People joke about how flight is effectively the real life equivalent of the half a-press meme, because One Weird Trick with air pressure allows giant hunks of metal to fly. But refrigeration is an equally absurd physics hack. Like, for all of human history, the only real way to cool something besides just allowing the heat to dissipate naturally was to use apply cold stuff to the hot thing, and have it absorb some of the heat. But cold stuff is, by definition, scarce in hot environments, and is used up by this process. And that was how cooling worked for all of history, until some assholes in the 19th century figured out One Weird Trick with vapor compression that can allow you to generate an unlimited amount of cold stuff (well, limited only by your ability to continuously compress and decompress the refrigerant). Like, fuck off…
Not quite! People have been refrigerating things and even freezing things using simple evaporative cooling for a very long time. Like the Persian cooling towers called Yakchal.
You dump water in a pit in the floor in the winter, and the wind blows over the hole at the top and carries the last heat of the water away so it freezes. Then the yakchal stays cold over the summer so you have ice all year round. Sometimes these things had wind towers installed that could use the wind to freeze water even in the middle of summer.
Then there’s this thing –
The Botijo, an old Spanish design that lets enough water bleed through the clay that the wind evaporates it and cools the whole container.
So people have been taking advantage of the wind for a while, and where it works, it works much better than ice, because ice can only get something as cold as itself. If it steals heat from something, it melts in turn. But the wind can carry away as much heat as it wants.
That’s the old cheat code. Refrigerators just automated the process to make it constant and reliable.
Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.
But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.
So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.
But then in 2017 a doctor saw an ad for this bakery scanning system and it occurred to him that cells under a microscope don’t look all that different from weird loaves of bread. And it turns out that yeah, you can use almost all of the same code to analyze a tissue sample and pick out any potentially cancerous cells in it. Other people have started buying the same program for everything from analyzing the readout from big physics experiments to labeling charms and amulets for sale at shrines to detecting problems in the wiring on jet engines.
oh so THAT’S the answer to why you need an ai that can tell croissants from bear claws. That actually makes sense.
Amazing. Beautiful. I need more stories likes these
Black Ice don’t care how well you learned to drive.
Is this shit for real? Somebody comes up with an innovative way to try and keep people from dying in car accidents, and some chud just HAS to crawl out of the woodwork to complain about it?
“Be a real man and die/suffer!” Is a real viewpoint in America
mc1303 