fun facts

They poured their life savings into a cave.

“My friends bought 34 acres of Ohio wilderness. While hiking one day, they stumbled upon a dark, dripping cavern—and decided to pour their life savings into it. Today, it’s one of the world’s most profitable airbnbs. The waitlist is years […]

fun facts

Encyclopedia of Smell History and Heritage.

I stumbled upon this and am so glad it exists. Today’s link is to an article on Civet. “Unlike musk, ambergris and castoreum, civet had been unknown to the classical Western world. As of its introduction to the European market […]

fun facts

Aerial firefighting is a labor of love.

“Diving toward a burning hillside in his first season flying an air tanker for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, Jeff Reynolds realized he was doing just about everything his early flight instructors warned him not to.” ~ […]

fun facts

What is in fire retardants dropped from planes?

“In the United States, firefighting strategies range from the ground to the air. Aerial firefighting is one of these strategies. It involves dropping water and fire retardant from planes to slow or stop the spread of a wildfire. But what […]

big ideas

You have no idea what thermodynamic computing is.

Neither do I, but this might catch your attention: “Energy efficiency, while being about 1000x faster than today’s GPUs, you know, you can get up to 100 million X more energy efficiency…” Extropic CEO Gill Verdon presenting for 13 minutes […]

thoughts of food

Grubhub paying big fine for icky behavior toward all.

The FTC went after them for harming the whole trifecta — consumers, drivers and restaurants. “The settlement includes a monetary judgment of $140 million against Grubhub, which is partially suspended based on the company’s inability to pay the full amount. […]

on the blockchain

The basic concept behind Chaos.

“An AI (also known as… get this… @divinediarrhea) that not only develops a presence/personality in the digital world, but in our lowly old physical realm as well. Cool… so where does crypto come into it? Simple: anyone that owns the […]

thoughts of food

Phthalates with your ghee.

A group called Mamavation commissioned a study at an EPA-certified lab. “100% of ghees analyzed by our laboratory had traces of phthalates. This is a total of 7 detections from 7 ghees products. Ranges of phthalates were from 105 parts […]