A dilemma of an industry that supports hundreds of thousands of workers and is integrally dependent on cheap labor, often undocumented immigrants. It's gonna take broad changes to make the situation sustainable - visas that allow year-round workers as opposed to seasonal labor. Or milk that costs twice as much.
Sunday, December 30, 2018
The Animals of Chernobyl | NYT
Aberrant markings and tumors persist more than 30 years after the Chernobyl disaster. Even spiders webs have abnormal patterns.
Saturday, December 29, 2018
Saturday, December 22, 2018
Fast food chicken: Testing Subway, McDonald's, A&W, Wendy's & Tim Hortons
At 13:29, "most of the samples came back close to 100% chicken, except Subway, which had around 50% chicken."
Thursday, December 20, 2018
Can you hack into Tesla Autopilot Dash-Cam Footage?
"You have to basically gain root access to the MCU [Media Control Unit]..."
"In most Tesla crashes, then, crash footage exists. It's not great resolution, but it's good enough for government work. "It has to send these messages over the CAN bus very quickly to save them from the camera to the MCU," Hughes explains, "so they have to be dumbed-down resolution so that they can actually make it to the MCU before anything bad happens to it in a crash." This transfer seems to be triggered whenever the airbags deploy, and "takes some amount of time," he says — in his estimation, probably "about 20 seconds." So, for the May Autopilot fatality in Florida, which left the Model S roofless, the crash footage probably didn't make it to the MCU."
How much energy is saved recycling an aluminum can? 210 watt-hours
Recycling one pound of aluminum (33 cans) saves about 7 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity.
Recycling aluminum saves 90-95 percent of the energy needed to make aluminum from bauxite ore.
[210 W-h]
Recycling one aluminum beverage can save enough energy to run a 14 watt CFL bulb (60 watt incandescent equivalent) for 20 hours, a computer for 3 hours, or a TV for 2 hours.
[280 W-h]
One ton of recycled aluminum saves14,000 kilowatt hours (Kwh) of energy, 40 barrels of oil, 130. 152.32 million BTU's of energy, and 10 cubic yards of landfill space.
[14 *10E6 W-h * 15g / 10E6g = 210 W-h]
Wednesday, December 19, 2018
How sellers gain prominence on Amazon search
What sellers will do to rise to the top in an Amazon search - fake reviews, fake sales, bribes to remove disparaging reviews or elevate their ranking.
In an earlier post, I mentioned a website that tests if reviews are genuine on Amazon:
In an earlier post, I mentioned a website that tests if reviews are genuine on Amazon:
Is that a real customer review?
Fake reviews are everywhere - how can you spot them, weed them out, and figure out what the "real" rating for a product is? This website does it for you.
This site was created by an unlikely source - a guy selling a bodybuilding supplement, who suspected his own product was getting mostly fake reviews, so he coded a website to detect and remove the fake ones.
https://reviewmeta.com/
Here's the back story:
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=623988370
In the example provided in the NPR story, "So it went from a 4 star out of 5, with 177 reviews on Amazon. And the adjusted rating on ReviewMeta is 1.7 stars after 10 reviews."
This site was created by an unlikely source - a guy selling a bodybuilding supplement, who suspected his own product was getting mostly fake reviews, so he coded a website to detect and remove the fake ones.
https://reviewmeta.com/
Here's the back story:
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=623988370
In the example provided in the NPR story, "So it went from a 4 star out of 5, with 177 reviews on Amazon. And the adjusted rating on ReviewMeta is 1.7 stars after 10 reviews."
How Canada Helps Its Dairy Farmers
Production quotas and guaranteed minimum prices help prevent a milk surplus.
Monday, December 17, 2018
Tried a Lime pod - Lime launches car sharing in Seattle.
I've used lots of car sharing before - Reach, Car2go, Turo, and Evo (only in Vancouver, BC.)
Lime was the easiest of all - simple, quick, free approval that didn't require a phone call, and I was driving within minutes...which was good because it was raining, as usual, in Seattle.
The little Fiat 500 turbo was comfortable, quick and peppy, and had great visibility and even a backup camera. And best of all, had a convenient universal phone holder and triple-charging cable (lightning, type C, micro) right there.
So, compared to other car sharing companies that take several days to approve your application, or charge a fee, this was simple, quick, and easy.
As with all car sharing, there's no charge for insurance, fuel, or parking, just a basic rate per minute rate of $0.40 and you're good to go.
I'm loving it.
Lime was the easiest of all - simple, quick, free approval that didn't require a phone call, and I was driving within minutes...which was good because it was raining, as usual, in Seattle.
The little Fiat 500 turbo was comfortable, quick and peppy, and had great visibility and even a backup camera. And best of all, had a convenient universal phone holder and triple-charging cable (lightning, type C, micro) right there.
So, compared to other car sharing companies that take several days to approve your application, or charge a fee, this was simple, quick, and easy.
As with all car sharing, there's no charge for insurance, fuel, or parking, just a basic rate per minute rate of $0.40 and you're good to go.
I'm loving it.
How Shazam Works
A good explanation of how song recognition creates a "fingerprint" of a song with hash functions.
Tips: How To Make Roast Beef
Salt it, leave for an hour in fridge.
Tie it up to preserve its shape and ensure even cooking.
Sear it in a pan first.
Let it rest after cooking, for the proteins to reabsorb the moisture.
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