Who'd a thunk?
Last week while making one of my periodic (around 4-5 times daily) perusals of the Hacker News homepage, I saw where someone posted a question asking what books HN peeps would recommend.
It got many hundreds of responses, each one of which I glanced at, and I noted a couple books I'd never heard of that sounded fantastic.
Buried deep in the many comments was one which linked to this wonderful site picturing each of the hundreds of recommended books (screenshot up top).
Fantastic!
ChipTycoon is a little chip factory where you watch a single wafer going through all twenty-two stages of chipmaking — sand to rough silicon to a flat mirrored disc, then coated, printed, etched, and wired layer by layer.
*Bernhardt Stahmer invented Ruffles in 1948
Above, Ed Ruscha's poster for Alejandro Iñárritu's new film "Digger" starring Tom Cruise.
The poster features the Boy Scout Utility Modern font, which Ruscha designed himself and has used exclusively since around 1980.
Back story here.
Note added 3:46 pm Monday October 5: "Digger" bombed on its opening weekend; it looks to be a 9-figure money-losing disaster: "Ishtar II."
"GOING NOWHERE. FAST." on the poster turns out to have been prophetic.
Time to put all your words on the table.
Even the ones on flash cards.
Wrote Emil Kirkegaard:
......................................
An English vocabulary test of 108 items in two formats: for most you pick the word that matches a given meaning; for the harder ones you pick the two or three words out of five that are synonyms. The words are rare on purpose — this is a test of the top of the vocabulary range, not of everyday English.
Vocabulary is the single best short measure of general intelligence in adults who grew up speaking the language.
The items were calibrated on 499 US adults recruited through Prolific in 2023, and your score is reported as an IQ relative to White US adults of your age (vocabulary keeps growing into the 60s, so the same score means less at 70 than at 25). If English is not your native language your score will mostly reflect exposure to it, not intelligence.
.....................................
Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?
The only comic strip I read daily is "Red and Rover."
Once upon a time, as a boy growing up in Milwaukee, I read every single one of the daily comic strips in the Milwaukee Journal.
The comics were numerous, perhaps 25-30 of them, and they had their own page in a section called "The Green Sheet" because it was printed on light green paper.
The answer to the question posed up top is yes; the real question is, can an AI replicate Bassett's wonderful mix of whimsy and humor and artwork in such a way that someone unfamiliar with his work could differentiate genuine Bassett strips from those generated by machine.
At some point the AI version will be indistinguishable from the real thing.
The only question is when — not at present, not next year, but by 2030 my money's on AI.
Best named non-biker-related product of 2026.
Noise blocking earplugs from 3M.
Connecting cord so you can keep them handy around your neck when you're not using them without having to rip the place apart looking for one you can't find (see AirPods Pro — but I digress).
Best possible recommendation, in a 5-Star Amazon review: "We use these for our patients in MRI and they love them. The machine is very loud and these earplugs are comfortable. We get great feedback from patients and we have purchased them multiple times."
I don't know if you've ever had an MRI but if you have you know the deafening sounds it makes are equivalent to a big passenger jet engine.
When I saw the words "Skull Screws" I thought for a second it was the middle of the night during my Neurosurgery rotation in my third year of med school and we were inserting a subdural screw through the skull to monitor intracranial pressure.
False alarm.
Party pack of 4 pairs: $8.48.
Again I say, keep a spare pair for yourself and then do a solid for two friends.
It's Meta's new Muse charm, said to enable you to talk to your personal Muse AI agent whenever and wherever you want.
It's coming out in December and I can't wait to get my hands on one.
More here.
Yes, it's a wonderful thing to know and use CPR in an emergency such that an individual who might have otherwise died survives.
But let's face it: few people know what to do and even fewer do it when push (on the chest, hard, 60 times a minute) comes to shove.
So here's a tip that might well let you — uninformed, unschooled, and scared — help someone live:
Bend down, pick up their feet, and hold their legs in the air waist-high.
That's it.
By doing so you increase blood return to the central circulation — the heart and lungs, where it's needed to restore spontaneous heartbeat — from the periphery, where it's irrelevant for survival in a circulatory crisis.
Elevating the legs as described above is the equivalent of transfusing two units of blood — 40% of the average adult's total circulating blood volume — and makes CPR much more effective.
The best part is that you can't do any harm.
It's the very first thing I instruct someone to do when I arrive at a Code Blue scene.
Oooh, a name to conjure with.
Tell us more!
From websites:
.........................
Just hang this "wasp nest impersonator" in your yard or attic to keep wasps away — naturally.
Because the Waspinator looks like an enemy nest, territorial wasps will avoid it, completely leaving the scene.
No chemical sprays or sticky bait involved: just hang it by its loop, indoors or out.
.........................
Set of 2: $9.99.
Do a solid for a friend and give them the spare.
Back in 1962, 44-year-old McDonald's franchisee Lou Groen (above, with a picture of his restaurant back in the day) was on the ropes financially.
How he turned the tide and created a sandwich that McDonald's world-wide now sells at a rate of hundreds of millions every year was the subject of Paul Clark's Cincinnati Enquirer story, which follows.
In 1962, Lou Groen was desperate to save his floundering hamburger restaurant, the first McDonald's in the Cincinnati area.
His problem: His clientele was heavily Roman Catholic. In those days, most Catholics abstained from meat every Friday, as well as during Lent, the 40-day period of repentance.
His solution: He created the Filet-O-Fish — a sandwich that saved his restaurant and eventually would be consumed at a rate of 300 million a year, of which roughly one-quarter — around 75 million — are sold during Lent.
"The local Big Boy chain dominated the market, and they had a very good fish sandwich," recalled Groen.
"I was struggling. The crew was my wife, myself, and a man named George. I did repairs, swept floors, you name it."
"But that area (where his restaurant was located) was 87% Catholic. On Fridays we only took in about $75 a day," said Groen, a Catholic himself. "All our customers were going to Big Boy."
"So I invented my fish sandwich, developed a special batter, made the tartar sauce and took it to headquarters."
That led to a wager between Groen and McDonald's chief Ray Kroc, who had his own meatless idea.
"He called his sandwich the Hula Burger," Groen said. "It was a cold bun and a slice of pineapple and that was it.
"Ray said to me, 'Well, Lou, I'm going to put your fish sandwich on (a menu) for a Friday. But I'm going to put my special sandwich on, too. Whichever sells the most, that's the one we'll go with.'"
"Friday came and the word came out. I won hands down. I sold 350 fish sandwiches that day. Ray never did tell me how his sandwich did."
But the chain made Groen modify the fish recipe.
"I wanted halibut originally," Groen said. "I was paying $2 a pound for halibut. That sandwich cost me 30 cents apiece to make. They told me it had to sell for 25 cents. I had to fall back on Atlantic cod, a whitefish, and I added a slice of cheese. But my halibut sandwich far outshines that one."
Groen wasn't complaining. "My fish sandwich was the first addition ever to McDonald's original menu," he said. "It saved my franchise."
And fed it. By the time he sold his franchise in 1986, Groen owned 43 McDonald's restaurants in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, about half the number in the region today.
But his prosperity didn't include a slice of Filet-O-Fish's national sales.
"Not a penny," he said. "I made my money by selling the product and being the best operator I could."
Charles Faulks, operations director for McDonald's Ohio Region, called Groen's contributions legendary. "Lou exemplified Ray Kroc's philosophy that you can succeed if you believe in your brand, treat your people right, and give back to your community."
Groen entered the fast-food business in 1958. One day, while working in his father-in-law's Cincinnati restaurant, Groen was leafing through Restaurant Management magazine when he spotted a couple of advertisements for franchise opportunities.
"They were tiny little ads," he said. "One was for McDonald's 15-cent hamburgers. The other was for Beverly Osborne Chicken Delight. I said to my wife, 'If we do this, we'll be eating a lot of these. Would you rather eat hamburgers or chicken?'
"She picked hamburgers."
When Groen answered the ad, he was told that $950 would buy him exclusive McDonald's franchise rights in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and parts of Pennsylvania. "But I didn't have $950," he said.
So he invested a couple of hundred dollars in a district franchise that included Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. He opened his first store in 1959.
In the year 2100, tightening fitted sheets won't be a thing: they'll long since have been tricked out with a self-adjusting "smart" band that draws them up snugly against the bottom of the mattress.
Your mission, if you choose to become richer than Croesus, is to invent it.
I've gone through a zillion fitted sheet tightening devices over the decades and have yet to find one that works.
Of course, there were those few that I finally had to give up trying to install: who knows if one might have proved to be THE ONE?
Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?
Sorry, wrong year.
Not only the best but also the most durable: I bought mine in 2016 (above) and ten years later it still works as flawlessly as the day it arrived.
Back then it only came with a blue anti-scatter top but since then they've added grey and pink options.
Heavy metal that stabilizes your pill between precisely aligned hard sharp blades.
Bonus: safe because the cutting surfaces are shielded from your fingers.
Don't fall for those cheapo guillotine-style plastic numbers at CVS: these are the real deal.
If you're not completely satisfied, send me all the pill fragments that remain from your FAIL and I will take them all at once.
That is the bookofjoe way.
Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?
For many years my family members, knowing how much of a food person I am, subscribed me to all manner of "Cheese/Sausage/Bacon/etc. of the Month clubs: it was an easy way for them to give me something they thought I'd enjoy without having to go through the contortions of trying to find something I'd like.
After about five years of tossing the unopened packages into the trash each month, I finally decided I couldn't remain silent, because they'd keep doing this forever.
What a waste of money!
When I told my peeps they were really angry, as I knew they'd be, but I simply couldn't play my part in the charade any longer.
Of interest: a couple years later they started up again, like I'd come to my senses or else they forgotten.
This time I got on the phone the moment the first installment arrived and reminded them we'd agreed on not giving these to me any more.
After that year the idiocy stopped.
But I digress.
These clubs cost a couple hundred dollars/year for a monthly delivery.
Why are they a waste for anyone who really likes food?
Because the cheese/bacon/sausage/etc. is not the finest,
Companies like Sargento populate these packages with their products: that is not cheese or summer sausage!
It's what's pejoratively called in the business "industrial cheese and meat;" it's made in giant factories on a huge scale, then shipped often in less then ideal packaging such that it arrives in less than subpar condition, usually in vacuum-packed plastic (top) rather than cheese paper.
Same with bacon and sausage and their ilk: no serious food person would touch these products.
You want to give a maven something they've never had nor heard of?
Order them some Van de Rose bacon.
It's the best bacon you can buy in the U.S.
Be a shining star.
Alexander Overwijk draws a perfect freehand circle 1 meter in diameter in less than 1 second.
This morning I clicked my Google search bookmark and up came the minimalist, stripped down homepage of yore —including "I'm Feeling Lucky" (above).
Love it.
Then I started sliding the cursor around and up popped a box of options (below)
which includes "Create QR Code for this page" — very interesting!
I clicked on it and followed the instructions and up came this:
I aimed my phone's camera at the QR code and darned if the page didn't immediately appear on my phone (below).
This is no humbug.
So kewl!
