By Walt Hickey
Have a great weekend!
LEGO
The Lego Group has just announced its most expensive set ever in the documentary series Star Wars. It is a Death Star that is 70 centimeters tall, 79 centimeters wide, 27 centimeters deep and contains multiple rooms capable of enacting every major scene from the first or second Death Star. It cost $999.00, but that’s just the dollars. You also have to deal with the ethical costs of a sprawling network of prison labor that goes into constructing the outer carapace. Add that to the moral stain of infiltrating a peaceful planet and executing a coup in order to obtain the Ghorman reserves of the necessary kalkite. This is not to mention the wages upon the human soul for constructing a machine of war and destruction at the same moment that untold masses in the Outer Rim lack even the most basic resources. Also, Star Wars is fiction.
What’s Up Doc
After initially refusing to join Disney and Universal in their suit against AI image generator Midjourney, Warner Bros. Discovery has joined the fray. The company has sued Midjourney for copyright infringement. Their logic is similar to The Mouse and The Minion: The Wabbit has keenly observed that it’s really easy to generate Bugs Bunny and Batman. And gosh, Warner Bros. does happen to own that. It’s seeking profits attributable to the alleged infringement, or, alternatively, $150,000 per infringed work, which would conceivably be a lot.
Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter
Istanbul Bridge
A Chinese Panamax container ship has crossed the Northern Sea Route — which runs along the north coast of Russia, connecting East Asia to Northern Europe — in merely 6 days, a significantly faster Europe-Asia shipping route. The ship left then St. Petersburg on August 18 and is due in Qingdao on September 12, making it a 25-day trip. The new Arctic Express opens up this month connecting China to Europe, an 18-day trip that would be considerably faster than the typical 40 to 50 day Suez Canal route that is otherwise typical.
Songbirds
Migration routes of tiny songbirds have long been difficult to track; GPS transponders that work on larger migratory beasts don’t work attached to objects weighing as much as two AA batteries. A decade ago, RFID tags advanced to be light enough to track these tiny animals. However, to actually track them, you’d hypothetically need to construct a massive network of thousands of towers over their entire migration route. Anyway, researchers did just that by creating the Motus Network, which grew from a single array of towers in Ontario to a network of 2,200 stations in 34 countries tracking 450 species worldwide.
No, Not In Boston. No, Not Tufts.
Every year, Boston resets its entire rental real estate situation. Specifically, right about now, when all the incoming college students’ leases start. By definition, it’s also when last year’s non-returners typically end, and more importantly, the reverberations thereabouts. In essence, if your lease schedule has ever been timed to your Boston university experience, you’re probably moving out or moving in in August. This means that if you want free furniture in August, you should go to Boston, because there is a lot of it. Things that don’t get hermit crabbed by the incoming or up-growing freshmen or grad students get tossed to the curb. In Boston, trash pickup tonnage in September and August increased 30 percent from 2015 to 2023, and the city makes sure to deploy more trash trucks than usual to pick up the discarded accouterments of a fine education.
Roshan Fernandez, The Wall Street Journal
Venice
Venice! The Most Serene Republic, the great Winged Lion of the Adriatic, La Serenissima, the ultimate thalassocracy, the rival of the Ragusans, opponent of the Ottomans, the imperator of the Ionian, the domain of the Doge and timeshare holders of the Dalmatian Coast. Their symbol and their icon are exemplified in the almighty gleaming golden lion sculpture sitting atop a pillar in Piazza San Marco overlooking the Venetian Lagoon — or as the Renaissance Venetians pronounced it, “The Adriatic Sea.” Anyway, it turns out the famous lion was made in China. Researchers analyzed lead isotopes taken from a sample of the lion sculpture taken during a 1990 restoration, and found that the copper ore was mined in the Yangtze River basin in China. It was potentially brought back to Venice in the 13th century, perhaps by a relative of Marco Polo who returned from the court of Kublai Khan in 1265. The sculpture was looted by Napoleon in 1797 and moved to Paris, and only returned in 1815 after the French broke it.
Alaska
In layman’s terms, a cursory examination of a map will reveal that Alaska is all the way up there, while the rest of the American supply chain is down here. It’s obviously more complicated than that, but not by much. All told, 8,298 commercial freight-hauling trucks entered Alaska from Canada’s Yukon in 2024, which doesn’t nearly cover the $2 billion worth of food entering the state annually for its 750,000 residents. Indeed, it is only about four percent of the imported food. While there is a long-touted stat that 95 percent of Alaska’s food is imported, nobody can find the actual source for those imports, and the data on the ground challenges it. Beyond the Alaska-Canada highway link, a whole lot of that food is local, with Alaskans consuming between $450 million to $900 million worth of locally wild-caught food (salmon, caribou, other fish and game) every year.
Eva Holland, High Country News
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