Odd Lots
- Grocery conglomerate Kroger is testing a driverless robot cart for grocery delivery here in Scottsdale. The service uses robots made by Nuro. (Watch their videos to get a sense for the carts’ size and speed.) The test only involves one Fry’s grocery store several miles south of me, but assuming no disasters, I expect to see it rolled out more broadly. (Thanks to Jon Gabriel for the link.)
- Almost no one answers their phone anymore, and close to a hundred years of “telephone culture” is rapidly going away. The torrent of illegal robocalls is the primary reason, though our multitude of other means of communicating does contribute. The Feds are doing almost nothing to enforce our junk call laws; if Trump could eliminate illegal robocalls, we’d not only re-elect him, we’d crown him emperor.
- The Web is now mostly scripts, and most of the scripts are for advertising and surveillance. Here’s a nice long-form intro to the problem, touching on Google’s AMP, and explaining where all our bandwidth is going.
- Earth has “mini-moons;” chunks of rock under 10′ in size that wander into Earth’s gravitational influence and then wander out again. We’ve only spotted one so far, but I’ll bet there are a lot more. What could SF do with an idea like that? I’ll be giving some thought to that question in coming days.
- Gosh! The NYT is willing to admit that sleep deprivation affects college grades. (This is one reason I lived at home; I was told what dorm life was like.)
- Related to the above: Since sleep loss makes us gain weight, could the fabled “freshman fifteen” be due to trying to live on four hours a night?
- Here’s a nice short (if technical and a little snarky) explanation of how El Nino conditions come about.
- Researchers have found a way to extract uranium from seawater. There is about 4 billion metric tons of uranium in the oceans; if this method scales, we can end global warming simply by going all-nuclear. Again: If you’re more afraid of nuclear power than global warming, I see no reason to be afraid of global warming at all.
- And of course, this is the realization of an Arthur C. Clarke White Hart story called “The Man Who Ploughed the Sea,” in my view the best of the Harry Purvis yarns. My copy of Tales from the White Hart is from 1969 and falling apart, but find a copy if you can. It’s not every day that we see science fiction become actual science.
- This seems pretty clear to me: “There is no convincing evidence that people with moderate or average sodium intake need to reduce their sodium intake for prevention of heart disease and stroke.” I did the experiment. Sodium affects some people. It does not affect all.
- An Amish gentleman in Michigan has started his own ride-sharing service for the Amish community. For $5, Timothy Hochstedler will take you wherever you need to go in Colon, Michigan in his horse and buggy, providing stories and good conversation along the way. He doesn’t have an app, but if you see him go by empty, flag him down.
- Insufficient sleep causes people to become lonely and withdrawn, which in turn raises mortality rates by as much as 45%. As you’ve heard me say many times: Sleep is not optional.
- Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International series rekindled my interest in cryptozoology, and there’s a whole museum devoted to that, operated by author Loren Coleman. I love their “Monsters in America” map, even if there’s nothing close to Phoenix.
- One creature on the map gets the award for Best Monster Name of the Year: The Pope Lick Monster, which somehow suggests a giant dog haunting Vatican City.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: astronomy · health · robotics · science · sleep · web · weirdness
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Arthur C. Clark’s fiction included lots of things that we have seen to come to pass — unlike flying cars (yet). Of course, communications satellites, most of which now occupy the Clark Orbit was a famous one, and there were others.
However, one thing that was a backdrop to his book “The Ghost From the Grand Banks” is what most amazes me. It was not the technology or even finding the Titanic or planning to raise her. No it was the social change that had taken place by the time period of the novel in which public smoking (or smoking at all) had become a memory of the past, and was a social taboo. How often does science fiction forecast a change in social norms that had existed for centuries?
I ‘lurk’ in southern MN… but then I am fairly friendly and “Mostly Harmless.”
I do have a copy of Tales from the White Hart (1971, seventh printing) and I’ve long been a bit amused at noise canceling, even if it’s not on the scale of Silence Please.
And back in the days of C-band satellite (and a 9-foot dish…) I recall watching some conference telepresentation where a fellow (which I could recall who, now) gave a talk about butter was alright, and margarine etc. problematic, and that salt/sodium was not usually a problem – and it if it was, check the thyroid. Perhaps not quite exact, but for 198X, quite interesting and only moreso as time as passed.
The specific technology for uranium extraction reminds me of a John W. Campbell editorial, in which he postulated a similar technique for producing gold. (The point of the editorial was about the actual insignificance of gold flows in trade deficit problems. So if gold suddenly became cheap…)
The inventor’s name was Quintus Q. Quirn, and it was known as “the Magic Quirn Process”.
My wife is a Loren Coleman fan. We made the trip to Portland Maine, in November of 2010. It is a small place in the back of another store, but it was pretty neat and Loren gave us the tour. Nice guy.