A.C. Flory's Blog, page 15

Climate tech starting to gather momentum

Concrete contributes about 8% to the GLOBAL CO2 emissions driving climate change. And we can’t live without it. But now there’s a way to recycle old concrete while at the same time reducing CO2 emissions. This New Atlas article shows how:

cheers,
Meeks

A real life ‘Still Suit’?

This one is for anyone who loves the Dune books, and the latest movies. Enjoy.

cheers,
Meeks

Something amazing…

Speechless!

Meeks

The last Tukti…for now

Little Miss looks up and sees…

I’ve reached a point where I have all the visual images I need. Now, all I have to do is find the words to go with them. While I let the story percolate, I’ll be doing some beta reading for Chris James so I’ll be a bit quieter than usual.

Have a great weekend everyone.

cheers,
Meeks

Not again, WordPress?

I recently posted about how convoluted commenting was becoming on WordPress. Well, now, the effing Happiness Engineers have struck again:

Just yesterday, clicking on a comment in my notifications list would open the comment to the left of the list, allowing me to easily click on the next comment. Today? Today, the comment covers up the list, and I have to click a STUPID back button to get rid of it and see the notification list again.

And those up/down arrows? I don’t know what they’re meant to do, but all they seem to do is display a list of people who…like the post?

And speaking of likes, clicking on a ‘like’ notification [to mark it as read], causes the same stupid list to display. Then you have to click the bloody back button to get out of the list of ‘Likes’ and back to the actual list of notifications.

What in blue blazes is going on?

Instead of streamlining interactions between users, WordPress is adding more and more useless clicks to the process. Each click may not seem like much, but add them all together, and the whole process becomes incredibly unwieldy. And unpleasant. Soon we’ll be thinking twice about commenting at all.

This is such poor design that I can’t imagine why any sane programmer would do it. Clunky, awkward code is bad code.

Does anyone know what the heck is going on?

Meeks

Just for fun!

You’re welcome.

Meeks

Now if only it could vacuum…

This is the robot I want!

Meeks

From Dumplings to Robots

In my head, sophisticated robots are still a thing of the future, but this video reveals that the tech is far more advanced than I thought:

According to the New Atlas article dealing with these robots, 2024 ‘… is a breakout year for general-purpose AI-powered robotic workers, and Chinese companies such as Unitree, UBTech/Baidu, Astribot, LimX, Kepler, the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center and others are making genuine strides toward robot laborers capable of learning and executing useful tasks’.

The ‘fembots’ remind me of a UK series called ‘Humans‘ in which some of these robots reach sentience. The story is actually a exploration of what it means to be human, but it feels eerily prophetic.

I can see why ‘fembots’ would be a great ‘product’ for some consumers, but I can’t help wondering why we need humanoid robots to do ‘useful tasks’ when the world is heading towards 9 billion flesh and blood humans who all need a job? I wonder if slavery has anything to do with it…

Meeks

Chicken Soup with Parsley Dumplings

I’ve written about chicken soup before, but the parsley dumplings are new. Light, fluffy, and delicious, the recipe is dead easy, and arose out of an accident!

I’ve been making nokedli type dumplings for decades, but recently I grabbed the wrong jar of flour, and mixed the batter with self raising flour instead of plain flour! Oh no…

That was literally the best culinary mistake I’ve ever made. The dumplings turned out very, very soft and fluffy – no good for stews etc but perfect for soups. So as I haven’t shared a recipe in a very long time, here’s my quick and easy parsley dumpling recipe.

Ingredients

1 egg1/2 a cup of chopped, Continental Parsleyroughly 1/2 a cup of self raising floura dash of black peppera pinch of saltjust enough water to make the batter easy to beat but not runny

Method

Bring your soup to a gentle simmerMix the parsley with the egg [I just use a fork]Add the flour and pepper and saltMix thoroughly [if the batter is too ‘dry’ add just enough water to beat the batter with a fork].take a teaspoon and gently slide spoonfuls of the batter into the soup.allow the soup and dumplings to simmer for 5 – 10 minutes until the dumplings have tripled in size and are floating on the surface of the soup.

And that’s it. A few ingredients, a few minutes of mixing, a few minutes of simmering, and you’ll have delicious dumplings to liven up your soup!

If you don’t like parsley, leave it out. Or substitute some finely chopped spinach instead. Or, if you have boiled chicken from the soup, mash some of it up and add to the dumpling mixture. That’s the beauty of these dumplings, you can add whatever you like, and the soup itself will complete the ‘flavouring’.

I did try to cook these dumplings in plain water once. They were ok but lacked the rich flavour we’re used to.

I’d love to know what you think, so if you do end up trying these dumplings, please! come back and let me know how they turned out.

cheers,
Meeks

Andrew…who?

The name – ‘Andrew Tate’ – sounded vaguely familiar, but I had no idea he was a misogynist whose toxic message was grooming boys as young as ten! Not until today.

What teen boys see in Andrew Tate – ABC podcast hosted by Samantha Hawley:

“When parents I know heard about him [Andrea Tate] it was in December when he was jailed. So we’d never really heard about him before, but when we asked our teenage sons if they knew who he was, they all did know who he was, and we had no idea. And I found that really, really disturbing.”
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/abc-news-daily/what-teen-boys-see-in-andrew-tate/101887710

I found that really, really disturbing as well, and I wondered how many of you know how your sons and grandsons are being groomed?

Grooming is usually associated with sexual abuse, but it can also refer to mental and emotional brain washing. Teens without good role models will go searching for someone to emulate. Girls go looking for glamorous women on social media. Boys search for strong, successful men who make them feel good about themselves.

And make no mistake, having someone you look up to say that you deserve to be powerful is addictive, especially when the social media algorithms amplify the message to keep you engaged.

To test the role of social media algorithms in radicalising vulnerable people, researchers set up five archetypes with varying ‘issues’, then waited to see what the algorithms would recommend.

‘The initial suggested content was in line with the stated interests of each archetype, but after five days researchers said the TikTok algorithm was presenting four times as many videos with misogynistic content including objectification, sexual harassment or discrediting women, which increased from 13% of recommended videos to 56%.’
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/feb/06/social-media-algorithms-amplifying-misogynistic-content

56%… But I knew that already. I don’t use Tik Tok, but I am on Youtube, and you would not believe the flood of cute cat videos that end up on the home page of my channel. I like cats, but I hate being manipulated by a piece of code!

But how does this manipulation work? Well, this mindless piece of code is deliberately designed to look for engagement. If I watch one cat video and then watch a second cat video, the algorithm will present me with more cat videos. Why? Because the longer I stay on social media the more advertisements I see, even if I don’t consciously ‘watch’ them.

My own experience is that each video I watch contains one or more advertisements. Recently, however, Youtube started presenting 2 paid promotion videos on my home page. That’s 2 out of 6 videos I didn’t ask for that the algorithm just plonked in front of me.

Advertising doesn’t work on me, but that’s probably because I’m old and grumpy and know how to search for what I actually want. Teenagers who grow up with social media have no such filters. And influencers are very good at creating fantasies that make those teens want to emulate them.

But what does the Andrew Tate message actually do? Apparently, it’s now so pervasive that it’s showing up in our schools and female teachers are being targeted.

And then there’s the domestic violence epidemic. 26 women killed in Australia in the first 4 months of the year. And let’s not forget the Archbishop stabbed to death by a sixteen year old.

Algorithms are spreading messages of hate all over social media, but because we aren’t vulnerable, we don’t get bombarded with the same poison as our kids. We’re not targets, so we simply don’t see what’s happening in plain sight.

The teen years are always difficult, but now more than ever before, parents and grandparents need to be there for their kids, because if we’re not, the Andrew Tates of this world will be.

Meeks