Bag of Randomness for Friday, February, 8, 2019

  • In the image above, I love the defiant use of Comic Sans. “It’s a bold strategy Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for him.”
  • Ancestry.com sent me an email stating my ethnicity estimate has updated from the DNA test I sent them in October 2017. I’m exactly half-Asia, but still not sure if it’s the left or right half. I’m now less Irish, but I still love U2. And, I’m still not as German as Prussian as I thought I’d be, a long while ago I heard that’s where us Geeding folk originated.
    • We have better tools for telling regions apart, especially closely related regions like Ireland and Great Britain. We also have 16,000 reference samples now instead of 3,000, which helps screen out less-likely regions.

    • Even though that above image shows the percentage change, here’s the original results.
  • While watching the State of the Union the other night, I wondered when the carpet in the House Chamber was last replaced, which was back in 2014. The article provided an interesting tidbit of how bad the carpet and chamber smelled when chewing tobacco was popular and spittoons were plentiful.
    • As the House of Representatives blog recalls, the condition of the carpets became so gross as a result that Charles Dickens called the House “the headquarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva”…and an 1895 report on the sanitary conditions of the Capitol complained about the spittoons that “would not be tolerated in the barroom of a mining camp.” The report also characterized ventilation on the House floor as “the straining of air through shafts coated with carpet lint, and charged with the vilest of vile matter from the throats and lungs of over 400 people”, a condition the author, George Washington Shell, said posed a real problem. As he noted, “the danger to the life of those who breathe that air can not be overestimated”.
  • The madness in Virginia politics and old yearbook photos won’t stop. It’s amazing how long all of it has taken to surface, but image what politicians of the future will have to battle with all their social media history. Maybe the mountains of data teens willingly post will be too much to search through, but then again, AI will probably narrow that down right fast. But then again, perhaps deep fakes and created content will be indistinguishable from anything authentic.
  • I guess we’ll be seeing bluebonnets in about a month, maybe I’ll plan a road trip to the Hill Country.
  • Smart kid

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One Response to Bag of Randomness for Friday, February, 8, 2019

  1. RPM says:

    I have mega reservations about giving my DNA to a private company for abstract results in return. Nothing stopping them from selling that DNA to anyone who can pay the price. I may be overly cautious, but I don’t see an upside.

    The person that finally invents the app that can totally erase all your social media posts and browsing history will make Bill Gates look like a hobo.

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