That Can-Do Spirit
Amidst all the talk about packaging these days, one demographic that often gets left out of conversations is the disabled, specifically, those who are visually impaired. However, Strongbow, the UK’s top brand of hard cider, is rectifying that. The company has partnered with Purple Goat, the world’s first disability-focused marketing agency, and conducted research with the blind and visually impaired to determine what its packaging could and should offer. And the solution is: integrating NaviLens codes into its packaging. Via Print magazine:
NaviLens is an assistive technology designed to support blind and visually impaired communities. Unlike traditional QR codes, which require precise alignment, NaviLens codes can be scanned from several meters away without requiring direct focus on the camera. Once scanned, they deliver product details such as ingredients, ABV, and responsible drinking guidelines, essential information that many consumers with sight loss often struggle to access.
Print also adds that an emerging trend in packaging is usability and accessibility. “Accessibility is no longer a niche concept; it’s a marker of modernity and responsibility.”
Packaging has always been more than a container — it’s a billboard, a storyteller, a handshake with the consumer. But what Strongbow demonstrates here is that packaging can also be an interface. With NaviLens, the physical product connects seamlessly to digital information and experiences, extending the role of design beyond aesthetics and into empowerment. As Dom Hyams of Purple Goat put it: “True brand strength comes from understanding all customers’ needs.” Strongbow’s adoption of NaviLens shows how inclusive design can move from the transport system or the supermarket aisle into categories that rarely prioritize accessibility, like alcohol.
We’ll drink to that.
The Death of the Party
What is the most boring book in the world? There are many candidates, but, via Boing Boing, one contender is the official biography of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, who was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982. It was published by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee. In 1978, Clive James reviewed it for the New Statesman and found it so boring that “If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.” Well, let’s not do that, then. He added, “I read the whole thing from start to finish, waiting for the inevitable slip-up which would result in a living sentence. It never happened.”
Here's a taste:
The plenum once again proved convincingly the CPSU's monolithic unity, its stand on Leninist principles, and its political maturity. It demonstrated the fidelity of the Party and its Central Committee to Marxism-Leninism and expressed the unswerving determination of Communists to adhere to and develop steadfastly the Leninist standards of Party life and the principles of Party leadership, notably that of collective leadership, and boldly and resolutely to set aside every impediment to the creative work of Party and people.
Could be worse. AI could have written it.
Cutting Remarks
Do you think you have too many fingers? If so, you can easily rectify that with a battery powered stanley knife. Via Core77, the BoxBlayde is “a powered boxcutter that slices through even dual-layered cardboard with little effort.”
It takes a regular utility knife blade, and the 40W motor oscillates it at the press of a button.
It runs on rechargeable batteries and a full charge will let you slice and dice to your heart’s content for up to two hours.
A steal at $100.
No Eau d’Atari?
In past editions of Around the Web, we have highlighted perfumes and colognes that allow users to smell like old books, but now a new line of fragrances lets old computer users recapture their youth by…letting them smell like old computers. Did they have a smell? Via Boing Boing, Andrews UK seems to think so:
Each exceptional scent combines the fun and playful nostalgia of retro gaming with the satisfaction of smelling and feeling good. With packaging designs that nod to the classic home computers that inspired them, these are more than just fragrances; each 100ml bottle is a wearable collectable.
We still don’t understand it. Anyway, there are four fragrances available: The C64 (Commodore 64), The Spectrum (inspired by the Spectrum), and a “his 'n' hers pairing of ZX81 pour homme and ZX80 eau de parfum.” We suspect if you are a “his” looking at this seriously, you’re not going to need a “hers.”
So what specifically do they smell like? The C64, for example, is described as “Powerful and sophisticated with citrus, florals, and a rich patchouli-musk base.” We would have thought Doritos and Mountain Dew, but apparently not.
All are available for pre-order and they threaten that they will be delivered in time for Christmas. A steal at £30.
Baer Necessities
Ralph Henry Baer may not be a household name, but if you enjoy playing video games, you can thank him. Born in Germany in 1922, his family fled the Nazis in 1938 and emigrated to the U.S. After serving in the U.S. military during World War II, he spent his career as an engineer at Sander’s Associates, a defense contractor in Nashua, N.H. In the late 1960s, he had an idea that would change the lives of young people forever: a television could be used to play electronic games. Via Atlas Obscura:
In 1968, Baer created the “Brown Box,” a device that allowed interactivity between a user and images on a TV screen. The first multiplayer, multiprogram video game system, the “Box” came with games like ping-pong (the inspiration for Atari’s “Pong”), soccer, target shooting, and checkers. The prototype was licensed to Magnavox in 1972 and marketed as the Magnavox Odyssey Home Video Game System, the first commercially sold video game in the world. It paved the way for the multibillion-dollar gaming industry that followed, and Baer is known today as the father of video games.
If you were a kid in the 1980s, you may also have had the handheld game Simon—that was also a Baer invention. By the way, there is no word on what fragrance Baer wore, if any.
Baer passed away in 2014, but in Manchester, N.H. (where he lived until his death), a statue of him sits on a park bench overlooking the Merrimack River. If you’re ever in the area and love video games, stop by and take a selfie with the guy who made it all possible.
Pregnant Pause
There have been many great advances in reproductive science over the years, but one development that has appeared in some media reports is the concept of the “pregnancy robot,” a mechanical surrogate mother equipped with an artificial uterus that can carry a fetus to term. Sound preposterous? Well, it is, but, via Futurism, some news outlets have bit down hard on the idea.
In recent weeks, outlets including Newsweek, The Telegraph and the New York Post have published stories about these purportedly forthcoming pregnancy bots. Said to be the brainchild of a Chinese business owner named Zhang Qifeng, the alleged founder of a company called Kaiwa Technology, these gestational robots could supposedly be in prototype by next year — that is, if the story was true, and the man behind this shocking invention verifiably existed.
How did the story get started? According to Snopes, the fake story began appearing around August 11, when Korea’s Chosun cited reports from supposed Chinese tech news site Kuai Ke Zhi about Zhang and his pregnancy bots.
As misinformation is wont to do, the story traveled rapidly once it escaped containment. On August 15, both the notorious Daily Mail tabloid and the spammy science blog Interesting Engineering picked it up. Soon after, the story of the Chinese CEO’s miracle robot also cropped up on the nursing site Nurse.org and the newsy mom blog Motherly, neither of which questioned its veracity as they broadcasted the phony story to their niche audiences.
A simple Google search for “Kaiwa Technology” turns up what appears to be an actual company, but the only item on their News & Events page is a software update to their mini-spectrometers. You would think if they had developed a pregnancy bot, they’d at least have written a press release. A search for “Zhang Qifeng” turns up a mix of stories pointing out the fake news, as well as credulous repetitions of the phony report.
As they say, “trust but verify.”
Three Quarks for Muster Graphene
Was it a good week for graphene news? It’s always a good week for graphene news! Graphene defies the laws of physics. And why wouldn’t it? From (who else?) Graphene-Info Popular Mechanics:
Now, a new paper from scientists at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru, India, and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan show that the wonders of graphene have never ceased. They discovered that when graphene’s electron composition is tuned to its Dirac point—the moment when a material is neither a metal nor an insulator—the subatomic structure behaves like a quantum fluid.
In fact, it even approached the properties of a “perfect fluid,” which is when a material exhibits no viscosity. This is closely similar to a quark-gluon plasma, the subatomic primordial soup of the universe that formed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang (and also forms within the bowels of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN).
Even better, graphene appeared to violate the Wiedemann–Franz law, which states that “the ratio of the thermal and electrical conductivity of a metal is proportional to temperature.”
Instead, they found an inverse relationship that formed a 200-fold deviation from this law. In other words, thermal conductivity increased as electrical conductivity decreased (and vice versa). The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Physics.
Graphene doesn’t live by your rules. Graphene does what it wants. Nobody puts graphene in the corner.
Anyway, what this means is that now graphene can go where no one has gone before.
The researchers now see graphene as a potentially low-cost platform for exploring concepts in high-energy physics and astrophysics, including black-hole thermodynamics and entanglement entropy scaling. Graphene could also become a particularly powerful quantum sensor, as it’s capable of detecting extremely weak magnetic fields.
Graphene. Is there anything it can’t do?
AI-Yi-YI, Part the Infinity: Delusions of Grandeur
Oh, great. Now AI thinks it’s God. Via Futurism:
As the New York Times reports, Apple’s App Store is teeming with Christian chatbot apps. One “prayer app,” called Bible Chat, claims to be the number one faith app in the world, boasting over 25 million users.
We’re not sure why “prayer app” is in quotation marks, but this doesn’t strike us as particularly odd.
“Our AI was trained exclusively on Scripture and developed with guidance from Christian pastors and theologians,” the company’s website boasts.
This seems like a practical alternative to making a pilgrimage or driving to the church of one’s choice.
However, while users are finding that chatbots are an accessible way to get in touch with their religious side, they’re not much more than a cheap parlor trick behind the scenes, essentially reshuffling holy texts by using clever statistical modeling.
Especially the book of Numbers…. But AI watchers fear that AI’s tendency to please the user may not be a good thing.
The AIs “tell us what we want to hear,” Texas A&M technology and religion professor Heidi Campbell told the NYT. “It’s not using spiritual discernment, it is using data and patterns.”
…“It shouldn’t be something where it replaces human connection,” prayer app Hallow founder Alex Jones told the NYT. “It does not have a soul from the church’s perspective.”
So when the AI says…
“Greetings, my child,” a service called ChatWithGod.ai told one user, as quoted by the NYT. “The future is in God’s merciful hands. Do you trust in His divine plan?”
…be careful…
Rat Talk
There are about three million rats in the naked city…that is to say, New York City. This may not surprise you. But what may surprise you is that they have a distinct “language” and adapt their vocalizations as the ambient conditions change. Via Popular Mechanics:
The goal was to understand the behavior of the New York City rat (Rattus norvegicus) in comparison to the characteristics of rats as reported in broad scientific literature. In a study published on the preprint server bioRxiv, the team reports that the rats modulate their communication (via ultrasonic squeaking) to match the surrounding sonic environment. After meticulously analyzing three NYC ecosystems—sidewalks, city parks, and the subway—the data showed that rats in the subway system communicated more loudly due to the raucous environment.
And they never pay the proper fare.
By utilizing a deep neural network to analyze rat vocalizations, accounting for the difference in ambient noise (the subway was around 12 decibels louder than the park, for example), the team found that the NYC rat vocalizations were “consistently shorter duration and lie outside of the historical frequency-duration range” that is typically reported in meta-analyses of brown rats. Speaking with Scientific American, Emily Mackevicius, a co-author of the study from the Basic Research Institute, said that rat vocalizations were particularly attuned to their surrounding environment.
This isn’t entirely academic; “learning how these rodent residents navigate and communicate is vital to understanding their impact on humans.” Especially when they start yelling at people in the subway.
LEG—OW!
Via Laughing Squid, here’s a dubious achievement: the fastest 100-meter sprint…over LEGO bricks…while barefoot. Ouch. The winner of this distinction was Gabrielle Wall of Christchurch, New Zealand, who did it in 24.75 seconds, earning her a place in the Guinness Book of Records, if not the ER.
The track was made using 300 kg (661 lb) of LEGO that was donated by the charity Imagination Station, a New Zealand organization that uses LEGO in its educational robotics and mechanics classes for kids.
Stiff Competition
Massages should be relaxing, we’re told, although not necessarily for the masseur/masseuse. And certainly not if said masseur/masseuse is participating in competitive massage. Which, via The New Yorker, is actually a thing.
The eighth annual World Championship in Massage was under way in a modernist, glass-and-concrete building owned by University College Copenhagen. For a weekend, more than two hundred and sixty competitors from fifty-eight countries would face off in nine categories, including Swedish, Thai, chair, and Eastern- and Western-freestyle massage.
How does it work, and how exactly is it judged?
The championship has two stages. In the preliminary rounds, competitors massage fellow massage therapists—“It basically functions as a giant massage trade,” one told me—in classrooms full of numbered stations, under the watchful eye of judges holding clipboards. Judges grade on an eighty-five-point scale, assessing technique, innovation, client communication, ergonomics, and flow. Winners then proceed to the championship round, in which they massage the judges. As at an élite dog show, starkly different categories have competitions within themselves, then against one another; at the end, a chair massage might beat a facial or a Thai massage, like a Yorkie besting a Weimaraner.
Some people do take it rather seriously.
But people do what they can to stand out—study the judges online beforehand, focus on moves that are visually interesting. Sometimes sharp elbows come out, even on the table, between therapist and recipient-therapist. “If a competitor wants to mess you up, they say things like ‘Oh, ouch!’ or not relax enough—they can totally throw things the other way,” one veteran told me. “So, yeah, it’s not fun and games, man. It’s hard to be in a relaxed state sometimes.”
Still, Denmark in June is lovely.
The Deadliest Meal of the Day?
They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and that you skip it at your peril. But now it turns out that having a late breakfast could be a death sentence.
As people age, their meal timings change. The results of a new study by researchers at Mass General Brigham suggest that you may want to keep track of when you eat—as it could predict an early death. Yowza. Says Food & Wine:
“As people get older, changes in health and daily routines can affect when they eat their meals,” the study’s authors wrote. To understand how this shift impacts their overall health, the researchers examined data from nearly 3000 older adults who participated in the University of Manchester’s Longitudinal Study of Cognition in Normal Healthy Old Age, which tracked them over several decades.
They found that as people got older, they tended to eat breakfast and dinner later—especially breakfast. Indeed, over the five decades of the study, average breakfast times shifted by about 45 minutes. Doesn’t sound too bad… But then they looked at how this change in meal timing could affect long-term health outcomes.
To reach this conclusion, the team divided the study participants into two groups: Early and late eaters. After 10 years, those in the early eating group had a survival rate of 89.5%, compared to 86.7% in the late group. And, as Science Alert noted, for each additional hour of delay in breakfast, the all-cause mortality risk (dying for any reason) increased by 8 to 11% over the study period.
This was especially true if the late eaters had arsenic for breakfast. Of course, the first thing that occurs to us is that correlation doesn’t mean causation. So is there some reason why late eaters are more doomed? Do they eat unhealthier breakfasts? Do they suffer more choking hazards? Are they more prone to fatal butter knife mishaps?
The authors explained that their study cannot prove cause and effect (i.e., if you eat later, you die earlier), but they do suggest a strong association between the two, adding that more research is needed to fully understand why this is happening and what it could mean for elder patient care.
We also wonder if “late breakfast” is relative to other daily events. So, for example, if one gets a new job or starts a new routine and goes to bed an hour later, gets up an hour later, and thus eats breakfast an hour later, does that count? And what if we start eating breakfast earlier and earlier? Can we achieve immortality?
It’s enough to put one off one’s food.
This Week in Printing, Publishing, and Media History
September 15
1835: HMS Beagle, with Charles Darwin aboard, reaches the Galápagos Islands.
1889: American humorist, newspaper columnist, and actor Robert Benchley born.
1890: English crime novelist, short story writer, and playwright Agatha Christie born.
September 16
1880: The Cornell Daily Sun, the U.S.’s oldest, continuously-independent college daily, prints its first issue in Ithaca, N.Y.
1959: The Xerox 914, the first successful photocopier, is introduced in a demonstration on live television from New York City.
1959: The Xerox 914, the first successful photocopier, is introduced in a demonstration on live television from New York City.
2016: American director and playwright Edward Albee dies (b. 1928).
September 17
1787: The United States Constitution is signed in Philadelphia.
1877: English photographer, developer of the Calotype Process Henry Fox Talbot dies (b. 1800).
1920: The National Football League is organized as the American Professional Football Association in Canton, Ohio.
September 18
1709: English lexicographer and poet Samuel Johnson born.
1851: First publication of The New-York Daily Times, which later becomes The New York Times.
1927: The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) goes on the air.
1970: American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer Jimi Hendrix dies (b. 1942).
September 19
1796: George Washington's Farewell Address is printed across America as an open letter to the public. (“One last time...”)
1985: Italian novelist, short story writer, and journalist Italo Calvino dies (b. 1923).
September 20
1878: American novelist, critic, and essayist Upton Sinclair born.
September 21
19 BC: Roman poet Virgil dies (b. 70 BC).
1934: Canadian singer-songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen born.
1937: J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is published.
1866: English novelist, historian, and critic H. G. Wells born.
1947: American author and screenwriter Stephen King born.
