Things I learned lately 20 Oct

• Michael McKeen, actor from This is Spinal Tap, Better Call Saul and Best in Show among so many others, was Lenny Kosnowski of ‘Lenny & Squiggy’ on the Laverne & Shirley TV show.
• ChatGPT is no longer limited to only knowing what has transpired up to September 2021.
• This northern city is spending $100 million on cycling infrastructure. Copenhagen? Oslo? Nope. Edmonton.
• Netflix’s next big thing is branded retail stores. I’m as puzzled as you are.
• San Diego is at about the same longitude (E-W) as Rogers Pass in BC. It’s further east than Revelstoke.
• West St Paul is actually due south of St Paul MN.
• The band Three Dog Night had songs written for them by Harry Nilsson, Steve Winwood, Randy Newman, Laura Nyro, Paul Williams, and Gary Wright.
• The Aleutian Island Chain in Alaska extends further west than the islands of Hawaii.
• There is a very large telescope operated by the Europeans and it’s called (wait for it) the Very Large Telescope or VLT.  It’s actually four individual telescopes, each with a primary mirror that measures 8.2 meters in diameter. These optical telescopes, named Antu, Kueyen, Melipal, and Yepun, are generally used separately but can be combined to achieve a very high angular resolution.
• It’s not even the electric vehicles Tesla has designed and built that are revolutionary. It’s their factories, which have taken manufacturing to another level. But speaking of their vehicles, Tesla has managed to get 400,000 of their cars testing self-driving in real time, with their Dojo neural net evaluating every time a driver has taken over the driving to determine what else the car needs to learn. All the while doing it without expensive sensors and pre-programmed road maps. Tesla’s cars ‘see’ the world around them using just an array of cameras. Their FSD beta has driven over 500 million miles unaided by humans.