David Ross

About this site: This site has morphed into my personal blog, an amalgamation of photo essays, thought experiments, essays and the like.

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Posted 4 hours, 23 minutes ago

Maryland License Plates Now Inadvertently Advertising Filipino Online Casino.

They let the domain expire and it transferred ownership a few times until a casino in the Philippines.

A spokesperson for the Maryland Department of Transportation’s Motor Vehicle Administration told Motherboard that “there are currently 798,000 active War of 1812 license plates.”

—Source: Vice

Kyoto, Japan

Posted 13 hours, 7 minutes ago

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Posted 1 day, 16 hours, 13 minutes ago

Ron DeSantis doesn't know how to pronounce his own name. That is all.

—Source: Axios

Alexander Calder sculpture at Storm King

Posted 2 days, 4 hours, 1 minute ago

stormking-8 — Alexander Calder sculpture at Storm King. Photo: Dave Ross

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Posted 2 days, 9 hours, 31 minutes ago

Five-star review of US$3999.99 tungsten cube on Amazon

My cube arrived carefully wrapped in a little bag, inside styrofoam packing, inside a sturdy wooden box, inside more styrofoam, inside a cardboard box that said "heavy".
And it precisely met expectations. It is a cube, a four inch cube, and apparently, tungsten.

—Source: Amazon

Photobombed by a deer in Nara, Japan.

Posted 2 days, 12 hours, 52 minutes ago

nara-deer-photobomb — Photobombed by a deer in Nara, Japan. Photo cedit: Dave Ross

Photobombed by a deer in Nara, Japan. At least I wasn't bit in the stomach like one of my travel companions. His fault was trying to feed them and pulling away from a greedy one, who would have none of that teasing.

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Posted 2 days, 12 hours, 57 minutes ago

Scientists generate energy from humid air

"What we’ve done is to create a human-built, small-scale cloud that produces electricity for us predictably and continuously so that we can harvest it.”

The heart of the human-made cloud depends on what Yao and his colleagues refer to as an air-powered generator, or the "air-gen" effect.

—Source: USA Today

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Posted 2 days, 15 hours, 22 minutes ago

How the U.S. Almost Became a Nation of Hippo Ranchers

In 1910, a failed House bill sought to increase the availability of low-cost meat by importing hippopotamuses that would be killed to make “lake cow bacon”

—Source: Smithsonian Magazine

More than 10k lightning strikes grace Hong Kong as typhoon Marwar passes by

Posted 2 days, 16 hours, 16 minutes ago

Screenshot_2023-06-01_at_9.29.15_AM_ — A lightning strike captured on camera at Ma On Shan. Photo: Facebook/Lee Lam

Despite having our blackout shades down, I was awakened a half hour before my typical 6am internal alarm clock thanks to a light show of what the weather observatory puts at more than 10,000 lightning strikes, including 3,000 in a single hour. This is all courtesy of the last vestiges of Typhoon Marwar. It was as if a disco was happening outside. Fortunately the entire light show with some loud thunder claps and rain was all condensed between 5:15am and 8am, so didn't affect my wife's walk to the office or mine to my home office. Negative consequences came in the form of dragging pollution over Hong Kong and some flooding in a few areas. Marwar is now on its way toward Taiwan.

The worst way to lose a high school championship final series?

Posted 3 days, 16 hours, 16 minutes ago

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Posted 3 days, 16 hours, 44 minutes ago

H.P. Lovecraft's Shoggoth character is a meme for AI?

It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. -- HPL, At the Mountains of Madness

As one commenter on the NYTimes story notes, anthropomorphize, much? Also: those poor penguins!

—Source: NYTimes

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