Baby Boomer, retired teacher, raised on Motown,life long Democrat, learning from grandkids and have always been open to “woke”
n growth🤗 not the college coach
I think what drives high achieving scientists to China, besides better research students and well-funded labs, is China’s genuine commitment to solving real world problems that make lives better.
Not everyone wants profit maximisation.
A Japanese engineer invented the QR code for one job, tracking car parts on a Toyota line, then his company chose to give the patent away for free, which is the only reason it ended up on every restaurant table on Earth.
His name is Masahiro Hara. The company was Denso Wave, a parts supplier owned by Toyota.
In 1992 the problem landed on his desk, and it was not glamorous. Workers on the factory floor were drowning.
Every car part had a barcode, but a barcode can only hold about twenty characters, so to track one component they had to stick five or ten barcodes on it.
A worker would stand there scanning a single part ten times in a row. Some of them were scanning close to a thousand barcodes a day. The job had stopped being about building cars and turned into pointing a scanner at stickers all day long.
And there was a second problem nobody upstairs cared about. This was a factory. Oil got on everything. A smudge of grease across a barcode and the whole thing became unreadable, and the line stopped.
Hara was asked to make the scanner faster. He looked at it for a while and realized the scanner was not the problem. The barcode itself was the ceiling. A line of black bars can only hold information going one direction, left to right.
He decided to build something that held information in two directions, up and down as well as across, so it could store hundreds of times more in the same little square.
Then came the part that sounds made up but is not.
Hara played Go on his lunch breaks, the old board game with black and white stones sitting on a grid. He was staring at the board one day and it clicked.
The grid of black and white stones was already a way to store information in two directions. That was the shape of his code.
But building the code was the easy half. The hard problem was speed, because the whole point was to be fast, and a scanner wastes most of its time just trying to figure out where the code is and which way it is turned.
The fix came to him on a train. He was looking out the window at buildings, and one building stood out from all the others because of its shape against the sky. That was the idea.
He put three little square targets in three corners of the code. The moment a scanner sees those three squares, it knows instantly where the code is and how it is rotated, even upside down, even at an angle.
Now here is the detail that shows how far he was willing to go. Those three corner squares only work if nothing else on the page looks like them.
If a magazine ad or a cardboard box happened to have the same black and white pattern nearby, the scanner would get confused and grab the wrong thing.
So Hara and his tiny two-person team went and surveyed printed material. Magazines. Flyers. Cardboard boxes. Piles of it, for days, reducing every picture down to its ratio of black to white area, hunting for the one ratio that almost never shows up in print anywhere. They found it. One to one to three to one to one.
That exact rhythm of black and white is baked into every corner square of every QR code on Earth, and it is there because it is the pattern the printed world almost never produces by accident.
Then he solved the oil.
He built the code so it carries a backup of its own information, spread mathematically across the whole square. You can tear off, smudge, or scratch out up to thirty percent of a QR code and it still scans perfectly, because the code rebuilds the missing piece from the copy it kept of itself.
A worker could get grease on a third of the label and the line would keep moving. This is the same math that lets a scratched CD still play and lets a spacecraft send data back across the solar system without asking to repeat itself.
He finished in 1994. He named it Quick Response, after what it does for the person using it, not after what it is.
And then Denso made the decision that actually mattered.
They held the patent. They could have charged a fee on every single scan, and given how many billions happen now, that would have made someone unimaginably rich.
Instead they announced they would not enforce their rights to collect royalties, and they published the specification openly so anyone could use it. Hara later said it was not even a big argument inside the company.
That one choice is the whole story. A code that costs nothing to use is a code everyone builds on. Airlines put it on tickets. Phone makers built readers into cameras.
Then a pandemic hit and the world needed a way to hand someone information without touching anything, and the free little square that a Toyota engineer built for greasy factory workers was suddenly on every menu, every payment, every door.
Hara still works there. He has said, more than once, that he never imagined it would spread this far, and that the part he is proudest of is that it got used to keep people safe.
The man built it to survive oil on a factory floor. It ended up surviving everything else too.
You have scanned his work a hundred times this year. Now you know whose it was.
American healthcare worker has a very serious warning for parents
“Don't buy your kid an e-bike. If I could give parents any piece of advice right now, it would be don't get an e-bike for your child. The consequences to e-bike accidents are life-changing and deadly, and honestly, kids should not be riding them — So please just don't buy them”
She’s right they are very dangerous here’s some data:
E-bikes can reach 20 mph, and Class 3 e-bikes can reach 28 mph. Same models can go even faster
An estimated 45,000–60,000 e-bike injuries occur annually in the US across all ages
Roughly 8,000–12,000 children and teens have to visit the ER every year from them
Children involved in e-bike crashes are more likely to suffer traumatic brain injuries, fractures and internal injuries than those injured on traditional bicycles because of the higher speeds
Pediatric trauma experts report dozens of children and teens have died in e-bike crashes in recent years
هذا القط الجميل ذو الشعر المجعد ليس من صنع الذكاء الاصطناعي بل قط حقيقي ينتمي إلى واحدة من أندر سلالات القطط في العالم، وتُعرف علمياً وعالمياً باسم سلالة "سيلكيرك ريكس" (Selkirk Rex)، وتُصنف كسلالة طبيعية ناتجة عن طفرة جينية تلقائية، وتتميز بجسد قوي ممتلئ، ورأس مستدير، وفراء كثيف يأتي بدرجات تموج مختل��ة منها القصير والطويل، وتعود جذور هذه السلالة إلى قطة مشردة عُثر عليها في مأوى للحيوانات في ولاية مونتانا بالولايات المتحدة الأمريكية، تبنتها مربية قطط محترفة تُدعى "جيري نيومان"، وقامت بتزويجها مع قط من سلالة "الفارسي الأسود" (Persian)، لتبدأ من هناك خطوط إنتاج السلالة رسمياً.
ظهرت هذه السلالة لأول مرة في عام 1987. واعترفت بها المنظمات العالمية الكبرى لرعاية السنوريات (مثل TICA وCFA) رسمياً في التسعينيات وبداية الألفية.
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#باستيت
I don't want a "Smart Fridge" that orders milk for me. I want a fridge that lasts 25 years and doesn't have a privacy policy that allows it to share my late-night snacking habits with my health insurance provider.
She joined Japan's Self-Defence Forces after watching soldiers help survivors of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. She wanted to defend her country.
Instead her colleagues assaulted her daily for over a year. In 2021 three of them pinned her down in front of dozens of watching laughing colleagues. She reported it up the chain of command. Two investigations launched. Both dropped for lack of evidence. Every male colleague who had watched refused to testify. TV stations ignored her. So she posted her story on YouTube.
The video went viral. 100,000 people signed her petition. The Ministry of Defence issued a public apology. Five soldiers dishonourably dismissed. An investigation uncovered over 1,000 other harassment complaints across the entire military. Three soldiers convicted in December 2023. Japanese government settled her civil lawsuit in January 2026.
She was named on the BBC's 100 most influential women in the world. Time magazine put her on their Next 100 list.
Her name is Rina Gonoi. She was 24 years old when she brought Japan's military to its knees.
In 1916 someone dug a well to find water for irrigation, in the middle of a desert. Scalding water exceeding 200°F, has flowed ever since. Calcium carbonate deposits building up into this cone shape with colourful thermophilic algae.
This is the Fly Geyser.
Since Josh Shapiro decided to film in a school it’s probably a good time to note that he covered up the murder of a teacher as Pennsylvania Attorney General by declaring her being stabbed 20 times as being a death by suicide.
The declassified documents Trump just released tonight to “prove” the 2020 election was “rigged” actually show that Russia tried to interfere to hurt Biden and help Trump.
A plane in the United States was forced to land after the sound of the adhan was heard from a passenger's phone.
A Southwest Airlines flight traveling from Tennessee to Florida was forced to make an emergency landing in Atlanta. Upon landing, a SWAT team boarded the aircraft and detained one of the passengers, accusing him of terrorism and posing a bomb threat.
It was later revealed that the detained passenger was a Muslim. During the flight, his prayer-time app activated and played the adhan (the Islamic call to prayer). The crew reportedly interpreted the sound as a potential security threat, notified dispatchers, and decided to make an emergency landing.
Así se ven Nueva Jersey y Nueva York hoy a nuestra llegada, contaminación atribuida a los incendios en Canadá. El peor registro de calidad de aire en 3 años. Se pide a la población local no hacer actividades al aire libre… pero el domingo aquí hay final y en estadio sin techo.