12 Trivia Tidbits for Monday, May 6, 2024

The PetPace biometric collar collects data like heart rate and temperature from dogs to determine how freaked out they are at any given moment. The creator of the collar has posited that he can use “A.I. and machine learning advanced models,” which, shut the fuck up dude, to see if a bunch of dogs are freaking out at the same time, possibly indicating an impending earthquake. Killjoy earthquake truthers will tell you that there’s currently no evidence that dogs can detect tremors any earlier than humans.

Cybersecurity company Hive Systems publishes a yearly chart detailing how long it would take a hacker to brute force your password, based on its length and diversity of characters. A password made up of 11 numbers would take 10 hours, but if it included numbers, upper and lower case letters, and symbols, it would take two million years. Meanwhile, an 18-er with the works would take 19 quintillion years.

With the hand of the Doomsday Clock ticking ever clockwise, the U.S. Air Force announced plans for a $20 billion nuclear-resistant plane that will hopefully allow the President and Secretary of Defense to escape disaster like that one scene in Independence Day. We invite you to imagine Biden muttering “must go faster,” Jeff Goldblum-style, along with us.

Tech start-up Vaulted Deep raised $58 million in funding to try out the radical idea of stuffing manure and other bio waste in sealed vaults underground, to keep disastrous amounts of CO2 from entering the atmosphere.

A 4-year-old was rushed to a Colorado children’s hospital with a whole host of odd symptoms, and had to be put on life support when his heart stopped beating. It started back up out of nowhere, 14 hours later, and doctors haven’t been able to determine why.

During an antitrust case against Google, a witness leaked that Google dishes 36 percent of ad revenue back to Apple in exchange for being the default search engine. Another document surfaced in the trial shows that Microsoft was so thirsty to make Bing the go-to engine, they offered up an astounding 90 percent of ad revenue.

It’s an exciting time to be in the fashion biomaterials game, developing dyes and fabrics that are sustainable but still cool. There are already fake leathers made out of cactus and mushroom, and a start-up called TômTex is making “shrimp leather” out of shellfish processing byproducts.

Floralia was a yearly, six-day festival that celebrated spring, flowers and fertility. The fertility goddess Flora was at the heart of the celebrations, and since she’s often thought to have been considered a holy prostitute, sex workers would hold mock gladiator battles.

University of Portsmouth physics professor Melvin Vopson has proposed the “Second Law of Infodynamics,” which he thinks proves that we’re living in a simulation. In an organic, “real” universe, order breaks down and chaos reigns as time goes on. But Vopson believes he’s noticed the opposite, that information systems may actually become more ordered over time, which hints at an intelligently designed “data optimization and compression” feature in the programming of our universe.

A research paper focusing on therapeutic use of psychedelic mushrooms found that patients routinely feel such strong feelings during treatment, they come away with romantic attachments to their therapist. It also works the other way around: “managing romantic transference proved to be a challenge” for the therapists as well.

Two million bottles of Perrier have been destroyed due to detection of bacteria of “fecal origin” in one of its wells, but it was strictly “precautionary.”

The Catholic Church is the single largest landowner in the world. But church attendance in America has been steadily declining, and in 2018, the Vatican prohibited local diocese from allowing “sordid” businesses, like liquor stores and abortion clinics, to buy up their churches. In recent years, abandoned churches have become home to things like skate parks, comedy clubs, wrestling arenas, and, somehow, brew pubs.