Archival items

Did you know you can access the Archives of The New York Times online? I was researching technology and the Pandemic and looking through The New York Times recent articles when I stumbled onto a reference to the Archives and that the contents are available - mostly free to subscribers. And the Archivesy are searchable. They can be viewed as text or, via their Time Machine, on the printed page of the edition. I spent some time reading an issue from April 1880! Who knew there was an Institute of Technology even then! And that it would be so engaging to read history in the making. 

New words ...

Each year, new words are added to the dictionary ... and I'm not sure how long it takes for the dictionary people to come knocking at your door after you have coined a word, or a term, but the people who came up with something to call the people who steal delivered parcels from people's doorstep (or wherever the delivery folk have left it) should be hearing the knock on their door any time. Their term? Porch pirates. It's a growing problem of course. I have been watching a few videos on YouTube lately about the elaborate lengths people go to to get back at people who steal their parcels or catch new porch pirates. I quite like the glitter bombs when they go off in their car or house ... or wherever. Better when they get caught on elaborate cameras set up in the "stolen" parcels - with the camera feed going to the cloud so it doesn't matter if they get rid of the actual camera. Smile!

Shortages ...

Since when does any store run out of hummus? It's not something I want all the time but I just felt like some yesterday .. and when I realised how little we had left it went on the shopping list for today. Simple enough ... except our usual Coles store had run out of it ... and a heap of other stuff as well. The other stuff I understand ... but hummus? Usually there are buckets of it everywhere but this time not one little tub of it ... even in those flavours that people tend to choose last - if at all. And don't get anyone started on toilet paper ... people just seem to grab rolls of it whenever there's even a rumour of shortages. At least there haven't been any stories of fisticuffs over it as there were at the start of the CoVid pandemic.

Hot ... hot ... hot ...

Is there nothing that Wikipedia doesn't know? Probably ... but it does know that the hottest day in Australia - which was previously in Oodnadatta (South Australia) on 2 January 1960 - has now been joined by another equally hot day - at Onslow (Western Australia) on 13 January (2022). Both temperatures came in at 50.7°C (123.3°F). They're not the only places in Australia to have high temperatures - both New South Wales and Queensland have had temperatures at 49.5°C (121.1°F) or above in the last 50 years or so. It's interesting, though, that even Australia's southernmost State has had over 40°C temperatures.

While it could appear to be getting hotter, I was reading the other day about 1816 - The Year Without a Summer. According to Wikipedia, severe climate abnormalities caused global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7°C (0.7–1°F). It was the coldest it had been in Europe between 1766 and 2000. The result was major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere. The reason: a volcanic winter event caused the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (now known as Indonesia).
It wasn't all bad though (?) ... it was while Mary Shelley was holed up during this period that she entered into a writing competion to see who of her compatriots could write the best horror story ... and thus Frankenstein was born ... or would that be ... created!

Ethically speaking ...

Philosophy. Hmmmm. I've never really dabbled in it much but I am doing more now that I'm studying a subject that references ethics. I need to give details of three types of ethics - and who knew there was more than one? So I have been looking at Utilitarianism and Kantianism for a start and cannot believe how well some folk explain the concepts. I have found a YouTube channel called Crash Course which clarifies and gives very clear examples of the different principles involved. I'm going to have to watch them a few more times though to make sure I understand them well enough for my next project: determining who was ethically responsible for (spoiler alert!) the death at the end of Louise Penny's The Long Way Home. I had been wondering about it (in terms of what could have been done to prevent it) and now I have a framework in which to process it, I am looking forward to the exercise.

Receipt issues

What do you do when you have a receipt you're holding on to for someone and then you leave it in the car and it fades to the point where you can't read it? Well, you can try to photograph it using different filters and have some degree of success, or you can contact the store and see if they can print out a duplicate - if you could work out what the bar code or identifier on it was (because it really doesn't seem to be there any longer) , or ... you can take it to Coles and they will put it under their special light so they can read it without any problem at all ... and then they print up a Duplicate receipt for you. Problem solved!

Not the duplicate receipt.

Loss of faith?

Who would have thought that Australians seem to be losing their faith in traditional religions? Don't take my word for it... let's use an independent source - the Australian Census ... well a few of them anyway. 

In the years since 1966, those reporting no religion in the Census have increased from 0.8% to 30% in the 2016 Census. That makes approximately 7 million Australians who claimed to have no religion. Hmmmm.

The figures from the Censuses (is that a word), bearing in mind the ones from 1966 to 2006 are not included here:
Census 1966 - Those reporting no religion - 0.8%
Census 2006 - Those reporting no religion - 19%
Census 2011 - Those reporting no religion - 22%
Census 2016 - Those reporting no religion - 30% - approximately 7 million Australians.

Data from Census 2021 will be released from June 2022 and it will be interesting to revisit this then to see if there has been an increase in "no religion" with CoVid and other world events or maybe something else entirely. 

Quick reminder: According to Wikipedia: Religion is a social-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements; however, there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion.

The Digital Divide

It's amazing what you learn along the way. A TAFE Queensland subject is Develop and extend critical and creative thinking skills. On Page 17 of the Learner Guide, there's mention of something akin to that Generation Gap that folk used to talk about. These days it's more likely to be the Digital Divide. There are two sides of the Divide - and most folk are on one side or the other - Digital Immigrants or Digital Slaves. If you're older, if you grew up in the 1950's and 1960's, you are more likely to be a Digital Immigrant - everyday technology is new and something that you need to learn, normally grudgingly. The other group, the Digital Natives, born in the 1990's and 2000's has no fear of trying a new device or system - it's just natural for them. The boundaries are blurred of course, they must be, given people's different experiences and proclivities ... and don't think I won't be starting to catalogue the folk I run into from now on.

Stellar Pizza ... not just Rocket Scientists?

Did someone say Rocket Scientists? Despite what we may have thought, rocket scientists aka aerospace engineers scored no more than the general population in a study led by researchers at universities and hospitals in London and Bristol. They were given the Great British Intelligence Test which looked at areas of cognition like planning and reasoning, working memory, attention and emotional processing. Who took the test? 300 Aerospace engineers, 12 neurosurgeons and 18,251 members of the British public. According to the report by Rebecca Sohn I read on space.com there were differences between the groups, but they were hard to interpret - but, bottomline, it seems any of us could turn our hands to rocket science, if we were so inclined. 

But what about those who do become rocket scientists? What do they do next? Well, if you've been working with SpaceX, you might turn your hand to Pizzas. Three former SpaceX engineers have set up Stellar Pizza, billed as a robot restaurant which will be able to churn out a pizza every 45 seconds! Benson Tsai, CEO of Stellar Pizza, worked at Elon Musk's SpaceX before rounding up 23 former SpaceX employees to build an automated, touchless pizza-making machine which can fit in the back of a truck. It takes about five minutes for the pizza to be produced from start to finish ... and while the article I read in Business Insider said while Stellar Pizza offers a pepperoni or supreme pizza, customers can build their own with toppings including onions, bacon, chicken and olives.