Month: December 2019

Photo: The most popular image was this bit of graffiti at Hong Kong Polytechnic which I learned from commenters is a Winston Churchill quote. Seems appropriate to leave this here as Hong Kongers are still protesting since mid-March 2019.

So here it is, the top links from this year’s The Week That Was – these are the stories that most interested you this past year in order of popularity. Thank you for your time and attention this year and see you in the next!

Special Operations Command Is Experimenting With Bullets That Shoot Through Water – Defense One

A night of drinking, a closed strip joint and a White Castle shooting bring suspensions for 3 judges – CNN

Meet the $50 Strawberries That NYC’s High-End Chefs Are Fawning Over – Eater

Fake guns banned in downtown Las Vegas district, but real guns OK – Las Vegas Review-Journal

Tiny Hand Will Be Your New Comic Sans – BuzzFeed

Miami-Dade Commissioner Joe Martinez Involved in Active Criminal Probe – Miami New Times

Memphis youth builds home nuclear fusion reactor – Memphis Commercial Appeal

I Just Took the World’s First 20-Hour Flight. Here’s What It Did to Me – Bloomberg

There’s a Dramatic Beef in the Quilting Community, Over a Pair of Scissors – Jezebel

Garfield phones beach mystery finally solved after 35 years – BBC

Photo credit: Electronic machine used to vote on articles of impeachment.

Jeep, the company behind four-wheeler brands such as Wrangler and Gladiator announced that its entire lineup will go hybrid or full-on electric by 2022

A sharp-eyed researcher discovered that Department of Agriculture listed Marvel’s mythical East African country, Wakanda, as a trading partner on a website built to track tariffs on nations signed on to the free trade agreement. The developer had forgotten to remove the test files from the prototype.

A woman in San Francisco, desperate to locate her dog, stolen while it was waiting for her outside a local grocery store, hired a plane for $7,000 to fly a banner with the website she set up to find her her dog. BTW, the website is www.bringjacksonhome.com/

Merck received FDA approval for the world’s first vaccine for the Ebola virus.

Now that it’s legal in increasingly more counties, marijuana has become a major export for the African country of Lesotho and a “critical piece of the government’s agricultural strategy.”

With the recent proliferation of metal credit cards, those looking for something more distinctive can opt for the $200,000, gemstone-encrusted Visa card from the Insignia Group.

San Francisco had to quietly revise the government’s well-intentioned blanket ban on facial recognition technology when they realized that the City Supervisors’ use of their government-issued iPhone Face ID was made illegal.

A shoplifter at a Walmart in Ohio was quickly apprehended when she made the poor choice to commit her crime during the annual Cops and Kids shopping event.

A bank employee allegedly stole $88,000 from his bank and was found out after posing with stacks of cash, on his social media account.

An all-electric powered seaplane took off from Vancouver, Canada, in what the operators describe as a “world first” for the aviation industry.

The man who placed the winning $243,200 bid for Olivia Newton-John’s leather jacket that she wore in the movie Grease, returned it to her as a gift.

The art world continues to debate the significance of the duct-taped banana.

A beach in Northern California was overrun by thousands of penis fish.

A self-driving truck delivered 40,000 pounds of butter from Tulare, California to Quakertown, Pennsylvania, finishing a 2,800-mile-trip in under three days.

Photo credit: Tokyo from above

Scientists at the University of Bath have developed an artificial neuron chip that behaves just like biological neurons.

A team of researchers in Poland worked on eye-tracking technology to give them hints at the ideally shape of a woman’s boob.

Finland just elected the youngest Prime Minister in the world. Sanna Marin is 34 and leads a coalition of four other parties, all led by women, three in their thirties.

Willie Nelson quit smoking weed. and Big Bird died.

Wal-Mart is selling the KFC-scented yule log that smells like warm fried chicken.

Someone duct-taped a banana to a wall and called it art, and sold two of them for $120K and another for $150K. Then a performance artist ate one in a performance he called, Hungry Artist.

Wasatch County in Utah has a tax revenue shortfall of $6 million when they realized that a single property was over-valued by $1 billion. “I’m thinking it was a data entry that would be something like they dropped their phone on the keyboard and it kicked out all these numbers without verifying,” said County Assessor Maureen “Buff” Griffiths.

Your long read of the week is a fantastic story of lost gold. The Fishermen’s Secret is told by The SF Chronicle.

Someone hosted an entire Thanksgiving banquet (and all were invited) on a NYC subway L train.

The White House went into full lockdown on Tuesday when something violated the immediate airspace. No, it was not Governor Ernie Fletcher, just a flock of birds.

Someone starting posting advertisements for trips to Eroda. The only problem was that it doesn’t exist.

From the ‘this can’t be good’ department, mercury has been found in Northern California coastal mountain lions and researchers are fingering the famous regional fog as the culprit.

It’s been reported that Trump’s golfing budget exceeds $115 million. Considerably more (287-times more) than the annual presidential salary Trump promised to give up.

This week’s dystopian news comes from Moscow where farmers have concluded that cows jacked into VR projections of greener pastures have less anxiety and may potentially produce more and better tasting milk.

Lee Sedol, the former Go champion beaten by Google’s DeepMind AI, retired after declaring AI invincible. ‘Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated’

Extra Credit: The amazing story of The Jungle Prince of Dehli is an fascinating read and wonderful four-part podcast.