5 Intriguing Things
1. Berg is closing. They have long been an inspiration. You should go gaze upon their work.
"We’ve not reached a sustainable business in connected products. But: There’s our troop! Cultural inventions! I’m proud of this British Experimental Rocket Group. Thank you fellow travelers, in your thousands. Behind the mountains, there are more mountains." (bergcloud.com)
+ You could start here: on smart light.
"It was when Bloom was a beta tester in the prototype ShakeAlert system being developed by a consortium of seismological researchers (including UC Berkeley), that he came up with an idea. 'I thought it was silly that every time I closed my laptop, I couldn’t get a warning,' he said. So Bloom cobbled together his own earthquake alarm for just over $100, using a Raspberry Pi single-board computer ($36.39), a wired speaker ($14.99), a mini-WiFi adapter ($6.71), and SD card. To house it, he uses a box from Grégoire, the local restaurant group known for its crispy potato puffs. And he keeps the device in the living room of his North Berkeley home, next to the fireplace. ShakeAlert triggered a 10-second early warning alert for the Magnitude 6 Napa quake last month. Bloom’s device provided a five-second warning." (berkeleyside.com)
3. Most birds can't taste sugar because deep down, they are tiny, feathered dinosaurs.
"Chickens are not fussy eaters. Any object resembling food is worth an exploratory peck. But give a chicken the choice between sugary sweets and seeds, and they will pick the grains every time. This is odd. Many animals, including our own sugar-mad species, salivate for sugar because it is the flavour of foods rich in energy. New research suggests that many birds’ lack of interest in sugar is down to genes inherited from their dinosaur ancestors." (theconversation.com)
4. Adventures in early dentistry.
"Swank says the toothbrush design familiar to most Americans dates to the late 1490s in China. 'The Chinese took wild hog bristles and attached them to bamboo handles,' explains Swank, 'which evolved into bone handles. Bone was used right up to the early plastics, but boar’s hairs are hollow, so there’s no way to get bacteria out of these things—not bacteria from their hair, but bacteria that was already in your mouth.' While a boar’s hair toothbrush might remove some food particles, it could also distribute bacteria, thus causing problems like gingivitis, an inflammatory gum disease. The modern, mass-produced toothbrush was invented in 1780 by William Addis, while he was languishing in an England jail for inciting a riot. At the time, most Europeans used a cloth to apply a gritty substance like salt, ground eggshells, chalk, or crushed charcoal to clean their teeth. Supposedly inspired by an ordinary broom, Addis carved holes into one end of an animal bone left over from one of his meals, into which he inserted knotted boar bristles." (collectorsweekly.com)
5. A glorious vision from 2002 of the future of computing out of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms.
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
cockle. The cockles of the heart is of some age (quoted from 1671) but of disputed origin; such phrases are best not experimented with, but kept to their customary form & context (rejoice, warm, the cockles of the heart).
Paint Out Another Few Square Inches of Computing