New Florence. New Renaissance.

The accidental birder

Margaret and I have enjoyed bird feeders (and so have the squirrels) and our periodic birding trips with the local Audubon Society, so I thought I would share this Conde Nast Traveler primer on birding. It is a very relaxing and rewarding activity and make you discover places near and far.

 

"Soon after, I ordered myself a guide to the birds of North America, and quickly found that my photographic outings in Colorado became more and more focused around birds. Bison are nice and all, but have you ever stopped to watch a meadowlark sing or a bald eagle swoop down to catch a fish? The next time a bird flies overhead, take a moment to watch. Whether it’s a humble pigeon at the foot of the Sacré-Cœur in Paris or a brilliant quetzal in the rainforests of Costa Rica, you’ll find that there are living, breathing sights to be excited about—even in the slow moments."

Plenty of birding resources on the web like this from National Geographic

The aliens have landed!

I found myself at Trent Bridge in Nottingham last month watching West Indies clobber Pakistan in a Cricket World Cup game. My knowledge of cricket is very rusty so I got lots of strange looks about the questions I was asking. Like I had no clue who Chris Gayle was. I had actually run into him that morning. We did not know it but we stayed at the same hotel as the West Indies team.

So, it is sweet irony that this weekend that a number of Londoners will be asking similar dumb questions, this time about baseball, as the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox show up this weekend just as the 4 best cricket teams in the world - Australia, England, India and New Zealand battle each other nearby.

Of course, some of them are likely to ask questions that come from yet another sport.

What the hell - just enjoy the glorious English summer!

 

Automated commercial dish washing

The washer picks up the plates and bowls with a magnet, cleans them with a rubber scraping wheel and rinses them with gray water (recycled water safe for cleaning purposes). Dishcraft’s robotic washer uses cameras, sensors and “dirt identification algorithms” to find and clean every last spot of food, even those that would be invisible to the naked eye.

Once they are washed, the machine stacks the plates and bowls into racks. A worker then places those racks in a sanitizer, standard equipment already used in commercial kitchens today. The sanitizer heats up the dishes, killing any remaining germs.

Dishcraft systems work only with the plates and bowls that the company makes and sells today. They are hard to break, easy to transport and have metal pieces affixed to the bottom so they are easily grasped by the robotic dishwasher.

CNBC

 

 

Plastic Eaters

That’s because plastics aren’t just happening to Johnson. He’s happening to them. Johnson is a research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and this past year, he and his colleagues created a biological enzyme that can chew efficiently through throwaway plastics like those that make water bottles and soap containers. The team is optimistic they can engineer a world where humans keep using this overabundant material—without winding up literally or figuratively overwhelmed by it. In that world, as part of a broader, robust recycling system, microorganisms will digest polymers into their chemical components so they can turn a profit as new and better products.

Popular Science

 

 

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQa6as8fhoo&feature=youtu.be

The vibrant colors of 5G

5G will happen in the airy realm of radio waves. To get there, big telecoms have to harness underused parts of the spectrum. But there's another crucial part underlying this system: lowly cable. Huge numbers of new transmitters will be needed to relay all that data to your phone, and many of those transmitters will still connect to the internet through fiber-optic cable—glass as thin as strands of hair carrying pulses of light.

To make it all work, companies, including OFS Optics, a fiber-optics and cable company, are now being commissioned to produce millions of miles of new cable holding twice as many fiber pairs—two strands, one for the uplink and one for the downlink—as the old stuff.

In each cable are the glass fibers, which are unspooled using a device called a payoff machine. At OFS, these machines are massive—6 feet tall, 25 feet long, and 4 feet wide. Color coding lets technicians know which fibers to splice when connecting two cables. When displayed on giant bobbins at the OFS cable factory in Carrollton, Georgia, the fibers create an unintentional artist's palette of yellow, coral, aqua, forest green, and gray.

Wired

Cycloramas in an age of augmented reality

I found myself at Gettysburg National Military Park this past weekend. Among other things I went to the Cyclorama which displays French Artist Paul Philippoteaux's painting "Battle of Gettysburg". It is a mind-boggling canvas that measures 377 feet in circumference and is 42 feet tall and brings to life the fury of the third day (July 3, 1863) of the Battle of Gettysburg. Philippoteaux was commissioned to paint it in 1879.

I could have spent hours with the ranger who explained the logistics of shipping the canvas from France to Chicago where it was first exhibited, then displayed around the country, the assembly in the circular wall at its permanent home in Gettysburg and subsequent maintenance and periodic restoration. 

From the National Park Service

"Cycloramas were a very popular form of entertainment in the late 1800's, both in America and Europe. These massive, oil-on-canvas paintings were displayed in special auditoriums and enhanced with landscaped foregrounds sometimes featuring trees, grasses, fences and even life-sized figures. The result was a three-dimensional effect that surrounded viewers who stood on a central platform, literally placing them in the center of the great historic scene."

The painting has been digitized in the 360 degree video below by the American Battlefield Trust - it's worth a watch, but I was thinking with today's AR/VR we will likely see a next generation depiction. 

Of course, nothing beats a visit to the Park, and a walk around many of the sites of the battle. It is so solemn.

And to me even more gratifying was seeing many artifacts of President Abraham Lincoln's famous "Four Score and Seven Years ago" address at the location a few months after the battle. 

Turn any smartphone into a satellite phone

For those who truly want to go off-grid, there's also a special package that includes not only the Iridium GO! base station and AC travel charger with international adapter, but also comes with a solar charger, two batteries additional, and a desktop charger. This is priced at a heftier $1,095.

ZDNet

 

 

Amazon clones a neighborhood

Amazon knows a lot about the world thanks to data from its vast retail business and cloud computing platform. It knows a 2-square-kilometer zone of Snohomish County in unusual detail—down to the position of weeds sprouting through the drainage grates. The company’s digital copy mirrors the position of curbstones and driveways within centimeters, and textures like the grain of asphalt within millimeters.

That synthetic suburb allows Amazon to test Scout thousands or perhaps millions of times under varying weather conditions without swarming the neighborhood with bright blue rovers until they become a nuisance. “The bots can run 24/7 in simulation,” says Sean Scott, the executive leading the project. The practice resembles how Waymo and others working on autonomous cars invest heavily in simulations to supplement miles driven on real roads.

Wired

 

 

Cable cutting options explode

Amazon now has a new free, ad-supported service, called IMDb Freedive, to complement its Amazon Prime subscription service.

Later this year, we should see new streaming services from Apple (Apple TV+) and Disney (Disney+); both companies have released more information about these upcoming offerings, which you can read about below. A new HBO-based service from AT&T subsidiary WarnerMedia is also expected to hit by year’s end.

The new options will join all-you-can-eat monthly subscription services such as Netflix, along with cable TV-style packages, from companies including DirecTV Now and Sling, designed to help consumers cut the cable cord

Consumer Reports

Review of YouTube TV which we currently subscribe to

Visualizing Fortune 500 data

Love the Fortune 500 issue - especially for the imagery.

Here are a couple of the 2019 Fortune 500 companies - AT&T and CVS Health - represented as covers