Image for a moment how we Computer Scientists feel. We invented the most brilliant tools humanity has ever conceived of, bringing the entire world to nearly anyone’s fingertips — and people use it to design and perpetuate pathetic brain-rot garbage like Gab.ai and anti-science conspiracy theories.
Fucking Eternal September…
Summary for those who don’t get the references:
In Futurama (a show about a young man who gets accidentally cryogenically frozen until the year 3000), Fry finds the fossilized remains of his pet dog from the year 2000. Ultimately he assumes his dog had a good and full life after his disapperance, but in the epilogue we see that his dog waited for him in front of his workplace (Panucci’s Pizza) throughout the seasons, regardless of the weather, until he aged and died.
In Full Metal Alchimist: Brotherhood, the Elric brothers visit an alchemist (Shou Tucker) who is known for having created a chimera capable of understanding human speech. While they study under him, they also spent time playing with his 4 year old daughter Nina and her dog Alexander. Upon returning one day they find Shou has created a new chimera capable of understanding human speech in order to satisfy his yearly alchemist assessment requirements; when the chimera indicates it knows who the Elric brothers are and wants to go out and play it becomes obvious that the chimera was made by combining Shou’s own daughter with the family dog. The resulting being is very sad and confused and doesn’t really understand what has happened to it, and just wants to be back to normal, but there is no way to undo . This chimera is the creature pictured here.
Ultimately, these are two of the most heart-wrenching scenes in animation.
(PS: Fuck Shou Tucker!)
When I was at IBM I won three such awards — one for publication, and two for patents.
At the time at least, they had an online form you had to fill in if you thought something you had developed was potentially patentable; that would go to some small committee for analysis and a decision as to whether or not it was worth pursuing — if it was, it went off to the patent lawyers. You then spent a good deal of time describing your invention to them so they could write up all of the patent documents in a manner that would cover as many bases as possible.
The awards weren’t huge. I don’t remember getting a monetary award for the publication — just a framed certificate. The patents paid $1500 CAN each.
At least one of the patented inventions would have happened anyway, because it was just a solution I came up with during the course of my work. I didn’t even consider submitting it as a patentable idea until a few team members encouraged me to do so. But if there wasn’t a monetary award I would have been less likely to fill out the form for the patent in the first place. All IBM is likely going to find by removing the award is that a lot fewer people (outside IBM Research) are going to have incentive to self-declare their potentially patentable ideas.
Something like r/diving also has immediate consequences for anyone who participates in an unsafe dive. They resurface with the bends and need immediate emergency treatment, or they die.
Canning is different, because the things people can typically get put on a shelf at above refrigeration temperatures, and then sit there for months (or even years) before being consumed. The harm from unsafe canning often isn’t seen for quite a long time after the canning itself was completed — and worse yet, as canners often love to give the things they’ve canned to family and friends, there is a contagion aspect to it that doesn’t exist in something like scuba diving. So the dangers of bad home canning are more insidious.
Back in 2015, an Ohio woman died and 23 others were sickened at a church picnic because of improperly canned vegetables. What’s extra insidious here is that the people who became ill didn’t even know they were eating home canned foods — the vegetables in question were mixed into a salad and brought to a potluck attended by around 60 people — over 1/3 of which became ill.
Lesson being, don’t fuck around with canning. Dangerous diving may affect you, your dive buddy, and possibly whomever eventually tries to retrieve your body. Bad canning can destroy your entire family along with friends, neighbours, and other members of your community — and it can happen years later, without you even necessarily knowing you’re eating badly canned food (or canned food at all).
Hey — I’m one of the former r/Canning mods quoted in the article.
The issue with trying to get data on unsafe canning from Reddit is twofold: firstly, people who undertake an unsafe canning practice who fall ill (or die) don’t typically come back to Reddit to report on their situations. If you’re fighting for your life in a hospital bed, you’re not likely going to login to Reddit to post “Well, I followed some bad advice here, and now I’m in the hospital”. So while we do know from a small number of documented sources that people who have got sick (and died) did so from following bad advice online, it isn’t as if they routinely self-report this.
(And conversely, if you just wind up with the shits for several days you may not even connect it in your mind to eating bad home canned food — and you’re probably less likely to go online and brag how you were able to shit through a sieve because you followed a bad canning recipe).
Secondly, time is a significant factor. Something you cook up in a pot on your stove and eat right away will be perfectly safe for all but the most immune-compromised of people, but stick that same food in a jar without proper processing and put it on a room temperature shelf and it becomes a time bomb, with the danger ramping up as more time passes.
That passing time doesn’t really work with publishing deadlines, and considering the unlikelihood of people self-reporting doing bad canning and hurting themselves (or others) there really isn’t any way of “waiting to see if someone hurts themselves”. People sometimes can stuff and then leave it on a shelf for years — so the harm may not be realized for quite some time.
Sure, it would have made for a better article if there had been a slam-dunk obviously unsafe recipe/practice posted and someone had died in the process — but gathering such data could take a very long time, and I’m sure Ms. Harding can always post another article in the future should such data become available.
Likely well deserved — but still unfortunate. The EV space only benefits from more options and more competition.