Over at my day job, our crack designer Neale has been having fun contrasting our new lightning-fast setup process against imaginary installations from the past. He’s mocked up out-of-date technologies like boxed software and cassettes. Most recently, we posted his rendering of a 5.25” floppy disk:

Apparently, however, this particular technology is not as obsolete as we thought. In fact, it’s essential to at least one public transit system in the US:

[A] portion of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, or Muni, rail system still uses an Automatic Train Control system installed in 1998 that requires its software to be loaded with obsolete 5¼ -inch floppy disks each morning.

Yikes! Though Muni is working to upgrade this system, that upgrade may still be years away.

For more on floppy disks in the modern era, see this interview with Tom Persky. He’s the owner of floppydisk.com and self-proclaimed “last man standing in the floppy disk business”.

Amazon has indicated they’re moving away from their “Just Walk Out” technology, which allowed shoppers to purchase items without needing to visit a checkout.

Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.

A whole lot of what may appear to be computer intelligence is actually just low-paid offshore humans. In this case, it wasn’t worth it at all.

Down at the University of Richmond, they’re teaching rats to drive cars. It turns out, the rats enjoy it, even when they don’t get treats for doing so.

Self-driving cars have been 10 years away for at least 20 years. Perhaps we ought to shift our efforts to rat-driven cars.

When I saw a headline indicating that 15 places in the US had “lost their total solar eclipse”, I was confused. A solar eclipse is not like weather, which changes frequently, nor is it subject to political lobbying and maneuvering. Instead, it’s a lot more like clockwork, and it’s something we can measure with extreme precision.

So what changed? Fascinatingly, our understanding of the radius of the sun. New calculations there mean the path of totality for the coming eclipse will be about 2000 feet narrower than previously thought. If you were right on the edge, move a half-mile (or more) inward.

Last week, a British woman attempted to rescue a hedgehog she’d scooped up on the side of the road. There was just one problem:

It was not a hedgehog at all, but rather the top of a hat.

I know it’s dumb, but I just can’t stop laughing.

The Boston Athenæum is one of America’s oldest independent libraries, with a collection of hundreds of thousands of volumes. Only one book, however, is bound in the author’s own skin:

[Photo courtesy of P. Kafasis]

This infamous volume is “Narrative of the Life of James Allen”, who was a 19th-century criminal. One of Allen’s many aliases was “George Walton”, which is why the front cover reads, in Latin, “This book is bound in the skin of Walton”. Yuck.

The Athenæum explains the book thusly:

“While sick with the tuberculosis that would soon kill him, James Allen requested that a copy of his memoir be bound in his own skin and given to John Fenno Jr., the one man who had successfully resisted when Allen attempted to rob him at gun-point in 1834.”

That’s pretty grotesque, but hey, it’s apparently what Allen wanted.¹ You have to respect a dying person’s wishes.²

Across the Charles over at Harvard, however, the origins of a similarly-bound book are rather more distressing. There, a copy of Arsène Houssaye’s “On the Destiny of the Soul” was, until very recently, bound in the skin of the body of an unknown psychiatric patient who almost certainly made no similar request for the disposition of her remains.

After many years, the Harvard Library is working to make things right:

“The Library is now in the process of conducting additional provenance and biographical research into the book, Bouland, and the anonymous female patient, as well as consulting with appropriate authorities at the University and in France to determine a final respectful disposition of these human remains,” the statement said.

The announcement follows a decade-long effort from rare book experts Paul Needham and John Lancaster calling on Harvard to remove the book from its holdings and repatriate the remains to France.

I imagine that last year’s news of misappropriated human remains at the Harvard Medical School morgue spurred this process along.

Footnotes:

1. I do have to wonder how poor Fenno felt about the whole thing. ↩︎

2. Do you, though? Who would’ve actually taken up this macabre task after Allen’s death? ↩︎

Earlier this week, the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in dramatic fashion, after one of its supports was struck by a container ship. Six people are believed dead, with another two rescued from the water, but it could have been much worse.

Maryland governor Wes Moore told reporters that, thanks to the mayday call, officials were able to stem the flow of traffic over the bridge, an intervention that he says “saved lives.”

Because this bridge was such a critical piece of infrastructure, discussions about replacing have already begun. In an article covering some of what we can expect, I came upon this sentence:

As the new bridge is designed, experts said planners should examine ways to prevent future collisions.

Eh, really? Is that worth the effort? Lightning never strikes the same place twice. Why bother wasting time on that?