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Recent music recommendations
here’s a list of recent albums. I’ve enjoyed so far this year.
- deathcrash – Somersaults: chill, mellow indie rock that makes you want to sit on the porch with a good drink and watch the trees sway in the wind
- cootie catcher – something we all got: catchy melodies, jangly guitars, good harmonies
- Joyce Manor – I Used to Go to this Bar: 20 minutes of punk bliss
- Willow – petal rock black: eclectic, jazzy, avant garde rock
- Geologist- Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights: electronic post rock, probably good for driving n a highway at night
- The Gorrilaz – The Mountain: a deep, immersive soundscape with eastern music/ Indian instrumentation
- Shaking Hand – Shaking Hand: a throwback to the early days of 90s emo when the focus was on earnest lyrics & instrumentation instead of screaming and nasally vocals
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Maybe Ozempic can fight addictions
There is growing research that Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs may help fight addiction.
People struggling with many addictions, ranging from opioids to gambling, are reporting similar experiences in clinics, on social media and around dinner tables. None of them started these drugs to quit. This pattern of people losing their cravings across a broad range of addictive substances has no precedent in medicine.
But my patients were giving me an important clue. People taking GLP-1 drugs often talk about “food noise” vanishing: the constant mental chatter about food that dominated their days simply goes quiet. But my patients were reporting that it wasn’t just food: They were noticing that the preoccupation with smoking, drinking and using drugs that drives people back despite their best intentions to stop was going quiet too.
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A prototype of an offshore wind farm data center
With the world’s growing for data centers, and the growing resistance to having them in communities, companies are looking for other ways to not only build the data centers but power them. Enter the offshore wind farm data center.
Aikido’s design builds on many iterations tested by the growing floating wind industry. When Norwegian energy giant Equinor finished construction on the world’s first floating wind farm in 2017, it kept the turbines upright with ballasted steel columns extending 78 meters into the water—a design called a spar platform. This gave it a dense mass like the keel of a boat. Since then, the floating wind industry has largely coalesced around a semisubmersible design based on oil and gas platforms. Semisubmersibles don’t go as deep as spar platforms; instead, they extend buoyancy horizontally. Anchors, chains, and ropes keep the platform floating within a certain radius.
Aikido is taking the semisubmersible approach. Its football-field-size platform holds the turbine in the center, and three legs extend tripod-like outward, like a Christmas-tree stand. At the end of each leg is a ballast that reaches 20 meters deep. This holds tanks largely filled with fresh water to maintain the platform’s buoyancy in the salty ocean.
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US automakers at risk of becoming niche manufacturers
Auto experts say old-line companies risk becoming obsolete if they don’t learn how to make appealing, profitable electric vehicles, which most executives expect to eventually replace cars that run on gasoline despite the Trump’s administration efforts to promote fossil fuels. Improvements in electric vehicle technology mean that, within a few years, they will be cheaper to buy and will charge in 15 minutes or less.
One of the biggest problems established manufacturers have is that many of the electric models they sell have fared poorly against cars from Tesla and other newer companies.
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Light exposure affects heart disease chances
A study that came out last year: light exposure affects heart disease chances.
Question Is personal light exposure at night associated with cardiovascular disease incidence?
Findings In this cohort study of 88 905 adults aged older than 40 years, exposure to brighter light at night was associated with higher risks of coronary artery disease, myocardial infarction, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and stroke, independent of established cardiovascular risk factors.
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The kids are discovering iPods
Over the next two decades, Apple released more than 20 versions of the iPod, with some capable of storing tens of thousands of songs and others costing as little as $49. The company eventually pulled back on the device as it focused on the iPhone. As of 2022, the iPod’s final year, Apple had sold an estimated 450 million.
Apple declined to comment.
The resurgence of the iPod is a sign that “people want digital that’s not connected, but not necessarily analog,” said Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive who helped create the iPod. If the choice is “1,000 songs in my pocket, or unlimited songs in my pocket and 1,000 notifications every hour,” people don’t want the latter, he added.
“Apple should just bring them back — not the same way,” Mr. Fadell said. “I would do it differently. I would make it modern for the modern age.”
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The practicalities of having a robot in your house
“We basically created an algorithm for emotional intelligence,” he said.
“How does it work?” a woman in the group asked.
Skuler explained that one of his first realizations was that, unlike most other A.I. models, the robot needed to be proactive. If it wanted to build deep, reciprocal, human relationships, it wasn’t enough to simply respond to commands. It had to anticipate a person’s needs and then act with agency.
“But that opened up a whole new can of worms,” Skuler said. “How do you decide the right moment to engage someone without being annoying? How do you start talking in a way that makes them likely to respond?”
Math. A lot more math.
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Acme Weather
The folks who designed the Dark Sky weather app, created a new weather application – Acme Weather. The focus this time centered around the uncertainty of a weather forecast, and how to communicate that.
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Farmers aren’t selling out to data centers
More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity.
The unknown company was building a datacenter.
“You don’t have enough to buy me out. I’m not for sale. Leave me alone, I’m satisfied,” Huddleston, 82, later told the men.
As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston’s land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacenter development – are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use.
