bastard

anyways one of terminology we have coined to talk about music is "Knee Music" which is derived from the fact that album covers that show a person's knees tend to sound the same as each other. It's kind of a sleepy, grungy indie folk pop sound with youthful-sounding, vocals that affect a candid and vulnerable feeling.

or anyway we found multiple album covers with knees in quick succession, and they all sounded the same, hence "Knee Music"

For a while, his method was slightly different, instead choosing a random genre and listening to it until he found a song from that genre that he liked.

The challenge in this is that even if a song isn't particularly pleasant to listen to, novelty will increase the rating, because it's something interesting we haven't heard before. So, it's incredibly difficult for a song to get the lowest rating, because a song that is outstandingly bad has something different about it to make it bad, which paradoxically makes it good.

We had a very hard time rating this song, Burial Etiquette- Ivy Staircase in Ruin. We both disliked it, but we had never disliked a song in this way. The harsh vocals are so far to the background and relatively quiet that it's like, a kind of generic song but there's a guy screaming incoherently somewhere in the next room

The genre is Funk, so we looked into funk some more, but it turns out that funk is not very popular anymore and it was popular mostly in the 1970s.

Only one other random song we rated with a 7, which is Thrailkill- Cattywampus.

Benny Bleu- Five Miles from Town

(Regarding the song Burial Etiquette- Ivy Staircase in Ruin)

Gabor Szabo- Some Velvet Morning It has a unique and complex energy with some unusual twangy strings in it that sound good and kind of groovy, and a lovely solo in the middle. It is skillful and fun, doing a lot of different things with subtlety.

Wool Cape

c. 1905

unknown maker, France

Scientists in China have developed a more efficient form of solar desalination that uses 47.4% less energy than alternatives. After the first year of testing, the scientists believe that at scale it would be able to desalinate water more cheaply than producing bottled water.

Found the paper (abstract, the rest behind a paywall) and I am... suspicious...

Reads to me like atmospheric-pressure evaporation, and since they are reporting pure evaporation rate, I'm assuming there's no regen/recycling, etc.

Average maximum solar irradiance is ~1000 W/m^2, from which they are apparently generating 38 kg/(m^2-h) of water vapor. According to my best buddy engineering toolbox, water takes 2256.4kJ/kg to boil. We can plug that in to see.

So: not 20L a day from 0.75m^2, 20L a day from ~8m^2, including 2kW of solar. Can plug that in:

Mottled Shovel-nosed Frog (Hemisus marmoratus), family Hemisotidae, South Africa

the RealDoll division that is working on AI-augmented sex dolls has sold an AI-equipped silicon unit named Sally to the Salamanca school district's high school at a steep discount, which is the only school district entirely inside an Indigenous rfeservation in America. they are testing an AI sex doll on high school kids, not sexually, but testing nontheless.

the Realbotix corporation claims the unit is not able to save identifying information, nor relay it or report it to Realbotix. But the robot is instructed to snitch on students it perceives as posing a threat:

Every safeguard described in the reporting traces back to the company itself. Realbotix's CEO said the system would always redirect conversation back to education and automatically alert administrators to language associated with self-harm. The superintendent, relaying what Realbotix told the district, said the system runs on a closed network with no internet connection and that Realbotix will not have access to personally identifiable student information. No independent audit, security review, or third-party verification of any of it appears anywhere in the reporting. Realbotix can describe what Sally's safeguards do. No one, including Realbotix, can yet describe what a program with these products does to a teenager's learning outcomes or emotional safety, because neither study has been run.