

Mass Grave of 150 Roman Soldiers Found Under Vienna Sports Field

“Since cremations were common in the European parts of the Roman Empire around 100 AD [CE], inhumations are an absolute exception. Finds of Roman skeletons from this period are therefore extremely rare,” said Kristina Adler-Wölfl, head of the Vienna City Archaeology Department.

Inhumations is a cool word. Other than that, I got nothing.

Data centers contain 90% crap data

We need to talk about the data. Crap data. We’re destroying our environment to create and store trillions of blurred images, half-baked videos, rip-off AI ‘songs’, rip-off AI animations, videos and images, emails with mega attachments, never-to-be-watched-again presentations, never-to-be-read-again reports, files and drawings from cancelled projects, drafts of drafts of drafts, out of date, inaccurate and plain wrong information, and gigabytes and gigabytes of poorly written, meandering content.

I see this fellow has been reading my blog.

Hyundai to buy ‘tens of thousands’ of Boston Dynamics robots

“Boston Dynamics and robotics AI will play a crucial role in achieving the group’s goal,” stated Jaehoon Chang, vice chair of Hyundai Motor Group. “Physical AI and humanoid robots will transform our business landscape to the next level. Through our collaboration, we will expedite the process to achieve leadership in the robotics industry.”

I’m pretty sure Hyundai bought Boston Dynamics a few years ago. So they’re buying robots from themselves. Now if they use AI algorithms to buy robots from themselves, their Tech Buzzword Bingo Card will be complete.

The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery

The machine-tool industry is a small but vital sector of U.S. manufacturing. Machine tools—which cut and form metal—are essential for reproducing the technologies required in an industrial economy. Because machine-tool makers worldwide typically sell their newest products close to home, a weak domestic machine-tool industry means that U.S. manufacturers risk losing access to the latest manufacturing technologies. In addition, the industry helps foster innovation in manufacturing processes and plays a key role in defense production.

Uh, that article is a Rand think tank report from 1994. And they were worried that the US had fallen behind Japan, Germany, and Italy. You know, they say you can see the Great Wall from space. But apparently Rand can’t see China from 1994.

Why I Maintain a 17 Year Old Thinkpad

One of the main reasons that old Thinkpads stand out is their design philosophy. They are made with swappable components with the intention of user upgradeability. The battery, RAM, storage drive, keyboard, and even the CPU can be easily replaced. I can open the bottom of my T400 with a regular screwdriver and clean the fan. A battery swap is trivial thanks to a removable pack. No single failure is catastrophic because there’s a straightforward path to replacement or repair.

Well, young feller, I’m wearing clothes that are older than that.

Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover.

Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.

Neato, but I must protest. The “true book lover” doesn’t read ebooks. He asks you to help him move four thousand pounds of hardcovers every two years. BTW, does anyone have any extra boxes?

[Update: Many thanks to Bob D, and somebody named Somebody, for their generous contributions to our tip jar. It helps keep this place going]