Your Friday World’s Record for the Fastest Time Solving Three Rubik’s Cubes While Juggling

The Great Unread

What is the least-viewed entry on Wikipedia? Via Boing Boing, Colin Morris, who has written a few scarcely viewed Wikipedia articles, was interested in finding out, and he compiled a list of the 500 least-viewed Wikipedia articles. The absolute least-viewed—tied at a mere three views in 2021—are:

One of these things is not like the other… If there were a species of moth that only lived in Wanshousi station, man, that would be completely ignored.

Moving a little bit further up the list, we detect a pattern:

Looks like we’ll have to click through and spread some Sri Lankan moth love.

Passkey Note

Do you hate passwords? Sure, we all do. And perhaps even worse are password managers like 1Password, which is easily the most irritating software ever inflicted on humanity. Happily, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and while it may turn out to be an oncoming train, there is some hope that it could alleviate everyone’s issues with passwords. Via CNet:

Coming in iOS 16 and MacOS Ventura this fall, passkeys don't require a unique configuration for each app or service, the recommended practice with passwords. They also don't need a second authentication factor, like an SMS code, to strengthen the password system's shortcomings.

Passkeys are as easy -- maybe easier -- to use than passwords because they don't involve typing or remembering the riot of keystrokes needed for passwords. They also stop phishing attacks and banish the complications of two-factor authentication.

Setting up a passkey is supposedly going to be easy:

Use your fingerprint, face or another mechanism

My face is a mechanism? I am a robot! Noooo!!!! We continue.

to authenticate a passkey when a website or app prompts you to set one up. That's it.

And then you use it:

When using a phone, a passkey authentication option will appear when you try to log on to an app. Tap that option, use the authentication technique you've chosen, and you're in.

For websites, you should see a passkey option by the username field. After that, the process is the same.

Once you have a passkey on your phone, you can use it to facilitate login on another nearby device, like your laptop. Once you're logged in, that website can offer to create a new passkey linked to the new device.

Look for passkeys to roll out later this year. Passkeys and passwords will likely exist side by side for a while as passkeys start to catch on, and by then we should have a clear idea of what new problems and aggravations they will spawn.

AI-Yi-Yi, Part the Infinity: Branding

Via Boing Boing, AI researcher Janelle Shane recently conducted an experiment to see how well the Dall-e neural network could generate corporate restaurant logos.

Full Graphene Jacket

Was it a good week for graphene news? It’s always a good week for graphene news! WearGraphene’s graphene-enhanced jacket is now available! From Graphene-Info:

The jacket uses graphene in two ways. Graphene is infused into the coat, with an aim to achieve thermos-regulation, and the jacket also includes graphene heating elements, in the pockets, and in the back. Read our full review here.

You can order it here, although it will set you back about $400.

Wow, Inflation Really Is Bad

Even poll results are massively inflated:

K19?

Don’t have time to take a COVID test? (Yes, we still need them.) Well, why not let your dog tell you if you may have COVID? From Smithsonian:

 A new study has shown that dogs may even be better at detecting Covid-19 than PCR tests. The dogs' powerful snoots identified positive Covid-19 cases among 335 people at 97 percent accuracy after taking a whiff of human sweat samples, reports Aria Bendix for NBC News. And during the tests, the team found that the canines found all 31 Covid-19 cases in the 192 patients showing no symptoms. The study, led by Dominique Grandjean at the Alfort School of Veterinary Medicine in suburban Paris, was published in PLOS One. It suggests that with the proper scent work, canines could help obtain test results fast in mass screening efforts and reduce the need for invasive nasal swab tests.

They would also be good for screening public events.

Fowl Language

We’re all familiar with the old riddle, “which came first, the chicken or the egg,” although it’s not all that insoluble. However, this week researchers believe they have identified the source of the first recognizable domesticated chickens. Says Gizmodo:

Chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) evolved from junglefowl, but exactly when and where humans first domesticated the animals has been up for debate. Previously, research contended that chickens emerged in Southeast Asia or India and northern China. 

There’s a new term we have to add to our lexicon: “junglefowl.” It’s tempting to envision giant, prehistoric proto-chickens crashing through the forest, like some weird parody of Jurassic Park. Anyway, we continue:

In the new work, a team looked at a trove of data on chicken remains found across about 600 different sites in 89 countries, and found the earliest evidence for domestic chickens to come from a Neolithic site in Thailand called Ban Non Wat.

…Ban Non Wat’s faunal remains are dominated by chicken bones that date to between 1650 BCE and 1250 BCE, the researchers found. Excavations at the site also revealed evidence of juvenile birds, which the team interpreted as evidence of poultry farming.

In other poultry news, scientists have solved (sorry, not going to say “cracked”) the mystery of a giant egg produced by an extinct terrestrial bird. Oh, and do we love the name they gave to this bird: “demon ducks of doom.” Says LiveScience:

In 1981, researchers in Australia discovered the charred remnants of numerous eggs from several cooking fires used by prehistoric humans, dating to about 50,000 years ago. Some of the eggs were identified as those of emus. But a few oversized specimens belonged to a second, unknown bird. For years, scientists argued about the identity of that large bird. But given the eggs' size and age, over time, two contenders emerged: Progura, a group of large turkey-like birds, or Genyornis, sometimes referred to as  "demon ducks of doom" because of their huge size and evolutionary relation to the smaller waterfowl.

A new analysis—published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—has identified the eggs has having come from Genyornis newtoni, Australia’s last “thunder bird.” (Yes, “Thunderbirds are go!”) G. newtoni was one intimidating duck:

It stood over 6.5 feet (2 meters) tall and tipped the scales at up to 530 pounds (240 kilograms) of beak, bones and feather-clad muscle, according to the Australian Museum. …Fittingly, these mega ducks also laid large eggs; each weighed around 3.5 pounds (1.6 kg), about the size of a melon. Genyornis' huge eggs would have been an ideal source of protein for Indigenous Australian people, provided they could safely collect them from the big birds' nests.

It’d also make one heck of a duck a l’orange.

Sit and Spin

There is much brouhaha surrounding “right to repair” as it applies to things like smartphones. However, we recently came across a phrase that seems deeply wrong: “DRM wheelchair.” Surely not. (Yes, and don’t call me Shirley.) Via Cory Doctorow, three million people rely on wheelchairs to help them accomplish life’s basic tasks: going shopping, getting to work, seeing friends and family, etc. May also rely on powered wheelchairs. Like any mechanical device, they can break. Unfortunately,

for powered wheelchair users, this situation is gravely worsened by an interlocking set of policies regarding repair and reimbursement that mean that when their chairs are broken, it can take months to get them repaired.

Stranded, a new report from the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), is based on interviews with 141 wheelchair users about their experiences with their chairs. Not only do they break a lot, getting them repaired can be expensive and frustrating.

But, as Stranded makes clear, manufacturers of Complex Rehabilitation Technology (CRT)—the formal classification for powered wheelchairs—have adopted repair-hostile tactics that make all of this much, much worse for wheelchair users.

Here’s where DRM comes in.

Wheelchair users don’t want to wait for repair, and so they often source their own parts and do their own repairs. When confronted with a choice between injury and immobilization or paying out of pocket for parts and tools, many wheelchair users feel they have no choice but to pay.

Home repairs that involve powered chairs’ electronic systems are a different matter. Not because electronics are more complex—but because manufacturers use “Digital Rights Management” (DRM): digital locks that are designed to block independent access.

So there is The Consumer Right To Repair Powered Wheelchairs Act (HB22-1031), which has passed the Colorado legislature, with Governor Jared Polis expecting to sign it into law. 

Citizen Cane

For those not quite ready for a wheelchair, there is Stride Senze, a “high-tech cane.” We kid you not. From Core77:

Industrial design consultancy NextOfKin Creatives worked up this Stride Senze concept, a cane for the elderly that would use sensors and a motor to assist the user. In theory it would reduce the amount of force required to move it, and its Segway-like motion correction would keep it stable when weight is applied to it.

Core77’s Rain Noe has concerns about one element of it:

the smooth sphere. Should be fine for shopping malls, freshly-paved parking lots and tiled surfaces; but when I think of my elderly neighbor who uses a cane, when she arrives home she must navigate a gravel driveway, then a flagstone path laid over grass to get to the house. Unsurprisingly, she uses one of those canes that terminates in four little legs with rubber caps.

As long as it doesn’t have DRM built into it…

Planet of the Apes

We on occasion take a peek into the world of nonfungible tokens (NFTs), have little clue what is going on, make derisive jokes, and immediately return to the real world. So we were bemused by this article in Slate about the “Bored Ape Yacht Club avatars” and how they are being stolen in record numbers. To begin:

Yes, Bored Ape Yacht Club avis are basically just .jpgs stored on a digital ledger, easy for anyone on the web to right-click and save. And yes, though much of the rest of the NFT market has cratered, the apes remain a status symbol, having fetched nearly $20 million just over the past week with an average price of $188,000 per ape, according the website NFT Stats.

If that’s what a status symbol comprises, we’re perfectly happy having no status whatsoever. We continue with one of the most surreal paragraphs ever written:

Since April 2021, when the Bored Ape Yacht Club collective auctioned its first NFTs, large corners of Twitter and other spaces have resembled a sillier planet of the apes. Celebrities like Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton showed off their BAYC-created apes on national TV. Shaq made his ape his Twitter profile picture. Justin Bieber got an ape, though he probably didn’t pay for it. By now, you’ve likely heard about the strange, tragic saga of Seth Green’s apes.

It gets more surreal.

In exchange for owning these ape avis, users got more than bragging rights, if they were into it. One’s ape token became their ticket to exclusive digital and IRL parties. You could get an “ApeCoin,” and use the currency to buy a special burger or purchase an expensive land deed in the metaverse.

But then someone crashed—er, hacked—the party and ape avatars were stolen, summed up in a meme-worthy tweet from New York City art gallery owner Todd Kramer:

So…how does this work exactly? How do you steal NFTs?

Well, when you purchase and trade NFTs on a digital marketplace like OpenSea, you have the option of storing your tokens—which are merely certificates denoting your virtual rights to certain images, and not the artworks themselves—in a computerized “wallet.” This can be either a “hot wallet,” i.e., an online storage space, or a “cold wallet,” which lets you keep the access codes for your tokens in a secure, offline drive. Hacks of hot wallets, through phishing emailsor access gained to users’ wallet “keys,” had not been uncommon before Kramer’s situation. But his very public complaint—and fascinating choice of syntax—brought wider attention to this particular scam.

And in case you’re wondering, because we have truly gone round the bend, Kramer’s tweet became…an NFT.

At any rate, the article goes into far more detail than we have interest in. Suffice to say, a fool and his apes are soon parted.

Steaking a Claim

Back in the day when frozen dinners or microwaveable meals were called TV dinners, there was the dreaded Salisbury Steak. Remember that?

It was never entirely clear what it actually was, aside from a kind of gravy slathered, bun-less burger. It turns out, it has a much deeper history.

As The History Guy explains, the Salisbury Steak has its origins in the US Civil War. It’s estimated that about two-thirds of fatalities were not due to bullets, but rather to disease, especially intestinal disorders like dysentery and diarrhea. No one was entirely certain what caused these diseases, but Dr. James H. Salisbury surmised that diet played a big part of it. Born in Scott, N.Y., in 1823, Salisbury was a proponent of the “germ” theory of disease, and wrote frequently on the topic. During the Civil War, he worked as a surgeon for the Union army, and switched out soldiers’ high-carb diet with chopped beefsteak and coffee. His strategy worked, and incidents of intestinal disorders went down. After the war, he set up his own clinic and continued his studies on the relationship between diet and disease, eventually deciding that a low-carb, high-protein diet was the best. (On the other hand, he was not a fan of fruits and vegetables.) Thew centerpiece was his chopped beefsteak, and he had extensive instructions for how it should be prepared.

His diet was highly publicized, with the first reference to “Salisbury steak” appearing in 1884 in a lecture about epilepsy treatment. Salisbury never used the term himself, even though he kept writing prolifically, and his work was cited by others writing on health and wellness issues. The steak was picked up by foodies, who began adding other ingredients and by the 1900s, it was regular fare in restaurants, where it picked up its gravy accompaniment. During the First World War, anti-German sentiment in the US led to the “Salisbury steak” being preferred to the “hamburg steak.”

Salisbury died in 1905 at 81, but his steak—although by the middle of the 20th century was really just a kind of bunless gravy-slathered hamburger—remained highly popular, and became a staple of the TV dinner, which appeared in supermarkets in the 1950s after television became the focal point of the American home.

At any rate, check out the whole video for a little slice—or patty—of forgotten history.

Neck and Neck

Via Laughing Squid, Chef Amaury Guichon of the Pastry Academy in Las Vegas is known for his chocolate sculptures. His latest is hos most ambitious yet: an eight-foot tall, 160-pound giraffe.

This Week in Printing, Publishing, and Media History

June 6

1756: American soldier and painter John Trumbull born.

Portrait of Alexander Hamilton by John Trumbull, 1806.

1799: Russian author and poet Alexander Pushkin born.

1875: German author, critic, and Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Mann born.

1892: The Chicago “L” elevated rail system begins operation.

1933: The first drive-in theater opens in Camden, N.J.

1946: American bass player and songwriter Tony Levin born.

2016: English playwright and screenwriter; works included Equus and Amadeus Peter Shaffer dies (b. 1926).

June 7

1810: The newspaper Gazeta de Buenos Ayres is first published in Argentina.

1848: French painter and sculptor Paul Gauguin born.

1911: American engineer and designer Brooks Stevens born, most famous for designing the Wienermobile.

1955: Lux Radio Theatre signs off the air permanently. The show launched in New York in 1934, and featured radio adaptations of Broadway shows and popular films.

1958: American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and actor Prince (né Prince Rogers Nelson) born.

1970: English novelist, short story writer, essayist E. M. Forster dies (b. 1879).

1971: The United States Supreme Court overturns the conviction of Paul Cohen for disturbing the peace, setting the precedent that vulgar writing is protected under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

1975: Sony introduces the Betamax videocassette recorder. Alas, the “videotape war” of the late 70s and early 80s would result in VHS becoming the dominant format...for a while.

June 8

1809: English-American theorist and author Thomas Paine dies (b. 1737).

1867: American architect Frank Lloyd Wright born.

1887: Herman Hollerith applies for US patent #395,781 for the “Art of Compiling Statistics,” which was his punched card calculator.

1912: Carl Laemmle incorporates Universal Pictures.

1949: George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is published, initially as fiction...for a while

1916: English biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist, and Nobel Prize laureate Francis Crick is born.

June 9

1523: The Parisian Faculty of Theology fines Simon de Colines for publishing the Biblical commentary Commentarii initiatorii in quatuor Evangelia by Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples.

1870: English novelist and critic Charles Dickens dies (b. 1812).

1891: American composer and songwriter Cole Porter born.

1930: A Chicago Tribune reporter, Jake Lingle, is killed during rush hour at the Illinois Central train station by Leo Vincent Brothers, allegedly over a $100,000 gambling debt owed to Al Capone.

1934: Donald Duck makes his debut in The Wise Little Hen.

1961: American screenwriter, producer, and playwright Aaron Sorkin born, and walking and talking in no time.

1973: Secretariat wins the U.S. Triple Crown.

June 10

1793: The Jardin des Plantes museum opens in Paris. A year later, it becomes the first public zoo.

June 11

1572: English poet, playwright, and critic Ben Jonson born.

1892: The Limelight Department, one of the world’s first film studios, is officially established in Melbourne, Australia.

1910: French biologist, author, inventor, and co-developer of the aqua-lung Jacques Cousteau born.

1935: Edwin Armstrong gives the first public demonstration of FM broadcasting in the United States.

1936: The London International Surrealist Exhibition opens.

1998: Compaq Computer pays US$9 billion for Digital Equipment Corporation in the largest high-tech acquisition.

2002: Antonio Meucci is acknowledged as the first inventor of the telephone by the United States Congress.

June 12

1817: The earliest form of bicycle, the dandy horse, is driven by Karl von Drais.

1916: American director and producer Irwin Allen born.

1920: American cartoonist Dave Berg born.

1939: Shooting begins on Paramount Pictures’ Dr. Cyclops, the first horror film photographed in three-strip Technicolor.

1939: The Baseball Hall of Fame opens in Cooperstown, N.Y.

1949: English singer-songwriter, bass player, and producer John Wetton born.

1959: American singer-songwriter and musician John Linnell born.

1985: American computer programmer and co-creator of Mozilla Firefox Blake Ross born.