Thursday Things: Eighth Issue
3 October 2019. Vol 1 No 8. By Dan McGirt. #8
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Photo by Sven Scheuermeier on Unsplash
Top dog scientists have determined why dogs like sticking their heads out the car window. It’s a treat for their super noses! “When sticking their head out the window, they can smell every person in the street, every trash can they go by, every patch of grass, restaurant and other dogs. It’s like watching TV for us,” says Jennifer Cattet, an animal behavior researcher. Rover may also be trying to determine whether you are driving to the dog park or the vet. Oh, Rover is on to you. Don’t think you’re fooling anyone taking the long way around to the Sharp Poking Needle Place.
You can’t fight the future, because time is on its side. But that doesn’t mean you can’t try. In the UK, home of the original Luddites, a new study claims that British employees are deliberately sabotaging workplace robots over fears the machines will take their jobs. While I can understand the concern, it seems to me that one good way to lose your job is to sabotage your employer’s equipment. Also, these tactics run the risk that the robots might decide to deliberately sabotage human employees in self-defense. Don’t be giving them ideas! (And read on for an example of a robot no one will want to sabotage, except maybe your dog.)
A team of researchers from the University of Maryland, the State University of New York and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has found that new global tree growth over the past 35 years has more than offset global tree cover losses. This is good to know. I think most of us reflexively have this notion that forests are shrinking and we’re running out of trees. But no! Researchers found that global tree cover growth is more than offsetting trees lost. Squirrels of the world can breathe a sigh of relief, along with the rest of us.
It isn’t quite the robot butler we were promised, but this self-driving garbage can remembers to take the trash to the curb for you. It’s the SmartCan! It’s doing a job we’d rather not, so I think even Ned Ludd would give monkeywrenching this one a pass. I also imagine that after the coming superflu pandemic / zombie apocalypse / terminal smartphone addiction wipes out humanity there will be nothing left but lonely, empty SmartCans dutifully driving themselves to the curb on trash day, then back to the house, over and over for all eternity. See this short horror film for a preview of that dismal future.
I know what you’re thinking — why bother with the trashbots? Let’s just shoot all our garbage into the Sun! Maybe not everything, but the really toxic stuff like nuclear waste, deadly chemicals, and disposable diapers. On the surface this seems like a great idea, not least because it involves launching lots of rockets. Alas, this article explains why we don't shoot Earth's garbage into the Sun. Short answer — overcoming gravity makes it ridiculously expensive. Unless you’re Superman. And he’s got better things to do.
Speaking of Superman, he may end up speaking Spanish … Something bright came in hot enough to spark several fires in Chile recently, and it looks like it wasn't natural. A mysterious object fell from the sky in southern Chile. Investigators have determined it wasn’t a meteor. My suggestion is they canvass local farmhouses and see if any kindly old couples have recently adopted an infant. Then look in the barn for a small spaceship.
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