Congratulations, you've made it through the week!

Have a Happy Thought:   We have passed the solstice – halfway through the solar year – at 8:51am on Friday 21 st June, New Zealand time – that is, a few hours ago. In most years, the solstice hits on the calendar date of June 22 nd in New Zealand. But this year, it’s a bit earlier.   A couple of definitions/explanations first: The solstice occurs when the Earth’s poles are most directly pointed toward (or away) from the sun. Because it’s the North Pole that’s pointed toward the sun right now, it’s summer solstice in the northern hemisphere. And winter solstice in the southern hemisphere, because we’re pointed away from the sun. The solstice is when you get the longest night and shortest day of the year (winter)… or vice versa (summer). Equinox (think: equal) is midway in between the winter and summer solstices. So they happen in the midst of spring and autumn, and tend to have equal amounts of day and night.   So back

Have a Happy Thought:     We’re learning that sperm whales might have a whole language. Not just a few words, but a complex, intricate communication.   This is one of the really cool things that machine learning (one of the aspects of what is being branded “AI”) has been used for. Scientists took a whole bunch of recordings of sperm whale songs, and broke them up into distinct “codas”.   They then took these 9000+ codas, and fed them through some machine learning algorithms to see how the whales were using them. Turns out, each coda might be roughly equivalent to a phenome (the audio equivalent of a letter), or maybe a word. They’re combined in different orders ( pat vs tap ), lengths ( tap vs tapdancing ), and even potentially adding ornamental noises ( ahem ). And the codas are used in all sorts of changing ways, so each whale is using all sorts of codas, in different ways - not just singing a repetitive “song”.   In other words (heh): it sounds a lot like a languag

Have a Happy Thought:   3-D movies are once again* in theatres , and tech companies are, despite Facebook’s Metaverse fiasco and Google’s Glass , working toward ever-more immersive technologies.   *huh, according to Wikipedia pages, 3D hasn’t been out of the theatres since the 1950s, or by some definitions even as far back as the early 1900s , before talkies** even became a thing! **for those that don’t know, “talkies” is what people called the early movies that actually had soundtracks , including dialogue – before that, there may have just been music, often played by live orchestras! Once you learn this, it’s hard not to think very differently about the fact that we still use the word “movie”… like seriously, we haven’t yet gotten over the fact that the pictures, they move!     Back to talking about 3-D. The idea that people might want to experience something in 3-D that they weren’t physically there for? Well, at a minimum it’s been around for well over 100 years. (If