Good luck Mc-aholic

Squid camouflage

my naem is skwid
i am not fish
i mite be sick
so im in dish
the doctor touch
it gave me shock
i do not trust
so now im rock

*69

Artists still trying to break through

I could talk ad nauseam about Spotify and what it means to me, but I'll spare you, especially if you already use it. One thing I notice sometimes when I'm browsing artists is how many times a song has been listened to, which is usually in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of streams. In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, if you open an album page and hover over the rating bars at the far right of any song, it will show you how many streaming plays it has got.

Once in a while, I am shocked to discover that an artist has fewer than 100,000 streams accumulated to date, which I find unfortunate considering how great they sound. I think we owe it to our friends to tell them about artists we know about who haven't truly been discovered yet.

The first artist I'd like you to check out on Spotify is Folksongs for the Afterlife. Try the songs Miles and Miles and then Summer Loop.

Next check out Paatos, from Sweden, specifically their album Kallocain and the songs Gasoline, Happiness and Won't be coming back.

Check out, also from Sweden, Dungen's song En Gang I Ar Kom Det En Tar off their album Tio Bitar. It's very retro.

Bugge Wesseltoft should get your body moving a bit with Change, from the album Moving.

If a lower bass groove is more your thing, Minilogue's Hitchhiker's Choice original mix from the Hitchhiker's Choice mini-EP is great to test out your speakers.

For something a bit more laid back, check out New York's Ida, their album Heart like a river, for the songs Late Blues (one of my all-time faves), and Honeyslide.

Got any sub-100,000 artists to share?

Small things 28 Feb

• Have Post-it notes numbed our memory? How did we remember stuff before them?
• I wonder how many hurricanes and tornadoes it will take before people stop building their houses out of wood and particle board.
• Americans eat as if they had free health care.
• MM/DD/YYYY. Whose idea was that?
• You know you've reached adulthood when you own dishes or cutlery that haven't seen the light of day in years.
• Getting old means it's a challenge just to remember why you left one room to go to anot..... sorry, what were we talking about?
• You go from hearing your song on the radio, to hearing it in a bar, to hearing it at your wedding, to hearing it in a grocery store, to hearing it in an elevator.
• Sleeping is easy. I can do it with my eyes closed.
• Never buy shoes from a drug dealer. You have no idea what they laced them with and you'll end up tripping all day.
• What starts with an 'O' and ends with 'nions' and sometimes makes you cry?   Opinions.....

Adult: Time for your bath.
Kid: I don't want a bath.
Adult: Come on, you'll be done in 10 minutes, then it's all over.
Kid: Fine.
[30 minutes later]
Adult: OK, bath time's over.
Kid: No. I don't want to get out yet.

AMG at the pinnacle

I find it incredible how sophisticated, automated, precise and efficient internal combustion engine manufacture has become just as we are nearing the end of its necessity.

This is a video of the immaculate Mercedes AMG engine factory in Germany that builds M 139 engines for the 2020 A-45 and CLA-45. A 4 cylinder engine that puts out an incredible 387 hp minimum, 421 hp maximum.

You may notice while you're watching that the assembler works with the same engine from beginning to end. As he or she wheels the engine to the next station, robotically driven parts cabinets find their way to the current station so the assembler can just grab what is needed and add them into place. Even the tools are computerized.

In the end, your assembler's signed nameplate goes on the engine so you know which crafts-person built it. In case you didn't notice the grin on his face as he was building it, they obviously take great pride in what they do.

Injuries

Things I learned lately 28 Feb

• Researchers are figuring out how to make edible fat as a replacement for butter and oil out of insects. Insect fat contains lauric acid, which provides positive nutritional attributes since it is more digestible than butter. Moreover, lauric acid has an antibacterial, antimicrobial and antimycotic effect.
• In Japan, you can get mayonnaise in solid form in slices, like cheese singles.
• The estimated number of birds killed in North America each year by wind turbines: @300,000. The estimated number of birds killed in the US each year by cats: 1.4 to 3.7 billion. While that seems to put things into perspective, it omits a critical fact. Cats don't kill large endangered birds like owls or eagles. But wind turbines have been known to.
• This TED talk sheds some light on the real cost and drawbacks of the most popular renewable energy sources and offers a surprising solution that is more efficient, costs less, doesn't kill any wildlife, and is much less harmful to the environment. 
• Paper-based currency doesn't last long, so the U.S. Treasury Department keeps busy disposing of damaged currency and printing new stock. Every day, the presses print 25 million notes worth approximately 560 million dollars.
• The Boeing 737 was first introduced in 1967.
• The Hoover Dam construction project, started in 1931, was the first construction project in the world where the workers were required to wear hard hats.
• The actor inside the alien suit in the 1979 sci-fi classic Alien, took Tai Chi and mime lessons in order to give the alien the slow, smooth, and deliberate movements that thoroughly terrified audiences.

Small things 21 Feb

• "Then the 30s, Hitler, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, second World War, Russian front. Not a good idea. Hitler never played Risk when he was a kid.... 'cause you know, when you're playing Risk, you could never hold on to Asia." ~Eddie Izzard
• I think it would be fun to make fake jewellery out of weird things, to see who notices. Like a ring featuring a Shreddie. Or a necklace with a paperclip on the end. 
• Memories of 1996: Sometimes you wanted to rent a movie, but the video store had already rented all the copies out. If you were lucky, there was a waiting list.
• Imagine a wikipedia that once an entry is made, that's it, no changes. Well, that was encyclopedias..... And they cost money! A lot.
• Memories of 1994: "Could you hurry up and get off the phone so I can use the internet!"
• What's the longest you've ever remembered a phone number by heart? I still remember mine from when I was a teen. Of course, my mom still has that number.....
• Memories of 1977: Phones were either on a table or mounted to the wall and you could only talk as far away from the phone as the handset cord could reach.
• Remember when you were young and couldn't afford all the music you liked so you'd patiently wait until the weekend radio music countdown to record off the air? You tried your best to capture the whole song and hoped the DJ wouldn't talk too much over the beginning of the song?
• You won't go blind looking at the bright side of life.
• Life doesn't give you lemons. They're a hybrid crossbreed - we gave them to ourselves.
• American Mom: "A new war? You got new war money? You never even finished the last two. We have plenty of war at home."
• Imagine if politicians spent as much effort making society better as they did trying to make their rivals look bad.

Smudge the cat meme - Japanese style

Mother nature's HVAC system

If you've ever been curious about what it would be like to heat and cool your home with geothermal, this video is for you.

Many people discount the geothermal option, because they think it's too expensive, can't be installed on a small lot, or won't work in their geographic area.

What most folks don't realize is that the kind of geothermal temperatures that are needed to support power plants aren't required to regulate the temperature of a house.

Smudge the cat meme - Egyptian style

Things I learned lately 21 Feb

• Women Air-force Service Pilots (WASP) (substitute Army and Auxiliary as well) were trained women pilots, whose job it was to test, ferry aircraft from factory to airbase and train other pilots. WASP freed up male pilots for combat during World War II. Despite the armed forces being involved in the creation of WASP, its members had no military standing. They numbered 1,074 women pilots.
• In North Carolina, a white police officer pulled a black man and his daughter over and when the office noticed the girl didn't have a car seat, the man explained he couldn't afford one. The office had the man follow him to Walmart where he bought a car seat with his own money.
• Insomnia Cookies delivers warm cookies to your door until 3 am (US only). It was started by a university student 17 years ago and was acquired by Krispy Kreme in 2018.
• Minnesota has set aside funding to encourage homeowners to plant bee-friendly plants, such as Dutch white clover and creeping thyme.
• Some Girl Scouts have been setting up their cookie selling tables just outside marijuana dispensaries. Brilliant.
• The Guangzhou metro area in China has 56 million residents, more than all of Canada.
• The experts understand how lift is generated by a wing, but nobody agrees on why lift is generated by a wing. Bernoulli's Theorem and Newton's Third Law complement each other on the how, but neither explain the why.
• Canning jars are also known as Mason jars and Kilner jars to honour their inventors.

"You're a stingray"

Small things 14 Feb

• If you bring your male dog to the dog park and some other dog owner comes up to you and says, "your dog is humping my dog," just say "the bride's family pays for the wedding." to deflect.
• If Spotify was like US health care, you'd pay a $9.99 premium for access to some music; You still pay $7 per song until you've spent $100, then the rest are free, but this resets every year; every song costs a $0.49 co-pay; if you lose your job, they cancel your subscription and songs now cost $999 each.
• The first time someone spun around in their office chair......
• You can't run through a camp site. You can only ran because it's past tents...
• What did one nut say when it was chasing the other nut? "I'm a cashew!"
• Why'd the old man fall down the well? Because he couldn't see that well!
• Why did Edward Woodward have so many 'd's in his name? Because without them he'd have been called Ewar Woowar. Say it out loud, I dare you.....
• What's blue and not very heavy? Light blue...
• What do you call a broken can opener? A can't opener....

Person: How do you read your own handwriting?
Other person: I was there when it was written.....

What's a pirate's least favourite letter?
Dear sir,
Your internet access has been terminated due to illegal usage.
Sincerely, your service provider.

Kinda says it all, doesn't it?

Fake plastic trees

There are rarely enough ways to re-purpose recycled plastic, so a lot of it ends up in landfills anyway. Recently, I discovered that there may be a huge demand for recycled plastic that could solve a specific pedestrian problem in cities.

As a resident in my community, I joined a working group of City workers, planners, designers and consultants, who wanted to walk along a major road in my community that just happens to be the inner city portion of the Trans Canada Highway. As we were walking along this roadway, the participants notice how vulnerable they felt walking so close to the roadway. Many got splashed with slush. The problem wasn't the width of the sidewalk, it was that the usable portion of it was just too close to the road. There was definitely room, in most cases, to make the sidewalk wider and shift the portion you walk on (as opposed to any decorative portion) further away from the road. But most of the participants also thought that some kind of physical barrier, even vegetation, or trees, would help make the sidewalk seem safer and more isolated from the traffic.

The problem is that vegetation doesn't typically do very well along a major roadway that receives a constant application of salt (or in our case calcium chloride) in winter. Most of the spots reserved for trees or bushes were empty, not because nothing had been planted, but because whatever was planted had not fared well. The City spends a lot of time trying to find vegetation that can survive our weather and the stuff scattered on our roads. I'm wondering if the solution could make use of our unwanted recycled plastic.

I'm picturing fake stalks lining the roads between the sidewalk and the road itself. Something similar to bamboo stalks, but made in different colours, thicknesses, even shapes. It could even be fake tall grasses. Bunched together, these stalks would act as a barrier to make pedestrians feel more isolated from traffic. Some of these stalks could even be lit up with dim lighting. Of course someone would have to design and build this fake vegetation, but what a wonderful way to make use of some plastic that currently finds no secondary use.

Things I learned lately 14 Feb

• In America, you can buy giant containers of powdered cheese from Kraft Macaroni & Cheese (KD as it's known in Canada).
• Despite their prevalence in Italian cuisine, tomatoes are from the Americas and were not widely adopted into Italian cooking until the late 17th century.
• Movie trailers are known as such because they were originally shown after the movie ended (and thus trailed the movie) instead of before the movie as they are in the present day.
• Despite the widely held belief that ostriches stick their heads into sand when threatened, there has never been a single observation of such behaviour in wild or domestic ostriches.
• There are roughly 1800 tornadoes in the US every year. I read that and I was blown away.
• Apparently, if you leave $1 in your will to a family member, they can't contest the will on the grounds that they were forgotten.
• In Windows 10, there exists Microsoft Print to PDF, which is now available to any program that can print, to convert the output to a PDF file.
• The various projects working on autonomous vehicles are also trying to figure out how to mitigate motion sickness in passengers.
• Switzerland has a political party dedicated to the elimination of PowerPoint.

How do you like my snowman?

Small things 7 Feb

• I wonder if there will come a time when we start to pee in the sink. If you think about it, you won't waste the amount it takes to flush a toilet, and when you wash your hands, you'll rinse the urine down the drain
• I think I'll sell my theremin. I haven't touched it in ages.
• What do you call people who take care of chickens? Chicken tenders......
• Say what you want about deaf people.
• I bought the world's worst thesaurus today. Not only was it terrible, but it was also terrible.
• Guy walks up to the widow at her husbands funeral and says "May I just say one word?" Sure she replies. "Plethora." The widow says "Thanks. That means a lot."

"Why did you leave your last job?"
"Thanks to something my boss said."
"Oh dear. What did they say?"
"You're fired."

Drone delivery is a thing now

Wing, an Alphabet (Google) subsidiary has successfully delivered packages via drone, the first company in the United States to deliver by drone. The test location was Christiansburg, Virginia. The residents ordered products from Walgreens or other local businesses, but the packages were delivered to their doorsteps via drone.

One family used the Wing app to order Tylenol, cough drops, Vitamin C tablets, bottled water and tissues, the statement said. An older resident ordered a birthday present for his wife. Although the majority of the delivery was done by a FedEx truck, the last mile was completed by drone.
The yellow and white drones are loaded with packages at a local centre of operations called the "Nest," where Wing employees pack them with up to 3 pounds (1.3 kg) of goods, deliverable within a 6 mile (10 km) radius. Once they have arrived at their destination, the drones don't land. Instead, they hover above the house and lower the package with a cable.

America 2016

Children picking up their daily allowance of bottled water from the fire department. 

Flint MI

The 1970s were so amazing for music

I've heard this classic song covered by a lot of different people, but none as cool as Bonnie Raitt from her earlier days.

And with John Hammond and Lowell George to boot!

Farewell to thee EU

Put your hands in the air

If you've ever ridden a motorcycle, you probably know about the wave. When you encounter another bike rider coming toward you, you wave at each other. In fact, bikers are very cool about it. The wave evolved to a subtle point, but it's still very noticeable and it creates a sense of community among two wheeled riders.

I wonder if Tesla owners have a similar thing. I do know that Tesla owners have a very strong sense of community too. Since they were the first car to 'self drive' and continue to push the envelope, I wonder if they would adopt a 'put your hands in their air' or 'raise the roof' thing, signifying the ability to drive almost hands-free.

Things I learned lately 7 Feb

• The Sacramento Public Library started a Library of Things, allowing patrons to check out, among other things, sewing machines and other items that patrons may find useful, but don't need to own long term.
• Although Windows Defender, the built in security software in Windows 10 has the ability to detect most ransomware threats, it relies heavily on a connection to their servers in real time to do that detection. So if you accidentally execute a ransomware infected file with no internet connection, you're basically hosed.
• You can help another person if they're using Win 10 using the built in Quick Assist feature (use search to find it)
• Vermont may become the first US state to allow emojis on license plates.
• There is a bookstore in Upper Tantallon Nova Scotia called Otis & Clementine's Books, Coffee that hosts a bunch of kitties needing to be adopted.
• "go hang a salami" backwards is "im a lasagna hog"
• Although it was never brought to production, the title of the potential Spaceballs sequel was slated to be Spaceballs III: The Search for Spaceballs II and then later Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money.
• Neptune's moon Triton has active geysers that do not spew out hot liquids like Earth's geysers do, but giant jets of icy nitrogen gas and entrained dust in plumes up to 5 miles (8 km) high instead.
• People used to believe that wearing Amethyst protected you from getting drunk.