Number 5. New York Times. Fluffy feeling ill? Workers may get sick leave.
I don’t know why this would surprise anyone. We buy medical insurance for our kids and we take paid time off when one of them is sick. We already buy insurance for the pets, so PTO for Garfield or Hound Dog can’t be far behind.
In New York City, it is a serious proposal. This is based on the notion that mental health problems can be eased for someone owning a pet. Because pets, we know, are always soothing and calm, and never cause any stress.
Therefore, in an effort to keep mental health crises at bay in the Big Apple, an elected City Council member has introduced a local ordinance (affecting some 9 million people) to allow workers to use their sick time to care for their pets. We at the ANR venture to make a couple of observations about this mentally healthy initiative:
Presumably this only applies to full-time City employees. The private sector, always competing for workers in an open labor market, will not be far behind.
If I have a pet with a pre-existing condition requiring routine trips to the vet, shouldn’t I get more sick time added to my allowance of days? You expect me to care for the pet as though the pet were merely an extra burden? And THAT is supposed to ease my potential mental health crisis???
If I have 2 pets, should I not get a somewhat greater allowance of sick days than my one-pet neighbor? And what if Fluffy has a litter of mini-Fluffies? One extra day each, in each year? That seems hardly enough.
Perhaps a new City department will be called for, to track how many pets NYC residents own, and whether they have sold or given away any new pet off-spring.
I sense an RFID market opportunity here, as in that used in the live beef industry. (An RFID, for those of you not keeping up, is an embedded Radio Frequency Identification tag. It is an initiative embraced by the US Department of Homeland Security, which should make us all feel safer.)
At least New York’s proposal is more robust that California’s regulatory climate: In the Golden State, paid sick days for animals are limited only to service dogs.
New York, you go! Time to recover the banner of leadership in societal evolution!
Number 4. BBC. Man blocked from charging car outside his home.
He was only trying to reduce air pollution, cut fossil fuel use and save the planet. And suddenly he found himself opposed by his City Council.
A resident of Hathershaw, Oldham, UK, purchased an electric vehicle, for the reasons noted above, and sought to run an extension cord from the house to the curb where he could charge it up.
Not so fast, said the Local Democracy Reporting Service. The LDRS identifies local hazards to public safety — the article does not say whether they operate a tip line or whether a neighbor ratted him out — and asserts that cables running across the sidewalk represent a trip hazard.
Such cables do, of course, but, alas, the erstwhile resident does not have garage. Everyone in the neighborhood parks on the street. There is a public charging station a mere 3 miles away, but the gentleman in question has a bad heart and considers the wait time to be charged up in that dodgy area of town a risk to his health.
There has been talk of “in-curb” electrical installations and “pavement channels” to effectively make the cables go away, but it has proven easier and cheaper for the City Council to merely tell the elderly, heart-compromised tax-paying EV owner to get lost.
Number 3. The Verge dot com. United Health data breach leaked data on 100 million names.
I always knew I was 1 in a hundred million, and this proves it. After AT&T was compromised last year (3 billion records, or something), United Health Care was hit in February and Ascension Health Care in… maybe March, as I recall. I was a customer of all 3 of those, for which there should be some sort of prize. We could call it the Dark Web Trifecta, maybe.
From extensive web research (taking about 8 seconds in a search engine sweep), I found the following data breaches occurred over the last 10 years, compromising various entities, either individuals, households or enterprises:
Yahoo, 2016, 3 billion entities
Microsoft, 2021, 60,000
Real Estate Wealth Network, 2023, 1.5 billion
First American Financial, 2019, 885 million
Facebook, 2021, 5.3 million
Facebook again, 2018, 90 million
LinkedIn, 2021, 700 million
JP Morgan Chase, 2014, 76 million
Home Depot, 2014, 56 million
Friend Finder Networks, 2016, 412 million
Marriott International, 2018, 500 million
eBay, 2014, 145 million
Equifax, 2017, 16.3 million
River City Media, 2017, 1.4 billion
Exactis, 2018, 340 million
Capital One, 2019, 100 million
There are lots more, but I’ve sort of lost interest in writing them up. This list does not show the National Public Data (NPD) breach in 2024 where 2.7 billion records were lost and posted for free to the dark web. This included names, social security numbers, home addresses and phone numbers.
I think I’ll invest in Number 2 lead pencils and filing cabinets.
Number 2. Just the News dot com. Blade failure at Vineyard Wind project.
Not to pile on to bad news, but it seems that wind energy has met a new headwind. (Get it? Wind energy and headwind? Clever, huh?)
In July, a 60-foot-long blade on a wind turbine off Nantucket cracked and exploded into about a bazillion sharp fiberglass fragments, most of which found their way to the beach. Once arrived, they mixed invisibly into the sand, making a lacerative concoction sure to make kids wish they had worn their flip-flops like Mom had said.
Now, GE Vernova, the manufacturer, has used ultrasound analysis to examine the rest of their yet-to-be-installed stockpile of blades, and the CEO says they have decided to “remove some blades” from the inventory. The quantity is said to be “in the low single-digit proportion” of the total number of blades.
Which is a really clever to say absolutely nothing at all. I wish I had thought of that back when I was making public statements about 9-1-1 service interruptions.
If they had a hundred blades waiting for deployment, “low single-digit proportion” would mean 3 or 4 blades were found to be problematic. If, on the other hand, they had an inventory of, say, 500 blades, the number of those removed might be up to 20 or so.
The article says GE Vernova has a “$3 billion offshore wind backlog.” I actually have no idea what that means, and the reporter may not either. Using a number like that is, I suspect, included to give the appearance of investigative reporting without any real substance.
My ChatGPT digital desktop buddy tells me that placing a single wind generator offshore can cost, at the low end, around $20 million. For a $3 billion backlog, that might mean they need to place about 150 more turbines, or 450 blades.
At that scale, “single-digit proportionality” means another 2 dozen blades, or so, that were declared defective. This would not count defective blades that slipped passed the ultrasound test. I’m not convinced that a low single-digit failure rate constitutes a safe margin.
If I knew I had a 5% chance of flying in a commercial airliner that would blow up, I think I’d take the bus.
But it’s all in the name of saving the planet, so I’m all in. Because if I am not, someone is likely to rat me out, like the guy in Hathershaw with the dead battery in his car.
Number 1. Pop Sci dot com. Man spent $2 million to find new largest prime number.
A prime number, as we all know from 8th grade math class, is a number divisible only by 1 and itself. That would be, for example, 3, 7, 11, 17, 19, 23 etc. (Did I miss any of the easy ones?)
They are easy to spot when they are small numbers. Bigger ones will fool you. 51, for example, is divisible by 3 and 17, so it is NOT prime. 31, 41, 61 and 71, however, ARE prime.
This year, one Luke Durant used the “Fermat probable prime test,” well known to regular readers of the ANR, to ascertain that a number referred to as M136279841 was indeed prime. M136279841’s primeness (primitude, primisciousness) was confirmed by subsequent Lucas-Lehmer primality tests over the next 10 days.
With me so far?
Please note, M136279841 is not the VALUE of the new large prime number, it is the NAME of that prime number. The name is derived by using the exponent of the actual number.
Are we clear on that?
Mr. Durant subsequently informed the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search community — GIMPS, for short — that the newest-discovered prime number is 2 to the 136,279,841th power, minus 1. I would write that in scientific notation for you, except that (a) the substack platform has no idea what that even means, and (b) you wouldn’t care anyway.
I am not making any of this up. I can barely keep up with repeating it.
The new prime number, the aforementioned M136279841, has 41,024,320 digits in it. Again, that is not the value of the number; that is merely how many places it occupies to the left of the decimal. The real number, as has already been noted, is 2 to the 136,279,841th power, minus 1.
I fear I am being repetitive. I don’t know to make this any more clear.
At any rate, this is certainly $2 million well spent.
In an unrelated report, it has been noted that Mr. Durant is a firm believer in an active social life, but says he does not get out much.
And thanks for joining The Alligator News Roundup for Friday, November 1, 2024. The American Cancer Society Cattle Baron’s Ball for Wichita is tomorrow night, when Yours Truly is honored to be on the platform for an ever-so-brief moment. If you can’t join, at least enjoy the Public Service Announcement we filmed astride horses at Freedom Hooves, a delightfully productive, local community-minded stables.
In the video, the one on the right is Lisa, the weather girl from the local NBC affiliate. That’s me on the other horse. She is the on-air talent; I am merely the eye candy.
Have a good weekend! Take your dog to the vet, and then ask your boss for a sick day. And while you are at it, post your social security number, home address, mother’s maiden name and routing transit number to Facebook. You’d just as well… somebody’s already got ‘em anyway. See you next time!
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