Showing all posts tagged: trivia
Teleportation: the superpower of choice of superheroes
2 July 2024
Given the choice, a regular person, like you or me, who decides they’d like to become a superhero, will choose teleportation as their superhero superpower. In preference to three other choices they could have made: mind-control, flight, or supernatural physical strength. This is the long-story-short conclusion of some recent research into the subject, by Julian J. Hwang and Dongso Lee.
I’m not so sure about teleportation as a superpower though. It would certainly be useful for travel, but for a superhero? I’d go for mind-control, or supernatural physical strength, instead. Wouldn’t either of those be more useful in subduing your foes?
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Burritos power Guzman Y Gomez to hot sharemarket debut
21 June 2024
Shares in Australian founded Mexican food restaurant Guzman Y Gomez (GYG: it’s not only an initialism, it’s a ticker code) had a stellar debut on their first day of trading on the ASX, with one market pundit describing the launch as “the hottest float on the stock market in years“:
Its shares opened at $30, a premium of more than 36 per cent to what investors paid ahead of the blockbuster initial public offering under the ticker “GYG”.
The float price for GYG shares was $22, and as of the close on trading, yesterday afternoon, were priced at $30 a piece. GYG’s burritos sure are hot, as I’ve said before.
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Guzman y Gomez goes to IPO, eyes burrito world domination
3 June 2024
I’m not exactly a fan of large-chain food and beverage outlets. But Sydney based Mexican cuisine fast food restaurant Guzman y Gomez, AKA GYG (to me, anyway) is not quite large-chain. Not at the moment, though there are near to two-hundred stores in Australia, sixteen in Singapore, and a handful in Japan, and the United States.
But a successful IPO might see them coming to a location near you, should you currently not reside in any of their catchment areas. At this stage, it is anticipated they will commence trading on the Australian Securities Exchange, on 20 June 2024. Of their burritos, my favourite items on their menu, I will say they make for a fulfilling meal.
I couldn’t say the same for the offering from all large-chain fast food restaurants though.
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Minutes to hours, hours to days, this is how you spend your time
16 May 2024
A breakdown of how people, Americans in this case, spend their time, by each decade of their life. Things like sleeping, eating, working, caring for others, and socialising. The crunch is definitely on in our thirties, forties, and fifties, when time for sleep and socialising, for instance, is reduced.
Kurzgesagt also did a presentation a few years ago on how we spend the years of our lives. It does make you stop and think. Once you leave home, your parents place, and here Kurzgesagt offered twenty-five as an average age for this, you will likely see exceedingly little of them thereafter:
If you are making an effort to be with your parents for two full weeks each year for the rest of their lives, which covers the main holidays, birthdays and a bit extra, you still have already spent more than 90% of the time you will ever spend with them, even if they grow pretty old.
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To make the longest ever baguette bakers must go the extra mile
8 May 2024
Meanwhile, back in the real world… chefs in France recently made the world’s longest ever baguette, which clocks in at a… morsel over one-hundred and forty metres in length. (My question: did they create the world’s largest oven to cook up this oversize stick of bread?)
I thought a one-hundred and forty metre long baguette was impressive, until I read in the same article that Italian bakers made a baguette about one-hundred and thirty-five metres long, a few years ago. (My question: why?)
The problem with the French record breaking effort though, is an extra five metres isn’t really a whole lot. Someone else will come along soon, and bake one that’s one-hundred and fifty metres long. If the French had made a baguette that was, say, one kilometre long, that would be a feat that might stand for some time.
In other words, to hold the world record for baking the world’s longest baguette, chefs really need to go the extra mile.
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Amasia, the next supercontinent, will form in 300 million years
6 October 2022
The ground beneath our feet is constantly shifting. In around three-hundred million years, all the landmasses we’re familiar with today will have merged to form a supercontinent some are already calling Amasia. So fas as geologists can tell, there have possibly been six such supercontinent formations in the past.
The three most recent supercontinents were Pangea, Gondwana, and Pannotia. Geologists think there were other supercontinents before these three, which are called Nuna (or Columbia), Rodinia, and Ur.
The formation of Amasia is going to involve a lot of tectonic activity between now and then. Too bad no one here today will be around it see it.
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How locks, including the unpickable Enclave lock, work
27 June 2022
The Enclave lock, designed by Andrew Magill, comes with the claim that it cannot be picked. This might be the news the security conscious have been waiting for.
Some locks are more difficult to pick than others. Some have more perfect tolerances, or more positions, or keyways that are more difficult to fit tools into, or parts that move in unusual ways, or parts designed to mislead pickers, and so on. But these are only incremental improvements, and don’t address the fundamental flaw. The solution is to make it so that the two steps- accepting input, and testing that input- can never happen at the same time. When those two steps cannot interact with each other, a well-designed lock will never reveal information about the correct positions of its individual parts, nor can they be made to ‘fall into’ their unlocked positions through manipulation.
Watch the video clip for the Enclave lock though. As well as demonstrating Magill’s new lock, it also shows how conventional locks work. Quite fascinating.
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design, security, technology, trivia