Six Colors: Simply brings its piano app to Vision Pro
This week I took Simply Piano for Vision Pro for a spin, and it was anything from boring. The popular iPad app for teaching piano has come to Vision Pro, and so I sat down at the very same piano I used to practice on as a kid–it’s in a somewhat warmer room now–but with a Vision Pro over my head.
Simply Piano works by listening to you playing notes and detecting if you’re playing the right or wrong ones. It’s very clever, but the Vision Pro version adds in the ability to overlay a virtual keyboard on your real one, so it can provide visual cues (in the form of glowing notes) when you’re not sure which key to play. It also annotates your fingers, so you can see which fingers are supposed to play which notes.
Globe: Chrystia Freeland answered Senate questions on the GST break. It did not go well
Too often these days, House of Commons committees are like one of those “inspiration vs. reality” split images comparing the perfect magazine version of a cake with the melting, cockeyed, radioactive-looking reality some poor schmuck whipped up at home.
Magazine-cake version of Commons committees: We are here to study complex issues in depth and use our partisan tensions constructively to shape better legislation.
Hideous home-baker reality: We are here to kick each other in the crotch for social-media clips.
But this week, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland appeared before the Senate finance committee to defend her government’s two-month GST holiday. And because it was a Senate and not a Commons committee, the manner of working was completely different. It was not recognizably partisan and there were no histrionics or cheap games, just precise and technical questions seeking real answers.
It was, in short, a disaster for a government looking to claim thoughtfulness and coherence for this policy.
Fast Company: Supreme Court could make it easier for projects to ignore environmental impact
The Eagle County case stems from a proposal by a coalition of railway project developers to build an 85-mile rail line in Utah to transport waxy crude oil from wells to the interstate rail network. The developers sought a license from the Surface Transportation Board, an independent federal agency, which prepared an environmental impact statement and ultimately approved the license in 2021.
Officials in Eagle County, Colorado, sued, along with several environmental groups, arguing that the environmental impact statement was defective. In their view, the Surface Transportation Board should have gone further in considering “upstream” environmental effects that the railway would induce, such as increased oil drilling, and “downstream” effects of refining and consuming that additional oil.
NewsNation: Ohio bill would require high-demand liquor bottles to be opened when sold
The problem, DeMora said, is that people who he refers to as âflippersâ quickly buy up the allocated bourbons and illegally resell them on a secondary market for significantly more than what they paid.Â
âIf they buy a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle (a brand of bourbon) for $165, they turn around and sell it for $2,000 on the internet with these various sites, and that is illegal, and what it does is it basically stops people that are bourbon drinkers that want the bourbon for themselves, they canât get them,â DeMora said.Â
Maybe the state should be auctioning high demand bourbons?
ScienceAlert: Scientists Reveal a Very Compelling Reason to Use Your Air Fryer
Stir frying, deep fat frying, boiling, and pan frying food are all far more likely to pollute your home’s indoors than the relative newcomer to the modern kitchen, the benchtop air fryer oven.
Researchers from the University of Birmingham in the UK and the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany set up a kitchen in their lab to see how the different methods compared when cooking chicken breast.
They measured levels of particulate matter (PM) between 0.18 and 26 microns (millionths of a meter), as well as levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs); chemical pollutants found across foods, cleaning products, paint, and many other substances.
TechCrunch: Google says its new AI model outperforms the top weather forecast system
In a paper published in Nature, DeepMind researchers said they found that GenCast outperforms the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts' ENS – apparently the world’s top operational forecasting system.
And in a blog post, the DeepMind team offered a more accessible explanation of the tech: While its previous weather model was “deterministic, and provided a single, best estimate of future weather,” GenCast “comprises an ensemble of 50 or more predictions, each representing a possible weather trajectory,” creating a “complex probability distribution of future weather scenarios.”
Last Updated: 07.Dec.2024 23:16 EST
