Interesting Links for 07-06-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Scotland's first electric HGV starts making trips

(tags:scotland transport electricity )

2. Photoshop's new "Generative Fill" feature is really impressive.

(tags:ai photoshop )

3. The science around babies and sleep is, frankly terrible. (And the article assumes you'll be doing sleep training at all)

(tags:research babies sleep )

4. Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

(tags:Intelligence ai society )

5. The cultural bias of "ultra-processed food"

(tags:food society )

6. Edinburgh tram time-lapse shows route extension (opening today!)

(tags:Edinburgh trams timelapse video )

7. UK government ignored that major drinks companies, retailers, and trade bodies, as well as the Environment Agency wanted glass to be included in the deposit return scheme.

(tags:uk recycling OhForFucksSake glass )

8. Your Reminder that "AI" Will Just Flat-Out Make Things Up

(tags:ai fraud )

9. Who wants to eat a giant isopod from the depths of the ocean?

(tags:animals food weird taiwan )

Comments

[nancylebov]

4. In re Hawking or Einstein getting a cat into a carrier: I know smart disabled people with cats-- they *train* their cat(s) to get into the carrier.

[dewline]

1. Not a whisky fan, and still EGV! YAY!!!

4. Some days...ugh!

6. Hurray!!!

(Wishing we had streetcars/trams at street grade running again in specific parts of Ottawa and Gatineau!)

7. Well, glass should be part of the deposit return scheme. This is how it was when I was a kid in Saskatchewan, and the LCBO and Beer Store operations in Ontario still do things that way. If I had my way, that's what would be "normal" from coast to coast to coast in Canada.

[channelpenguin]

7. Glass is returnable here in Germany - but you only get 8c , you get 25 for a plastic bottle or aluminium can.

[dewline]

Wishing that the same happened in Canada. Every plastic bottle: pop, fruit juice, ketchup/catsup, mustard, salad dressing, shampoo/body wash, and so on!

[bens_dad]

7. I too remember deposits on glass bottles, and searching for discarded bottles to claim the deposit.

In 1978 the deposit on a "large" glass bottle - 10p - would buy a bag of crisps (7p or 8p).
I suppose the introduction of plastic bottles reduced the value of an empty glass bottle :-(

A year or two back I filled in a government survey on bottle-recycling. Worryingly to save space they were talking of crushing them. No problem for plastic or alumin(i)um but it is much more energy efficient to make a glass bottle from a similar bottle than from a pile of glass chippings.
I think I mentioned that recycling was the fifth of the "Six Rs": Refuse (decline), Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle, Refuse (trash). Thus Reuse should be the aim.

[bens_dad]

4. Thanks. At first I thought this article was rubbish but I persevered and I am glad I did.

[anna_wing]

I would like airtight plastic bottle caps or stoppers of various sizes to be commonly available, which would make it much easier to re-use glass bottles.

[andrewducker]

Agreed!

[anna_wing]

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=airtight+bottle+stoppers&atb=v314-1&iax=images&ia=images


Bingo.

# 4

[agoodwinsmith]

Thank you for the introduction to Maciej Ceglowski,

[hairyears]

(7) Shows that a popular environmental policy initiative was canned for no reason save petty political points-scoring...

And all of the businesses affected had (and still have!) a sound commercial incentive for glass recycling.

...So this is a visible retort to any claim that the Conservatives are 'the business-friendly party'.

[andrewducker]

It's a great disguise they wear. Fools a bunch of people.

[hairyears]

I just read the EGV article: 250 miles, half of it with a 24-ton load, on slow roads with serious inclines.

Probably not the 6-8 hours of motorway plus 2 hours of urban traffic that represents the 'ideal' working day for HGV's operated by drivers subject to tachometer-monitored work time limits...

But it's now within reach of a worthwile percentage of HGVs: tho ones with fixed schedules of medium-distance delivery-and-pickup to a central location.

The technology is (I think) about halfway to being equivalent to existing diesel trucks: if it improves by five percent a year, we'll see EGVs taking more than half the current HGV traffic within a decade.