Geekly Update - 04 April 2018

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

If your childhood’s paper airplanes nose-dived and not even into wastebaskets, you can learn to fold the perfect plane from a world-champion paper airplane pilot, John Collins. Because not every cool geekly thing has a microchip in it.

Get used to it. A Japanese nursing home employs 20 different kinds of robots to care for the elderly, as the nation grapples with an aging population and shrinking workforce. "These robots are wonderful," said 84-year-old Kazuko Yamada after an exercise session with SoftBank Robotics Corp,'s Pepper.

A Chicago bar is now offering Oculus Rift virtual-reality tours of the distilleries that make the ingredients of the $95 cocktails served there. Worse, it’s not alone.

“Addiction Rehab is broken. Can technology fix it?” asks Wired magazine. Well, did technology fix education, or medical records?

Research suggests that video games may help aging dogs remain mentally nimble while continuing to turn teenaged boys into mass murderers.

This just in from the Smoke and Mirrors Department: Cambridge Analytica was actually pretty bad at predicting how Americans would vote, which should be of little comfort to advertisers relying on the same Facebook data to influence consumer purchasing decisions.

While the amount and detail of data that Facebook has about you is shocking, one Irish Web developer discovered that Google has ten times as much going back many more years.

Cell phone radiation is again implicated in rats’ brain cancers. The good news is that phone-linked brain cancer is less prevalent now, perhaps because rats are not holding phones as close to their heads as they used to.

Let's do the math... "A hundred or 500 or a thousand people could lose their lives in accidents like we’ve seen in Arizona,” said Toyota USA CEO Jim Lentz at a recent auto industry conference. But is that price worth paying if it saves the 35,000 lives lost annually in accidents attributed to human error?

Here's a twist on the "driverless car kills pedestrian" stories in the news lately... A Romanian court has ruled that a dead man whose license was suspended prior to his death, can have his license reinstated. Hopefully there is no law against driving while dead. Ironically, another court in Romania recently denied another man's request to have his death certificate rescinded, even though he provided proof that he was alive.

"We're really starting to see adversaries at nation-state level and down who are attacking trust in our critical services." When hackers go after your nation’s power grid, IT security gets really real.

When lions lie with wolves, or something… Intel’s latest high-end chipsets incorporate the CPU giant’s eighth-generation Core i5 and i7 processors and a customized version of archrival AMD’s Radeon RX Vega M GPU. Both companies have it in for Nvidia, so it’s a case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” for now.

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