Was at an air BandB for vacation a couple of weeks back.   The place had a fully outfitted kitchen with plates, spices, a juicer, coffee maker, and just about everything a kitchen would need.  Except one thing. Not a pot or pan in the place.  Very odd.  We had bought some food and I was making breakfast when I noticed the  missing pots and pans.  I wondered if I could microwave some eggs. I remember my brother trying this when we were kids, with terrible results.  The yolk exploded and covered the inside of our massive new Amana microwave with half cooked egg.  So I was skeptical.  But alas there were some recipes on line, including a few making scrambled eggs in a microwave in a coffee cup.  Perfect!  I gave it a try and in a bit more than a minute I had some very nice scrambled eggs.  Put a dab of butter in, some salt and pepper (before or after cooking) and some of the best eggs ever.  Easy cleanup, too.  Why didn’t I know about this?

I was in Denver on vacation and noticed the quiet (almost dangerously so) busses on the 16th street mall.  They seemed to be electric, but there weren’t any obvious signs or anything advertising this, just the lack of noise and smoke.  When I got home a quick Google turned up an article on the electric busses in Denver (Denver RTD to purchase 36 new BYD electric buses for mall service).  It also urned up the article on the all electric busses on Shenzhen.  By coincidence I was talking to a co-worker who happened to be from Shenzhen.  He confirmed the electric bus story and also mentioned that it is far, far easier to get a license for a new car in China if it is electric.

From Ars Technica:

China producing x86 chips nearly identical to AMD server processors

Thanks to a licensing deal with AMD and a complex joint-venture arrangement, the Chinese chip producer Chengdu Haiguang IC Design Co. (Hygon) is now producing x86-based server processors that are largely indistinguishable from AMD’s EPYC processors—so close in design that Linux kernel developers had to do little in the way of patching to support the new processor family, called “Dhyana.” The server chips are being manufactured for domestic use only—part of an effort to break China’s dependence on foreign technology companies.

A recent local story that has gotten lots of national attention.  Kids shooting off fireworks on July 4th shot by neighbor.  Lots of ugly stuff here, much of it not in the mainstream press.  First it was technically July 4th, but it was really just after midnight in the 3rd.  Non-traditional, but I remember having fireworks as a kid and shooting them days before New Years.  The short story:  41 year old white guy tells brown / black kids to be quiet.  They ignore him, so instead of calling the cops, he dresses up in military gear and gets a bunch of guns and shoots one of them.

Here is the really outrageous part: the shooter left a rifle on the ground, but the police “didn’t know who it belonged to”.  There were reports of guns on both sides but videos don’t bear this out.  The teenager was shot running away.  Here is the best part:  shooter wasn’t arrested until Friday, almost 3 days later.  What????  You can shoot someone and kill them and not get arrested immediately?  I will say it.  If you are white and the victim is black, no matter how bad it looks or what the witnesses say, you get to walk away, at least until the people getting shot scream loud enough.  I am getting more and more disappointed in Austin PD.

Hundreds fill Travis High field to remember teen killed in shooting

An article from New York magazine a few months back with some of the bigger names involved in the modern internet.

The Internet Apologizes …

Even those who designed our digital world are aghast at what they created. A breakdown of what went wrong — from the architects who built it.

 

I have come to really like Jaron Lanier.  He sums lots of it up:

We wanted everything to be free, because we were hippie socialists. But we also loved entrepreneurs, because we loved Steve Jobs. So you want to be both a socialist and a libertarian at the same time, which is absurd. … We disrupted absolutely everything: politics, finance, education, media, family relationships, romantic relationships. We won — we just totally won. But having won, we have no sense of balance or modesty or graciousness. We’re still acting as if we’re in trouble and we have to defend ourselves. So we kind of turned into assholes, you know?

A rainy 4th of July after a long string of 100F (or near)  days here in Austin.

TOWARD AN AI ROADBLOCK

Skeptics say full autonomy could be farther away than the industry admits

By Russell Brandom@russellbrandom  Jul 3, 2018, 10:12am EDT

I have never been a fan of “open plan” offices.  Here is some actual data.

The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration

Ethan S. Bernstein, Stephen Turban

” Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM.”

Markets

This Heat Wave’s So Bad It’s Even Slowing Down U.S. Stock Trades

By

Nick Baker

July 3, 2018, 10:29 AM CDT

I’m not really a fan of Twitter, for lots of reasons, but I just ran across this.  Dinesh D’Souza just re-tweeted a pair of posts with hashtags “burn the Jews” and “bring back slavery”.  I am as sprprised that anyone out there even reads material tagged this way,  such less re-tweets it.  Of course, it was an accident of some sort and the Liberal Media is just making a fuss over nothing.  Wow.  From Haaretz:

Dinesh D’Souza, Recently Pardoned by Trump, Shares Tweet With #burntheJews

D’Souza is a conservative author and filmaker who recently sparked controversy suggesting student victims of the Parkland, Florida shooting showed grief that was ‘politically orchestrated’ and ‘phony & inauthentic’