• So I looked this up and the whole story is wild.

    Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.

    But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.

    So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.

    But then in 2017 a doctor saw an ad for this bakery scanning system and it occurred to him that cells under a microscope don’t look all that different from weird loaves of bread. And it turns out that yeah, you can use almost all of the same code to analyze a tissue sample and pick out any potentially cancerous cells in it. Other people have started buying the same program for everything from analyzing the readout from big physics experiments to labeling charms and amulets for sale at shrines to detecting problems in the wiring on jet engines.

  • This is a good use of AI! Do the tedious work so the worker can socialize with the customer. And then use that same AI to fight cancer. This is fantastic! I hate AI “art” but not AI as a whole.

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  • discovery-at-sea:
“(May 12, 2023) We are raising money for a crowd funded research project investigating the cause of blueberry hermit crabs in Okinawa, Japan using trash found on the beach as “homes” instead of natural shells. These hermit crabs are...
    discovery-at-sea:
“(May 12, 2023) We are raising money for a crowd funded research project investigating the cause of blueberry hermit crabs in Okinawa, Japan using trash found on the beach as “homes” instead of natural shells. These hermit crabs are...
    discovery-at-sea:
“(May 12, 2023) We are raising money for a crowd funded research project investigating the cause of blueberry hermit crabs in Okinawa, Japan using trash found on the beach as “homes” instead of natural shells. These hermit crabs are...
    discovery-at-sea:
“(May 12, 2023) We are raising money for a crowd funded research project investigating the cause of blueberry hermit crabs in Okinawa, Japan using trash found on the beach as “homes” instead of natural shells. These hermit crabs are...
    discovery-at-sea:
“(May 12, 2023) We are raising money for a crowd funded research project investigating the cause of blueberry hermit crabs in Okinawa, Japan using trash found on the beach as “homes” instead of natural shells. These hermit crabs are...
    discovery-at-sea:
“(May 12, 2023) We are raising money for a crowd funded research project investigating the cause of blueberry hermit crabs in Okinawa, Japan using trash found on the beach as “homes” instead of natural shells. These hermit crabs are...
    discovery-at-sea:
“(May 12, 2023) We are raising money for a crowd funded research project investigating the cause of blueberry hermit crabs in Okinawa, Japan using trash found on the beach as “homes” instead of natural shells. These hermit crabs are...
    discovery-at-sea:
“(May 12, 2023) We are raising money for a crowd funded research project investigating the cause of blueberry hermit crabs in Okinawa, Japan using trash found on the beach as “homes” instead of natural shells. These hermit crabs are...
    discovery-at-sea:
“(May 12, 2023) We are raising money for a crowd funded research project investigating the cause of blueberry hermit crabs in Okinawa, Japan using trash found on the beach as “homes” instead of natural shells. These hermit crabs are...

    (May 12, 2023) We are raising money for a crowd funded research project investigating the cause of blueberry hermit crabs in Okinawa, Japan using trash found on the beach as “homes” instead of natural shells. These hermit crabs are endemic to the southern islands of Japan, and they act as coastal environmental engineers. They are endangered on several islands, and we want to try and understand why they are resorting to beach trash for shells. Please consider sharing this post and donating to the project. The fundraising will be active for the next 45 days (until June 26). 

    You can find all project details here: https://experiment.com/projects/blueberry-hermit-crabs-with-beach-trash-homes


    We suspect that areas with high rates of tourism lead to beach combers collecting natural shells leaving nothing for the hermit crabs to use. It’s possible that overfishing of turbo snails which would naturally provide shells for the crabs may also be a factor. We will survey many sites across several islands in Okinawa to try and determine a cause of this behavior. 


    We will be working closely with national geographic photographer Shawn Miller (photo credits above) and several researchers in Japan. Additionally, we will complete extensive beach clean ups in the areas we study. Thank you so much for reading! 

  • The fundraiser has a ways to go - click the link above to donate if you can.

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  • In hell, people can choose what happens to them. They can choose literally ANYTHING. Naturally, many people try to exploit this by going for luxuries and pampering, but the devil ALWAYS has ways to torture those fools…

  • “So I can choose anything,” you say. The devil in front of you explained that there wouldn’t be any physical contract. This room made verbal ones just as binding. “Anything at all?”

    “You could even choose to be alive again,” the devil confirms. Their form shivers around the edges as if caught in a heat mirage. You blink and they’re sitting across from you again, hands folded on the table between you, solid as can be. You still can’t make out any of their features. “Riches, good food, intimacy, anything.”

    “I guess it’d be silly to choose torture,” you say slowly.

    “If you’re really contrite you can,” the devil says. They don’t seem as excited by the idea for some reason. They wiggle their fingers. “Some souls choose that in order to atone. They seem to think I’m lying when I say there’s no atonement to be had here. You’re in Hell, kid. No getting out of this one.”

    Kid. You rub a hand over your mouth to wipe away the smile before it forms. “I think I understand. How long do I have to decide?”

    “As long as you want,” the devil says. They rest their chin in their hand. “I have an endless concept of time. I don’t mind waiting.” 

    You bet they don’t. You chew your cheek. “What’s the longest it’s taken someone to decide?”

    “Three months,” the devil says. They make a point of looking at the bare walls, the lack of windows, the endless grey of the perfectly laid tiles that make up the floor. There’s no light source in the room and, therefore, no shadow. There is nothing but grey. “They weren’t entirely sane by then though.”

    Keep reading

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  • afloweroutofstone:
“humansofnewyork:
“ “I’m from Basra. In the seventies we were the economic capital of Iraq. It was beautiful once. The only city with two rivers. We had one million people but ten million palm trees. In those days everyone was...

    “I’m from Basra.  In the seventies we were the economic capital of Iraq.  It was beautiful once.  The only city with two rivers.  We had one million people but ten million palm trees.  In those days everyone was optimistic.  Our oil reserves were better than the Saudis.  We assumed the oil would be invested, and that our lives would keep getting better.  But our leaders failed us.  It was war after war.  Without all the fighting, things could have really been great.  But the palm trees are gone now.  There’s no potable water.  We have a shortage of electricity.  Healthcare is very poor, and cancer is everywhere because the Americans used radioactive bombs.  Our whole land is contaminated.  The food that comes from the soil is poison.  But please visit, you’ll be welcome.  The people are friendly.  You’ll be met with hospitality.  We understand that governments are the warmongers.  You’re victims just like us.”
    (Cairo, Egypt)

  • The Guardian, 2014:

    “US forces fired depleted uranium (DU) weapons at civilian areas and troops in Iraq in breach of official advice meant to prevent unnecessary suffering in conflicts, a report has found.

    Coordinates revealing where US jets and tanks fired nearly 10,000 DU rounds in Iraq during the war in 2003 have been obtained by the Dutch peace group Pax. This is the first time that any US DU firing coordinates have been released, despite previous requests by the United Nations Environment Programme and the Iraqi government.

    According to PAX’s report, which is due to be published this week, the data shows that many of the DU rounds were fired in or near populated areas of Iraq, including As Samawah, Nasiriyah and Basrah. At least 1,500 rounds were also aimed at troops, the group says.

    This conflicts with legal advice from the US Air Force in 1975 suggesting that DU weapons should only be used against hard targets like tanks and armoured vehicles, the report says. This advice, designed to comply with international law by minimising deaths and injuries to urban populations and troops, was largely ignored by US forces, it argues.”

    The Guardian, 2013:

    [Hans] Von Sponeck [’former UN assistant secretary general and UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq’] said that US political pressure on WHO had scuppered previous investigations into the impact of DU on Iraq:

    “I served in Baghdad and was confronted with the reality of the environmental impact of DU. In 2001, I saw in Geneva how a WHO mission to conduct on-spot assessments in Basra and southern Iraq, where depleted uranium had led to devastating environmental health problems, was aborted under US political pressure.”

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  • fun fact one of the world champions in pepper-eating contests is a trans woman and she actually faced significant backlash because people somehow thought she had a biological advantage. to eating spicy pepper

  • update bc i went back and checked: her name is brianna “the chilli queen” skinner and she set a record in 2017 by slamming back 23 carolina reapers consecutively. she only stopped when told to by the referees, and the next year she stepped down out of boredom. queen

  • in an interview when someone asked her how she managed to do it she straight up said she's gone through harder shit being trans than eating a pepper

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