Not sure about that particular detail. I met a farmer last year (sitting next to me on a cross-country flight). At one point, after I realized he was a pig farmer, I asked him about bacon... specifically, if there was an objective reason why bacon seemed to be so WILDLY "hit or miss", especially compared to what I (vaguely) remember from childhood.

He said most commercial pig farms in the US lean VERY heavily on a half-dozen commoditized breeds. I didn't remember the names, but I went and looked them up just now:

* "Berkshire" (the breed) is known for having exceptionally good flavor, marbling, and tenderness due to the distribution of its intramuscular fat. It's considered a "heritage" breed, originally from Britain (though now thoroughly Americanized). From what I read, they're now considered somewhat rare & ultra-premium in Britain... but are the third most common breed raised in the United States. Incidentally, the "Berkshire" name has nothing to do with "Berkshire Farms" or "Berkshire Hathaway".

* "Yorkshire" (Large White) and "Landrace" are the two breeds favored for export to China. Chinese buyers strongly prefer lean muscle and overall carcass size (particularly for the cuts Chinese buyers prefer... feet, heads, and organ meats). However, Yorkshire & Landrace pigs make shitty bacon, because they lack the fat-layering that gives American-style bacon its "streaky" appearance and tender, crispy texture.

Bacon is expensive now, too. Apparently, China used to buy lots of American pork, but Chinese consumers had little interest in bacon (or other products made from pork bellies)... so the result of Chinese consumers buying more and more American pork was a relative surplus of pork bellies available to sell in the US. Pork in general was more expensive (because American consumers were competing with Chinese consumers to buy American pork), but bacon was cheaper relative to pork in general than it had ever been in history.

That said... bacon available in the US is arguably a lot better now than it was a couple of years ago. The breed of pigs that produce the kind of pork considered highly desirable by Chinese consumers actually kind of SUCKS for making things like bacon. The surging popularity of those breeds is why we got to the point where someone picky about bacon literally had to pick through the entire stock at a store like Walmart or Publix, and sometimes had to walk away and go to another store entirely to find a pack or few of "good" bacon (with lots of well-marbled fat, vs being more like strips of thinly-sliced ham). Now that Chinese buyers have mostly walked away from American pork, American farmers have gone back to favoring the breed known for producing the variety of pork AMERICANS tend to prefer (and that makes really, really GOOD bacon).

Anyway, if what I wrote makes no sense... go to Walmart, and really LOOK at the bacon sold under Walmart's own brand. In particular, compare the appearance of the bacon in their 24oz packs to the bacon in their 12oz packs. Generally speaking, their supplier (at least, to their stores in Florida) uses the best parts of pork bellies to make the 24oz packs, and uses the worst leftover parts to make the 12oz packs. They still have plenty of shitty 24oz packs, and occasional decent 12oz packs, but the 24oz packs are the ones were you're the most likely to find nice, neat, strips of fatty bacon that microwaves flawlessly... while the 12oz packs are the ones most likely to be a mess of tailings and leathery tough meat. The 16oz packs fall somewhere in between... some good, mostly bad.

IMHO, the most visually-pleasing "compromise" map projection is Kavrayskiy VII. It's not accurate for navigation, and doesn't maintain strict proportionality of area from north to south, but it makes really attractive wall maps with landmass shapes that don't look "weird," and does a decent job of preserving relative size & position of *adjacent* countries.

In theory, Robinson (NatGeo's preferred projection) is similar, but Robinson seems to have more of a "pinched+sheared" look to it that Kavrayskiy avoids.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.m.wikipedia.org%2Fwik...

If ChatGPT (or at least, GPT-4o) can ingest and execute code, why wouldn't it just go online, search for a FOSS chess engine in a language it "understands" (like Python), download it, recognize it as being more adept at solving problems in this specific domain, and execute that chess engine *directly* & present the output as its own?

The only thing I can think of offhand is that gpt-4o's "firewall" might limit its ability to execute code.

3840x2160 is just *barely* higher-density at 28" than your eye can pick out individual pixels from arm's length away, so it's basically "print-density". Achieving comparable pixel density on a 65" TV viewed from ~7 feet away requires ~16k resolution.

6-point text at 1920x1080@27" with subpixel-smoothing is kind of like printed text with 1 diopter of astigmatism, viewed through high-index lenses with some nasty abbe-error on top.

If you *really* want to appreciate the difference, look at lowercase letters with "enclosures", like "a", "b", "d", "e", etc. At 2k resolution, tiny enclosures are smeared & gray. At 4k, they're crisp & white.

Given Starliner's history of failure, 'm honestly in disbelief NASA even ALLOWED Starliner to launch with humans on board without requiring that it successfully make MULTIPLE successful unmanned supply runs to the ISS first.

Maybe I'm mis-remembering, but I could SWEAR I remember SpaceX launching several Dragon capsules for unmanned ISS supply runs before its first manned launch.

Regardless, that should be NASA's firm requirement for Starliner NOW... no humans until it successfully completes at least 2 or 3 unmanned supply runs to the ISS without serious incidents (with NASA paying Boeing the going rate for an ISS supply mission, regardless of how much more it actually costs Boeing to do it with a Starliner capsule.

If you compare the route shown in the linked BBC article to the aerial photo from Google Maps, it looks like the new road follows the path of an existing high-voltage power transmission corridor. You can look up and down it from a road that crosses it here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmaps.app.goo.gl%2FsAfWUe...

Assuming I got the path right, this is a route that was ALREADY mostly cleared at some point in the past, and they're just making it MORE clear for a new freeway. But, "Brazil built a new freeway along an existing power transmission corridor" doesn't sound nearly as sexy as "Amazon forest felled to build road for climate summit".

If the Amazon is anything like South Florida, you could literally bulldoze it down to bare earth, and within 20 years it'll look like primordial jungle again.

My parents live in Naples, Florida. At some point, my dad got old & stopped trying to maintain a 10x10 foot corner of their back yard, and allowed it to revert to South Florida jungle for almost 12 years. This is an area that was literal *grass* when I was in school. When I took it upon myself to clear it for them, it took 3 weekends with a chainsaw, wood chipper, twice-emptied DUMPSTER, and a day with a rented backhoe to transform it back into "grassy yard". It had trees with trunks literally fused into each other & growing SO TIGHTLY TOGETHER , I would have probably died from impalement if I'd lost my balance and fallen backwards or sideways onto the stumps of trees cut down earlier while cutting my way back into the area with the chainsaw.

Have you ever wondered what GRASS looks like when it's left to go completely wild in Florida? Basically, it turns into an alien-looking plant that's neither bush nor tree, but just kind of has this tightly-bound shaft that's about 3 feet tall that erupts at the top into HUGE blades of grass taller than you are.

My parents had an area along the side of their yard that was originally 3 feet deep where they had some plant that's kind of purple and fleshy. By the time I went to go beat it back into submission, its offspring had sprawled a good 12 feet from the property line and practically overgrown the brick path around the outside perimeter of their pool cage. And THAT was the result of MAYBE 2-3 years of yard-neglect.

It's absolutely UNREAL how quickly plants in South Florida go wild and overgrow everything within a few feet. In less than 3 years, something can go from "weed" to "tree with trunk and roots thick & extensive enough to need a chainsaw & backhoe to remove"

For lots of students, Calc II is "death by a thousand cuts". Unlike earlier math concepts, calculus (at least, as generally taught in the US) requires recursively hammering away at a problem along MANY steps that generally require a lot of time and paper... often, with no real confidence that you're even on the right path, and seemingly infinite ways to screw up somewhere along the way. Often, you don't even get the satisfaction of closure... you either just run out of time, or run into a sufficiently bad dead end that you can't figure out how to get past it.

Part of the problem is that math teachers are painfully aware that we're never more than 3 or 4 generations away from losing advanced math and descending into barbarity. The current generation of mathematicians can deal with AT MOST one or two lost generations of students before there's a risk that advanced math will die with them. So, they force almost EVERYONE to learn Calc II as a potential mathematician instead of someone merely taking advantage of a useful tool.

I believe that at some universities, there's a tense compromise between the math department and everyone else whereby students in majors that need to be able to USE calculus are required to take full-blown Calc II at least once... but if they fail to pass it with a sufficiently high grade, they can retake it as an alternate class that settles for making sure they know how to USE Calculus.

This is probably related to the well-known phenomenon where some kids coast through math with mostly 'A' grades, maybe an occasional 'B+', without much effort... then stumble a bit in Calculus I, and totally crash & burn in Calculus II. And likewise, it's the inflection point where many kids who struggled with (and often, hated) "math" while growing up suddenly have their epiphany, do spectacularly well, and decide to become math majors halfway through college.

If Bill Gates could go back in time, Linus Torvalds would wake up one morning with a free A3000UX on his doorstep, along with an invitation to a Swedish Demoparty. For the next 5 months, instead of working on his Unix kernel, he'd be working on a demo that would ultimately come in third place due to an uninspiring music track & be forgotten about, before graduating & getting hired by Microsoft.

Not only are cats not "dumb", they arguably *domesticated humans* and used us to conquer the world.

Ask yourself: when the day arrives that humans have successfully colonized Mars, which animal do you think will become the first to be deliberately taken to Mars to become the mother (via IVF) of countless future companions for colonists?

Yep. Cats.

Houses framed from old-growth hardwood might last for centuries.

Houses framed from fast-growing pine farmed over the past ~50 years have nails and screws popping out due to warping within a matter of months.

Wood-framed houses built since ~1960 will be lucky if they're even still *standing* another 50 years from now...and by that point, their waferboard roof & wall sheathing will have been replaced multiple times, and most of the interior frame will be sistered to boards that were themselves originally sistered to the original lumber.

If the ban gets enacted as scheduled, it'll be interesting to see whether a few million teens from AcelaLand (and elsewhere, via bus) decide to defy their parents and descend upon Washington, DC (possibly, orchestrated directly or indirectly by TikTok itself) to protest/riot/throw a collective generational tantaum.

Seriously, if a riot with millions of teens broke out in DC, the authorities would be hopelessly outnumbered & DC would be fucked. It's not like the police or military would dare to use deadly force against kids (unless the feds & police wanted to provoke a Tianmen Square incident of our own), but if kids went on a rampage in DC, they could cause a *staggering* amount of damage to pretty much everything. And completely shut down the authorities' ability to travel almost anywhere within it, by any method besides helicopter or literal paratroopers.

Sure, Amtrak, airlines, and Greyhound et al could refuse to provide transportation into DC... but every kid in high school knows *someone* with a driver's license & car. The authorities could roadblock roads into DC, but at some point the teens would *become* the roadblock & keep *anyone* from getting into DC.

It would go down in history as GenZ's Woodstock-level event. Once word got out that "the cool kids" were heading to DC, the uncool kids would hit the road, too, if only because they were mad about losing TikTok & it sounded fun to join their favorite influencers.

A couple of years after ATSC1.0 went live, some company actually came up with an improved encoder that encoded all the streams, then went back and used any remaining bits available for the frame to re-encode chunks of the main program stream's B or P frame to include more data than was strictly necessary & make them behave more like fragments of an I-frame. The idea was, if a frame got mangled, or a B/P frame corrupted it, subsequent B/P frames could repair it in a manner that looked kind of like "venetian blinds" instead of just leaving the whole screen corrupted for 5-10 seconds.

Broadcasters didn't want it. All they cared about was using every possible scrap of surplus bandwidth to pack in yet another unwatchably-macroblocked SD subchannel that nobody actually cares about or watches.

If anything, the problem has gotten WORSE over the past 20 years, as already-compressed MPEG-2 bitstreams have gotten more and more aggressively recompressed by local broadcast affiliates, with longer and longer gaps between I-frames. It USED to be, a glitched frame would derail the video for a couple of seconds. Now, in South Florida at least, glitches seem to persist for upwards of 10 seconds between I-frames.

Even worse, they don't adjust the encoding or drop subchannels when there's a hurricane, so now local broadcast TV becomes almost unwatchable once sustained winds hit 80mph (wind makes the antenna move & creates doppler shift. ATSC1.0's 8VSB encoding scheme can't distinguish between frequency-shift due to symbol-coding and frequency-shift due to the antenna thrashing around in the wind).

I wish that when there's a hurricane, local channels like WSVN and WPLG in Miami would temporarily drop ALL the subchannels & encode the live news broadcast as 480p60 with pure I-frames. You'd still get corruption during wind gusts, but at least it would be able to recover almost immediately instead of just becoming completely unwatchable during rain bands. With ultra-long GOPs, rain fade, and doppler shift, the stream never gets a chance to recover before the next burst of errors corrupts the GOP.