The Industrial Revolution killed the Bison. At the time, industry was powered by large central steam engines in factories, with line-shafts that ran through the buildings with belts that ran down to individual machines. The best material available at the time to make these belts (strongest, longest lasting, without excessive stretch) was leather from Bison. The bison hunters killed and skinned the plains bison nearly into extinction to keep the factories running back east. If it hadn’t been for the discovery of Vulcanization of rubber, the extinction of the bison would have likely lead to the (at least temporary) collapse of industry in the Americas.

Clearly someone just got done reading James Rollins ‘Tides of Fire’ and then decided to actually read the research papers he cites in the book.
I literally finished reading that book last night, and it’s entire premise (while fantastical science fiction) is based on this paper.

It’s an ok book, not high literature by any means, but a fairly well paced action adventure science-ish fiction.

The slow march towards the Disney/Microsoft entertainment duopoly continues.

I hate how Google has shifted to a model where you have to share your precise location to get useful results. I remember in the early days, you could go to your search settings and put in a zip code, and search results took that as your location, when searching for local businesses and services. Now, that feature is long gone, and if you want usable results, you have to turn on location sharing. And if you don’t, the search results are more garbage than usual.
For example, I lived in Texas for a long time, but 3 years ago moved to Montana, and *to this day* google gives me results for the Dallas/FortWorth/Austin/Houston area, rather than my actual location in Montana. Which is dumb, because they are clearly not even using cached old decent ip address geolocation, as I didn’t live in that part of Texas, and had more accurate results there, while still not sharing my exact location with google.
And yes, I have followed all their “tips” for getting better results, like pinning local locations on Google maps, to no avail, any time I search without typing in my city name and state, I get eastern Texas results.

Agreed, Red Faction was amazing for its time, because of the (revolutionary at the time) destructible environment. A lot of people I ran into who played it didn’t even know that there were multiple paths through many levels accessible only by destroying walls and opening passages. You could bypass an entire ‘boss’ fight against a tank by finding a secret tunnel in one area. And it was a long game, even using cheat codes, it took the better part of a weekend for me to run through the entire game.

I played the first sequel, and finished it in an afternoon, and it felt more like a generic shooter than Red Faction. Almost no use of the destructible environments to the players advantage, the only time that mechanic seemed to come into play was for your cover to be obliterated by rockets from NPC’s. It had nice graphics for its time, but lacked the fun and feel of the original. I never played any of the other sequels.

While fascinating, this does not change the fact that a diet high in fish is bad for cats. It can cause Feline Pansteatitis, also known as Yellow Fat Disease.

It is probably 4.4 billion tons of Portland cement, and 8 billion tons of sand, and and un-quoted quantity of gravel making well over 12.4 billion tons of Concrete.
Sheesh. Editors.

Waiting for the Black Mirror version where people wake up to find their 3D printer has printed a handgun unrequested.

I was only tangentially aware of the MOVEit breach, a family friend called and asked me a few questions about a free year of credit monitoring their health insurance provider was offering, and mentioned MOVEit. I just looked it up, and am a little stunned it has not made bigger waves in the news. Upwards of 46.7 million individuals and counting affected, 677 organizations (banks, insurance, businesses, municipalities, state and local government agencies). And this is the first news article I’ve seen on the subject. Pretty disappointing to see how many eggs are in one basket, security wise.

Solution: Dirt cheep flip phone as their ‘school phone’ and they can have the latest shiny smartphone *outside school hours*.
They already have school clothes, school books, school computers, just add school phone.

To pricy as in offsets enough profit from raising and selling beef that it never sees widespread adoption. Most people could care less about the world at large, their own bottom line is the deciding factor.

I know it’s essentially a 2004 era dumb phone, but it still makes a person feel like a stupid asshole for paying $1200 for a smartphone.

I get that if I lie down for a nap and nap for more than about 20 minutes. For me, a 20 minute nap in a comfortable chair with my feet on the floor is refreshing, but anything more makes me groggy and weird feeling for quite a while.

Yeah the need for a power bar to get through the day is silly. The truth is, when you feel like you are completely sacked, worn out and done, you still have 80-90% left in the tank, but we’ve been conditioned to never expend any reserves, but rather to operate on the excess.

Yep, the ‘what can we get past the filter’ urge is strong. And also the ‘what innocent thing can we make the filter hit on’ game to make the programmers look inept is also fun!