Weekly Web Harvest for 2022-01-02

The new company plans to let everyday Americans bet on civil lawsuits by buying and trading associated crypto tokens in “initial litigation offerings.”

“This poignant story of two foods touching on a hospital plate could almost have been written by Marcel Proust, for whom the act of dipping a morsel of cake in a cup of tea was the starting point for an expanding spiral of vivid recollections, culminating in the realization, nine volumes and 3 megabytes of handwritten prose later, that time and memory themselves are only an illusion.
The javascript alone in “Leeds Hospital Bosses Apologise after Curry and Crumble On The Same Plate” is longer than Remembrance of Things Past.”

“This is part of a regrettable trend, made possible by faster networks, of having ‘hero images’ whose only purpose is for people to have something to scroll past.”

With an advanced degree in accounting, DeSorbo is no stranger to numbers. But in a sport like swimming, it can be difficult to know how to make use of the data.

“A lot of coaches are overwhelmed with the amount of data that we get,” DeSorbo said. “You get it, but you don’t always know how to translate it into what we’re doing in the water. The best thing about Dr. Ono is that he has enough awareness of the sport to be able to explain the data in a way that we can apply it.”

Her clients will no longer be able to own the physical jar of Stephanie’s gas, but they will be able to purchase them as digital artworks on the blockchain. 

He tells her that the Earth is flat—
He knows the facts, and that is that.
In altercations fierce and long
She tries her best to prove him wrong.
But he has learned to argue well.
He calls her arguments unsound
And often asks her not to yell.
She cannot win. He stands his ground.
The planet goes on being round.

‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’

Every year the internet grows—as of January 2021 there are 4.66 billion active internet users. Unfortunately, accessibility is not substantially improving alongside this growth as we’ll see throughout this chapter. As our reliance on internet solutions increases, so does the alienation of people who do not have equal access to the web.

This is the largest and most detailed photo ever taken of a work of art. It is 717 gigapixels, or 717,000,000,000 pixels, in size.

The distance between two pixels is 5 micrometres (0.005 millimetre), which means that one pixel is smaller than a human red blood cell.

The team used a 100-megapixel Hasselblad H6D 400 MS-camera to make 8439 individual photos measuring 5.5cm x 4.1cm. Artificial intelligence was used to stitch these smaller photographs together to form the final large image, with a total file size of 5.6 terabytes.

h/t Stephen Downes

Once Warnock and Ossoff take their seats, the Democratic half of the Senate will represent 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half.

The key underlying technology in the VODXS faucet is blockchain. The blockchain is essentially a decentralized ledger that can securely record immutable data. The faucet itself takes the impressions and interaction data from a person washing their hands and records that data on the blockchain.

“Every VODXS faucet is connected directly to the blockchain, and as soon as this presence is noted, the faucet puts this information into a transaction on the network. Nodes pick up these user presence indicators and validate whether the indication is likely to be confirmed,” Mardikian said.

The blockchain platform also uses AI to identify ineffective or fraudulent ads with “real time monitoring of user interactions.”

Guy in Plato’s Cave: “Okay but what if I owned one of these shadows on the wall, with the blockchain?”