Thursday Things: Hot Dog Edition
25 February 2021. Vol 3 No 8 By Dan McGirt. #81
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Hot dog! Photo by Peter Secan on Unsplash
If you’ve ever wondered about the history of ketchup and mustard — and who hasn’t? — you may relish this article. A Brief History of Ketchup and Mustard
Around 300 BCE, people in China were experimenting with making pungent pastes out of fermented fish guts. A few centuries later, the Greek historian Pliny shared a method to treat scorpion stings using the ground-up seeds of a common plant. These are the unlikely origin stories of ketchup and mustard, two condiments that people in the United States spend over $1 billion on annually. How did two condiments with thousands of years of history between them become associated with hot dogs and hamburgers?
Organic food is one of those feel good things that sounds wonderful, like recycling, but when you dig into it doesn’t quite live up to its billing. I’m not judging you if you want to pay extra for “organic” whatever. But chances are pretty good you’re not really getting what you think you’re paying for.
Only eat organic? You’re paying too much, and it’s not worth it, author says
Nearly half of all Americans claim to prefer organic food, and the label has spread far beyond food. … Most farmers, however, have little interest in switching to the more costly and less convenient production methods required for organic certification, so this constrains the supply, which makes organic food needlessly expensive. America’s farmers so far have certified less than 1 percent of their cropland for organic production, and fewer than 2 percent of commodities grown in 2017 were organic. …
Farmers tend to hold back because producing food organically requires more human labor to handle the composted animal manure used for fertilizer, as well as more labor to control weeds without chemicals (sometimes putting down nonbiodegradable plastic mulch instead). It also requires more land for every bushel of production, further driving up costs. Trying to grow all of our food organically today would require farming a much wider area, damaging wildlife habitat.
Blasters! Blasters are coming. Us army testing machine gun-style laser weapon that vaporizes targets.
The United States Army is developing a powerful new laser weapon capable of rapidly firing metal-vaporizing pulses, much like a machine gun.
The new weapon, called the Tactical Ultrashort Pulsed Laser for Army Platforms, is expected to be about a million times stronger than any other laser weapon out there, New Scientist reports. Based on the military’s plans for the weapon, the laser will more closely resemble the sorts of laser rifles in science fiction movies than anything engineers have built in the past.
These will be good to have when the robot uprising starts. Unless the robots have them. Please do not give the robots blasters.
A quantum computer just solved a decades-old problem three million times faster than a classical computer. Workable quantum computers are coming, faster than we expect, and they will change everything, in ways we can foresee, but also in ways we neither expect nor can anticipate. Solving difficult simulation problems a million times faster than conventional CPUs could? That’s just getting warmed up.
Scientists from quantum computing company D-Wave have demonstrated that, using a method called quantum annealing, they could simulate some materials up to three million times faster than it would take with corresponding classical methods.
Together with researchers from Google, the scientists set out to measure the speed of simulation in one of D-Wave's quantum annealing processors, and found that performance increased with both simulation size and problem difficulty, to reach a million-fold speedup over what could be achieved with a classical CPU.
The robots will probably have quantum brains. That’s why we need the blasters.
Are you all Zoomed out? Researchers identify four causes of "Zoom fatigue" and their simple fixes. Happily, my work involves zero video conferences, but those of you who have spent the past year on Zoom and other Zoom-like services may be feeling a bit wiped out. Here are four reasons why that happens:
1) Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact is highly intense.
2) Seeing yourself during video chats constantly in real-time is fatiguing.
3) Video chats dramatically reduce our usual mobility.
4) The cognitive load is much higher in video chats.
Read the article for tips on how to avoid these problems and reduce your Zoom fatigue! You’re welcome!
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