Summary
Chris had a crappy Friday last week, his internet was playing up. Sam had a run in with someone that was apparently shoe blind this week.
The Miami zoo sure knows how to upset Kiwi’s by offering a zoo experience that seems crazy to us. Find out how much backlash there was.
Chris finds nothing wrong with a surgeon bringing in a cleaner to help with an amputation. Their bosses thought otherwise and fired them.
AI is being used to help read minds and manipulate photos.
We learn about an unusual death. A laptop without a screen and so much more.
Come have a listen to this podcast and tell a friend.
Links
Ukrainian Wheat
Miami Zoo Gets Kiwis Upset
Surgeon fired for getting cleaner to help with amputation
Unusual death in paper mache dinosaur
Michigan to get hydrogen plant
Spacetop, the laptop with no screen
AI powered point based photo manipulation
Family of Kiwi killed in the US gets a large payout.
Show Transcript
** This transcript was generated by an AI and may not be 100% accurate. If you have questions about any of the information found here, please reach out to us.
Sam [00:00:22]:
Hello and welcome to episode 431 of the Chris and Sam podcast.
Chris [00:00:26]:
I’m Chris.
Sam [00:00:27]:
And I’m Sam. Welcome along to your weekly fix of randomness technology and life. Brought to you by two randoms here in Hamilton, New Zealand.
Chris [00:00:34]:
Yeah, so it’s been an interesting week, I must say. I’ll give you a quick update. I am really enjoying doing this newsletter, actually. The compelling communicator. So issue three went out, I was going to say a couple of hours. I spent 2 hours writing it and the probably another 2 hours looking at it and tweaking it. Yeah, tweaking it in like a couple of different sessions, if you like, and getting it out. I’m actually really enjoying it, so that’s really cool. We’re up to 19 subscribers. Woohoo. And that was all good, except I had a horrible Friday. So we had an issue where my was it with you? No, I think it was with work where my internet dropped out in a call. And then I had a couple more issues. I’m like, God damn it. And one of my I think you mentioned it or no, Carl did that power supplies on routers quite often die? Yeah, so I ordered a router power supply, like from asus a proper asus one to replace. It was only $30, but it’s coming from offshore. I think it’s coming from Australia, actually. So it’s like, I can’t wait until that’s done. So I went to PVTech, grabbed the cheapest router, came home, couldn’t get it to go, went, oh, you’re a dick. Went back to PVTech and said, can this work with fiber? And they’re like, no, that’s way too slow, you need a faster router. So I had to swap it for more expensive I mean, I only spent $100 and it was good to have.
Sam [00:02:21]:
A backup router, especially as all your workers online.
Chris [00:02:26]:
Exactly. Because I work from home, I need this. So I was like, I need a backup router. Anyway, my other one cost me like 500, $600. This was $100. Anyway, so I plugged that in and it’s sort of going and then it failed again. I’m like, what is going on? And I had all this playing around. I have for whatever reason, this place that I’m set up in the and on the wall is in the bedroom. Like, why you have an aunt in the bedroom? I have no freaking clue.
Sam [00:03:02]:
Yeah, okay, weird.
Chris [00:03:03]:
And it’s just through the wall into the lounge. Like they could have put the cable through the wall instead of get it anyway, so that’s okay. So I had an Ethernet cable from the UNT in the bedroom going, scooping around the wall, through the door and the wall. And then my router was out here. So I ended up playing with Ethernet cables. And that because I had tested the Ethernet cable from the router of the computer and all the rest of it. Turns out this flat router cable, it’s one of those flat ones. I think it got damaged and probably because it’s got cold. I’ve been closing the bedroom door a bit and the cables at the bottom of the door.
Sam [00:03:47]:
So it’s used the aero.
Chris [00:03:49]:
Yeah. So I’ve spent all this money and all the rest of it possibly didn’t need to. Although it’s good to have this backup router. So I’m still waiting for the power supply. So I’m still using the new router. But yeah, I hate technology sometimes. It’s so good when it’s going well.
Sam [00:04:07]:
Yeah. Do you know what? I dislike people that have a very simple job, but somehow stuff it up. I went to get new school shoes yesterday for the teenager. Not a problem. Went back to I’m not going to name the place. Went back to the place where we got the previous shoes from. They’re pretty expensive. Not a problem. Got the exact same ones, it turns out. Here we go. Good. Here we go. Go home. Dropped the teenager back off home. She was busy with something else. She rings me later and says, hey, dad, the two shoes are two different models. Like, they’re two different brands. There are two different makes of shoe. Right?
Chris [00:04:51]:
Yeah.
Sam [00:04:52]:
And then to make things worse, the were both a left shoe.
Chris [00:05:00]:
I was waiting for you to say they were both left, but two different models as well. That’s hilarious.
Sam [00:05:07]:
The funny thing was, the guy obviously was very paranoid about giving us the wrong shoe because he kept checking these shoes, like, five separate times while they’re in the box, putting them in the box, making sure all the boxes that he had out all had the right shoe. He did it so many times, and then the still gave us the wrong ones. So to go back and fix that.
Chris [00:05:32]:
You know how you can be colorblind? I wonder if you can be shoe blind. And if so, he’s in the wrong job.
Sam [00:05:39]:
He did say all the shoes did look very similar when I went back. So maybe his shoe blind.
Chris [00:05:46]:
He would say that, yeah. And some of the bend different ways as well.
Sam [00:05:52]:
Yeah.
Chris [00:05:55]:
Do you remember the last week we talked about nuclear waste and that technology from the recycle? It well, totally randomly, I came across this other thing, which is in the news at the moment. It’s again, all this technology from the 60s, nuclear technology from the 60s that has put America it’s back in use and it’s putting America ahead. It’s mental. So at the moment, there’s a huge geopolitical thing going on where it’s kicking off the new space race. Right. China has already got a robot base on the dark side of the moon. So it hasn’t got people up there, but they’ve got robots. They’re doing stuff. Nobody knows what America what could go wrong. American is like, we got to get to the moon really quickly. So they’re going in the next was it four years, I think, because that’s the launching place to Mars. So China and America are racing to Mars is basically it. Or China and America and Elon Musk are racing to Mars.
Sam [00:07:12]:
Never forget the musk.
Chris [00:07:14]:
Don’t forget the musk. So anyway, one of the things that they pulled out that puts America ahead in the view of these scientists and the American scientists, I should say, is that in the 60s, they were working on nuclear rockets. So rocket power. Nuclear rocket power. And in 74, whatever, president Lyndon Johnson, something like that, he banned all that nuclear research stuff because they had all this nuclear we’re all going to die of nuclear war. Yeah. And that’s what stopped the other nuclear waste recycling thing that we took out last week. Anyway, so this nuclear drive, it’s no good for launching out of the atmosphere. So you’re still going to use the propellant to get out of the atmosphere. But using the nuclear drive, which has been tested, it’s not like new technology. They’ve tested it, they’ve used it, it works. They’ve had to dust off the test units and they’re testing it again and go, yeah, this works. And they’re using, instead of an enriched plutonium or whatever uranium it was before, they’re using a graphite thing, which is a lot more stable, a lot less expensive, a lot you know, it’s it’s simpler. It’s what they use for research nuclear reactors. So they’re going to use that and they reckon it’ll take 30% off the time to get to and from Mars. So instead of two years, it’s going to save several months, basically. It’s amazing. But yeah, it just blows my mind that this stuff from the 60s is the cutting edge thing that puts America ahead. I shouldn’t say us, but yeah. Puts America ahead on this supposed space race. Of course, nobody know what no, it.
Sam [00:09:13]:
Makes you wonder what else technology has stopped or been suppressed that they could be using.
Chris [00:09:19]:
Exactly.
Sam [00:09:20]:
Have you been keeping up the Miami Zoo problem?
Chris [00:09:25]:
Is that the one where they kept getting animals kidnapped from?
Sam [00:09:30]:
No, but that story sounds good.
Chris [00:09:33]:
I thought we talked about that before.
Sam [00:09:36]:
No, this is in the last two days, chris, the whole of New Zealand is upset with Miami Zoo.
Chris [00:09:44]:
What?
Sam [00:09:45]:
A couple of days ago, somebody posted, and I think it may have been the zoo themselves, a TikTok, because they have a kiwi, and for $25, Chris, you can pack the kiwi and touch it and just pat it like a dog and they just bring it out and it’s out in daylight and it’s just running around. A petition was set up. The removed the TikTok, but they didn’t remove it from Twitter. So I think the I saw a tweet last night and they said their social media person is going to wake up in the morning and wonder why 20,000 kiwis are angry at them. Doc was reaching out to them and saying, hey, you can’t do that. And yeah. Miami Zoo this morning has decided to stop offering the Kiwi encounter.
Chris [00:10:39]:
I’m confused. In these videos, what was the kiwi doing? Like, are they drugging the thing or what?
Sam [00:10:46]:
Is it just no, it was running around and it was trying to get to the open lid of its little box. It was trying to find the duck, and it went in, and then they just opened the lid again. But there’s pictures of them having it on a table, and people are coming around and they’re just patting it like a dog.
Chris [00:11:04]:
God.
Sam [00:11:07]:
It’s on loan from the Smithsonian Zoo to Miami because they hatched a bunch of kiwi eggs over time. So that happened. You should check out the photos. It’d make you angry.
Chris [00:11:24]:
Yeah. That’s not good. That is not good.
Sam [00:11:29]:
We’ve got some shoutouts.
Chris [00:11:30]:
Oh, have we? Yes.
Sam [00:11:32]:
Go for it. We’re going to shout out Quentin.
Chris [00:11:35]:
Yeah. Because he’s on Seven sharp.
Sam [00:11:37]:
The other day he appeared on TV for Seven Sharp. He’s the marketing strategy expert. That’s what they called him, which is great. And he was talking about people leaving one star reviews. Sometimes the people that have never used your product or visited your website or used your company because he had one. That’s how that yeah.
Chris [00:11:59]:
So, Quentin. Well done, Quentin. Because Quentin is a longtime and avid listener of the podcast.
Sam [00:12:06]:
I know if we don’t publish on time, we hear from him. Also, shout out to Carl.
Chris [00:12:14]:
He likes when I talk like this. He likes my Internet voice. And he would like some more general day to day conversations.
Sam [00:12:28]:
To people. Yeah, that’s right. Also. Yeah. Anyone I interact with, I used that last week. Talking about snow chains.
Chris [00:12:41]:
Yeah. Cool.
Sam [00:12:43]:
And quick shout out to my workmate, Brett. He was telling me that some guy has decided to outfit a Vespa with a full electric setup. So electric motors on the wheels and batteries under the seat.
Chris [00:13:00]:
That wouldn’t be that hard of a conversion, would it?
Sam [00:13:04]:
I don’t think so.
Chris [00:13:06]:
Quite a bit of space on a vet. My dad had a Vespa when I was a little kid. I fell off the monkey bars and landed on my chin. Not the best way to land when you fall off monkey bars, apparently. And I had to get stitches in my chin. And all I remember of the whole thing was being plonked on the front of him and the Vespa going through Newtown towards the doctors or the hospital doctors or whatever. No helmet on, just standing on the Vespa, holding on.
Sam [00:13:39]:
I like that. When there’s a medical emergency involving you, it involves two wheels transport. Yeah. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, look up the best beasting story in the world ever. It’s amazing. It’s on the front page. Of our website, the Christensenpodcast.com. I like to think that if you rung me in an emergency, I’m going to have to find a scooter, actually. Yeah, I’m going to have to find some sort of two wheeled contraption to get you somewhere.
Chris [00:14:17]:
Yeah, the Chris ambulance. Yeah. Okay. So that went down a different track than I was expecting. Hey, have you heard about this AI mind reading breakthrough? Well, it’s still in research, but there’s a paper being written on it recently. So what the paper is it’s a combination of and I haven’t read the paper or anything. I haven’t done that much interrogation of this whole thing, but it’s a combination of brain heat maps, electromagnetic resonance and blood flow monitoring alongside and all that’s being data being fed into this AI, and the AI is outputting a text stream of what the people’s thinking.
Sam [00:15:07]:
That’s very cool and creepy at the same time.
Chris [00:15:09]:
Exactly. So the goal is there’s applications for disabled people that cannot speak, obviously, so they can communicate, enable that communicate. But there are obviously some significant ethical concerns as the technology progresses. So at the moment, this is stuff that’s being done effectively in a lab. But we know that things that happen start in a lab soon enough, end up on an app. That check looks pretty good. Wonder what she’s thinking. Brains are us on your app. I don’t know. It’s going to be interesting.
Sam [00:15:56]:
Talking about AI, have you seen the point based photo manipulation?
Chris [00:16:02]:
Yes. Now, that was a fake. That was a research thing, and it’s not available. They’re not even close to making it a real thing, but they did it as a this is the one I’m thinking of, where they get the lion to move its face and open its mouth and close its mouth and do all that. And AI just makes that.
Sam [00:16:30]:
Yeah.
Chris [00:16:31]:
No, they said they did that as a demonstration. It’s something they’re trying to make happen. It’s not real yet, but it will be. Although Adobe Photoshop, I was looking at what they’ve got with their generative fill that’s just come out today. That looks amazing. So you get a photo and you go, I want to extend it 100 pixels either side, click generative fill and it fills it. That sort of thing, I think, has been done before, but this looks really good. I’m pretty impressed with that.
Sam [00:17:06]:
Yeah. I’ll send you the link to the story because I think that the point based thing may be further ahead than what you just said because they’ve got all the examples here and you can see the software that they’re using doing it.
Chris [00:17:22]:
Okay.
Sam [00:17:26]:
The examples are pretty powerful because there’s, like, a woman wearing a skirt and they just drag it down and it just makes it longer. So this will be very cool once it becomes mainstream, but also quite scary. Quite scary.
Chris [00:17:43]:
It won’t be long till you can do it, but the beauty of it, really, is that whole how simple it looks totally skirt and pull it down and it just does it. It knows what you’re trying to do. And even the smile, I thought the biden A, they pull the corner of his map and it just makes a smile. Puts all the dimples in the right places, creases in the right places, shows his teeth, all that sort of thing. You don’t have to spell that out. It’s pretty impressive.
Sam [00:18:16]:
Yes. Talking about impressive, I want to hear your take on this thing. I learnt about space top. Do you know what that is?
Chris [00:18:25]:
Space top?
Sam [00:18:28]:
Yeah.
Chris [00:18:29]:
No.
Sam [00:18:30]:
Okay, so I can send you a link. It’s basically a laptop without a screen. And what it has is a pair of goggles that you put on, and the goggles are your screen. So it’s super secure. Like if you’re on a plane, nobody can see your screen at all.
Chris [00:18:49]:
Got you. So it’s still using the hard drive. All the CPU is still an IC. Yeah, they’re really small goggles.
Sam [00:19:02]:
It’s just a laptop without a screen, basically. And then a pair of goggles are hooked into it.
Chris [00:19:07]:
Yeah. The goggles on a cable. Yeah. Cool.
Sam [00:19:10]:
So you just look like a weirdo and nobody will know what you’re doing.
Chris [00:19:14]:
But.
Sam [00:19:16]:
It could be pretty good as.
Chris [00:19:19]:
To whether those goggles have passed through. You know what I mean? Yeah. You can see in one of the things that you can see through them. That’s cool. Yeah. Because you wouldn’t want to be wouldn’t want to fully be like an oculus.
Sam [00:19:32]:
Fully immersed.
Chris [00:19:34]:
Yeah.
Sam [00:19:35]:
So I saw that this week, the ratio of people to sheep in New Zealand has dipped below five in one for the first time in 170 years. Chris yeah.
Chris [00:19:50]:
I knew it was on a decline. It’s been declining for yonks, though, hasn’t it?
Sam [00:19:55]:
I guess so. How do you know it’s been declining? Are you keeping track?
Chris [00:20:00]:
You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing sheep at one point in time, honestly.
Sam [00:20:06]:
Yeah, true.
Chris [00:20:08]:
But no, I came across this and looked at it ten years ago or something. It was noted that it was declining quite a bit. Hey, I want to talk about something positive, I think, because I came across this and I was like, we never hear the positive stuff. So this is a thing about Ukraine. And I watched this short docko thing and it was talking about the Ukrainian wheat. So, you know, they had to have this treaty to get the wheat out of Ukraine.
Sam [00:20:39]:
Oh, yeah.
Chris [00:20:40]:
That was a big thing with the war. Yeah. So that happened. And the Russians have pretty much been allowing it to go and the Ukrainians are getting it out there and all the rest of it. They interviewed this captain and he’s like, this is how we go. And I have to keep saying, this is who we are, so we don’t get blown up. As they’re leaving the ports and going through this very narrow navigable channel. Like, if they stray outside of this pathway in the sea, they could get blown up type thing. But they take the ships out and the ships have to go to this port, I think it’s in Turkey, and then they’re boarded by representatives of Russia and Ukraine to make sure that it’s just grain that they’re taking and not, I don’t know, tanks or dead Russians. I don’t know what they’d be else they’d be looking for, but anyway, makes sense. So the documentary guys went on with them. They had a quick look. They have meeting with the caps and they do all this. But what was interesting is in the last well, it’s just been over a year now, or a bit more than a year, 1800 ships, 30 million tons of grain whoa. Feeding 150,000,000 people. And they reckon that the food price from just that has globally kept it down 20%. Like, if that hadn’t happened food prices higher than they are. Yeah.
Sam [00:22:14]:
That’s crazy.
Chris [00:22:15]:
That’s amazing. It just blows my mind. And, I mean, you never hear that news because that’s not the sort of news that the news likes to tell you people.
Sam [00:22:25]:
Do you want to know what type of news you do hear about?
Chris [00:22:28]:
Okay.
Sam [00:22:30]:
A surgeon in Germany got fired because they asked a cleaner to hold a patient’s leg while they amputated their toe. It’s okay.
Chris [00:22:45]:
Well, yeah, I mean, they didn’t get the genital to amputate the toe. They’re like, Hold him down, hold his leg down.
Sam [00:22:53]:
No, but they were also handing surgical instruments to the doctor as well. Apparently that’s frowned upon. Yeah, they got fired.
Chris [00:23:04]:
Is that because janitors are cheaper than nurses or their nurse shortage even worse. Have all their nurses gone to Australia, too?
Sam [00:23:12]:
I don’t know. Yeah. So there was no qualified assistance on hand and they were already partially anesthetized and they were becoming restless, so they just called over a cleaner they saw and said, hey, hold this guy’s leg down.
Chris [00:23:25]:
To me, that’s not a bad thing. I don’t see the problem there. Like, get over yourself. Like, the guy was nothing went wrong. If something had gone drastically wrong, or if they said, hey, I got the DTS, here’s a scalpel, take that guy’s toe off. Yeah, I can see a problem there, but it’s like, hey, this guy’s waking up. Can you just hold his leg down so he doesn’t move and we don’t screw him up? That’s perfectly reasonable.
Sam [00:23:57]:
I think it’s perfectly fine. Okay.
Chris [00:23:59]:
I’m glad.
Sam [00:24:00]:
I don’t know, I’m 50 50 on it.
Chris [00:24:03]:
Yeah, I think it’s reasonable.
Sam [00:24:05]:
I know that you like a good old weird death story. So I saw this mentioned and did you know that Wikipedia lists unusual deaths by year, like in the 2000s? Anyway.
Chris [00:24:22]:
Just like the Darwin Awards.
Sam [00:24:24]:
Various yeah, it pretty much is. But I guess there’s more of them. The one I heard that I’m going to tell you about. How do you feel if about a guy died inside the leg of a paper Mashe statue of a Stegosaurus.
Chris [00:24:44]:
Okay.
Sam [00:24:46]:
He was upside down in the leg. The police have hypothesized that he may have dropped his phone somehow and went in to get it and then they found him a couple of days later. Why is the Stegosaurus statue paper Mashet and why is leg open? I know. So that’s not good at all.
Chris [00:25:21]:
You don’t want to die that way. Honestly, I don’t want to end up being well, actually, it would be quite funny if people turned up in my funeral and just pissing themselves laughing about how silly the method of my death was.
Sam [00:25:34]:
But yeah, I just read one, two below that one and I’m just like, what?
Chris [00:25:41]:
Okay, go.
Sam [00:25:42]:
A man in India oh, sorry, I don’t know where he was, but he was an Indian man. The decided to use epoxy resin as a contraceptive and he passed out and died from organ failure from that.
Chris [00:25:58]:
So he sealed it was urethra.
Sam [00:26:03]:
Yeah. And he was mixing it up and he inhaled the fumes.
Chris [00:26:10]:
Okay, that’s really dumb. I don’t want to die from anything that dumb.
Sam [00:26:22]:
No, I think that is the trick, not to be dumb. Hey, you know how we talked about that teenager that got killed in America by the police? The family just got a payout because that’s the American way. $19 million, which is 30 million New Zealand. That’s the settlement.
Chris [00:26:44]:
Yeah. Great. It’s not great. It’d be better if you wasn’t. What’s this thing you’ve got here about? Hydrogen technology facility.
Sam [00:27:00]:
Yeah. So this Norwegian company called Nell Hydrogen, they are already making renewable hydrogen in different parts of the world and they’ve committed to build a $400 million facility in Michigan. And they just said that they get a good financial package going there, they get $10 million back or something and they’re going to be able to produce a gigawatt of electrolyzers per year. And they’ve got another plant in Connecticut as well. So they’re sort of moving towards a lot of this hydrogen based power, I guess.
Chris [00:27:42]:
So the way the hydrogen power thing works, as I understand it, is they use solar power first or some solar power type thing to separate renewable resource.
Sam [00:27:53]:
Yeah.
Chris [00:27:54]:
So they separate water. So they get hydrogen and oxygen, separate that out and then they use the hydrogen in either a furnace type thing or some other way to spin the turbine and make the electricity. Right. Yeah. Okay, cool. Sounds pretty good.
Sam [00:28:13]:
And it it sounds like they are also going to be partnering or doing a lot with Chris as well, because there is it’s Toyota that went real big on hydrogen, I think.
Chris [00:28:27]:
Yeah. So Carl brought this up the other day when we was talking about it. He’s predicted the demise of Toyota. Toyota is going to yeah.
Sam [00:28:38]:
Cause you agree.
Chris [00:28:39]:
Oh my God. So?
Sam [00:28:40]:
No, I don’t know. I think for whatever reason they’re locked into their thinking, I think they’ll be okay. I don’t think they’ll be the demise.
Chris [00:28:53]:
He’d probably say the same, actually, because he pointed out that they don’t have and electric car. And I was like, yeah, but they have more hybrids than anyone else, which and a hybrid really is an electric car because it’s electric motors, right? It’s just a petrol thing generating the electricity, right?
Sam [00:29:14]:
Yeah.
Chris [00:29:15]:
He goes, yeah, but they don’t have an electric car. An electric car is the biggest growth market right now, worldwide. So if the don’t offer an electric car, then there’s definitely a point to that. But you’re right, they have been using hydrogen fuel cells for yonks now, and they had a facility in Japan, which for I think it must be nearly 20 years now, they have the hydrogen separators in the bus stops in this facility. Like, they have these like a bus stop and the top is solar panels and they’ve used that. And all the internal vehicles that go around this facility, it’s like a little town, Toyota Town, they all run off the hydrogen, which is just and they’ve been doing that for 20 years. So these hydrogen cells and the beauty of hydrogen fuel cells is that you just plug it in and you go you don’t have to wait 4 hours for it to charge or whatever, it’s just oh, this one’s empty. Put a new one in clonk, boom, and away you go. And zero emissions. Yeah, because all that comes out is water.
Sam [00:30:29]:
Yeah, that’s right. That’s what we want. We just want some water coming out everywhere. That brings us to the end of the podcast. Thanks to everybody that’s been listening, all the people that have been commenting and liking and yeah, I put out some little audio clips this week. People seem to that’s how Carl heard my voice.
Chris [00:30:52]:
Yeah. Because I wondered about that, because he spoke to me and I said, well, the goes, sam should say that more often. I said, well, you should tell him in a comment something that’s right. So just for you, Carl, have a real good week. Stay safe out there. Until next time.
Sam [00:31:12]:
I’m Sam.
Chris [00:31:14]:
Chris. I’m Chris. Bye.
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