5IT: dénouement
"Relax into the couch as you chill out in Deckard's apartment helping him track down replicants. Share some hard space liqour out of his bottle bag. This is 12 hours of the ambient droning sound heard in Blade Runner while in Deckard's domicile. Perfect for imagining that you are in a dystopian future where huma-like androids do man's bidding until they get too old and too _smart_."
"'In 2014, robots have begun in earnest to supplement the already automated agriculture industry,' Tobe told EE Times. 'By 2020 many farming tasks will be performed with autonomous robotic devices.' According to Tobe, robots are enabling farmers to jump over the slow incremental progress of farming automation, going directly to fully automating most aspects of agricultural chores -- from grafting, to planting, to harvesting, to sorting, to packaging and boxing. In addition, drones are being used to pinpoint where crops need fertilizer or spraying, and in some cases actually doing the job themselves. To get a full picture of the agricultural impact of robots in 2014 (besides automatic cow milkers, which were excluded), Tobe surveyed 60 agricultural robot makers and got 27 responses to his questionnaire."
3. On the socially isolated young Japanese people who are called hikikomori.
"Yu-chan, a 27-year-old woman who considers herself no longer hikikomori, is working to hone her computer skills to get a job, which would be her first. She said she was comfortable speaking, but her face immediately flushed a light pink. She trembled slightly during a brief interview when discussing the 14 years where she stayed home because of hurtful words friends said to her when she was 10."
4. The mission to pull a Soviet sub from the deep.
"The story of 'Project Azorian' began on March 1, 1968, when a Soviet Golf-II submarine, the K-129 (the CIA history refers to the submarine by its pendant number - 722), carrying three SS-N-4 Sark nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, sailed from the naval base at Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula to take up its peacetime patrol station northeast of Hawaii. If war had broken out, the K-129 would have launched its three ballistic missiles, each carrying a one megaton nuclear warhead, at targets along the west coast of the United States. But something went terribly wrong, for in mid-March 1968 the submarine suffered a catastrophic accident and sank 1,560 miles northwest of Hawaii with the loss of its entire crew. Interestingly, the CIA history is silent on the cause of the accident, mentioning neither how the agency came to learn of the sub's demise nor the exact location of its resting place 16,500 feet below the surface of Pacific... The article traces in detail the trials and tribulations of 'Project Azorian' over the next six years, culminating on August 8, 1974, when the commercial vessel specially modified to perform the secret mission, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, raised a portion of the K-129 to the surface and took it to Hawaii for detailed examination."
5. A remote-controlled seagull for better bird watching.
"Mike Evans, the dad behind 'The Secret Dad Society' has created the wonderful Scuttlecam, a papier-mâché seagull mounted to the chassis of a remote-controlled car with a small camera attached to allow both his kinds and him to get get a closer look at the seafaring birds “without the threat of being pooped on or pecked at."
+ My son is obsessed with seagulls (or as he calls them "eee-gulls"), so this project has a special place in my heart.
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
dénouement. (Lit.): 'untying.' The clearing up, at the end of a play or tale, of the complications of the plot. A term often preferred to the English catastrophe because that has lost in popular use its neutral sense. By transf., the final solution or issue of a complex situation, difficulty, or mystery.
The Credits: 1. youtube.com / @timmaughan 2. eetimes.com 3. wsj.com 4. gwu.edu / @jon_jeckell 5. laughingsquid.com / @yellowoutdoorhouse
Pendant Number - 722