The city with more hotel rooms than Las Vegas
And some stuff about spiders.
Hey Comrade,
If you ever find yourself on the concourse at Victoria Station between the Burger King and the bureau de change you might notice a very specific spot where your Bluetooth headphones cut out. Similar spots can also be found at Liverpool Street and Paddington.
The first time it happened I thought we were all about to get a message from our alien overlords that everything was getting too silly and they were assuming control. On discovering it was that exact spot that caused the effect I decided it was some sort of government listening post and made a mental note to be more disciplined about wearing my tinfoil hat.
This phenomenon has been discussed on the internet ad nauseam and the conclusion generally seems to be that it is the density of Bluetooth signals that causes it. This felt unsatisfactory though as it was such a specific spot. Indeed, a 2014 Ofcom study into the effect of 4G on the Wi-Fi in Victoria Station found that whilst there was no impact by the 4G transmitter they installed, there was ‘some other strong non-Wi-Fi interference near sensor one’. Guess where sensor one was? Only in the exact same bloody spot. Queue X-files theme.
So what is the cause? The most likely explanation is that trains require a huge amount of electricity. The power lines supplying it emit frequencies that are in the same range as Bluetooth (around 2.4GHz), causing interference. Either that or the government is trying to brainwash you into thinking the Earth isn’t flat.
All the frequencies,
Hugo
Inspector Stuff
The Business of Stuff
The Stuff
Starbucks looks to improve their service times ⛸️ - there are 383 billion different possibilities when ordering a latte which results in wait times of more than 5 minutes for a third of customers. As a result, the company is investing billions in improving its processes. This includes everything from installing faster espresso machines to making ice cubes smaller so they’re easier to scoop.
Dubai will soon have more hotel rooms than Las Vegas 🐟 - by the end of the year the glittery emirate state with have 154,000 surpassing Sin City’s 151,771 rooms. There’s no danger of them running out of beachfront either as they just build more, damned the fishies.
Twitter, I mean X is throttling links to its competitors 🧐 - a study has shown that a URL to a non-competitor takes well under a second to load whereas one to a competitor can take north of two seconds. It doesn’t sound like much but a Google study demonstrated that load times of more than three seconds lead to a 32% increase in the level of people abandoning the link. Very cheeky that, potentially allegedly illegal.
British Gas is being investigated for deliberate alarmist marketing 🔥 - the energy company has been telling people that their old meter might catch fire. When one panicked customer called up he was told it was just a marketing strategy to try and get people to move to a smart meter. There are massive incentives for energy companies as it reduces costs for them and the government has set targets.
Spider silk would be super helpful if they weren’t so unfriendly 🕷 - the material is six times as tough as Kevlar but the problem is that if you have too many in the same place they all just murder each other. Fortunately (until something goes wrong) scientists have used CRISPR to implant the silk-making gene into silkworms which are much more friendly. An early proposed use would be in super-strong surgical sutures.
Gregg’s uses pictures of the wrong Richmond in its shops 🥯 - the most schoolboy of schoolboy errors. The northern bakery put a number of pictures of the London suburb in shops around Richmond, North Yorkshire.
Bangladesh has restored the purity of its Tumeric 🟨 - shady sellers have been stepping on the spicey supply, contaminating it with lead chromate to make it appear more yellow. Lead poisoning is a massive global issue and the authorities in Bangladesh were able to take it on using an educational campaign and x-ray fluorescence scanners. This has reduced contamination from 47% to 0%.
A really expensive plane is still missing 🧑✈️ - have you ever lost a coin down the sofa? If you can lose a coin down the sofa then you can leave your phone in a restaurant. And if you can leave your phone in a restaurant you can misplace an F35-Lightening! If you’ve seen it, that’s a reference to an old advert for joining the Navy. If not it’s meaningless gibberish. Either way, authorities have been unable to find the F-35 that went missing a few days ago, but at least it shows the stealth capabilities are working.
Law firms are racing to make AI work for them 👩⚖️ - the opportunity is clearly huge but so are the risks of these language models making stuff up. Many firms are trialling AI tools for research purposes but due to privacy concerns have not been using it on client information.
China has an absolute boatload of Large Language Models 🇨🇳 - on the back of the success of OpenAI, 130 different LLMs have sprung up in China although there is a noticeable lack of viable business models. The expectation is that this will rapidly consolidate as having so many isn’t much help for anyone.
Have a good week!
Quote of the week
“If you don’t have a plan, you become part of someone else’s plan” - Terrence McKenna