Geekly Update - 13 March 2019

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

This could be the geekliest item I've ever reported on here. Daniel Rose-Levine, a teenager from New York, says he used "plenty of math" to set the world record for solving a Rubik's cube -- with his feet. He has accomplished the task in just under 17 seconds, and recently presented the mathematical secrets behind solving the cube at the National Museum of Mathematics.

A New Jersey man has received over 10,000 calls and text messages after his sons posted his face and phone number on a highway billboard, asking people to wish him a happy birthday.

The answer to life, the universe and everything just might be turtles. Physicist at the University of Chicago used machine learning to discover that quantum particles shooting out from a mass of supercooled atoms formed a pattern that resembles a turtle.

Marc Köhlbrugge created a chat site where every character typed costs a user money. Even that has not improved the quality of discourse, but it’s made Marc a few hundred bucks.

Digital hoarders explain why they compulsively collect Tumblrs, medieval manuscripts, and terabytes of text files. At least it’s not newspapers and cats.

A robot that automatically sorts and prices cards from "Magic: the Gathering" solves a very real problem and doesn’t leave anyone unemployed.

A woman won a $10,000 contest by reading the fine print of her insurance policy.

Microsoft, the epitome of proprietary software, has joined the open-source movement by releasing Windows’ Calculator app under the MIT license. Seems like a calculating move.

New Zealand farmers are herding sheep with flying drones that bark like dogs.

Kids are using shared Google Docs to evade parental restrictions and bully each other.

A Georgia county paid $400,000 to lift a ransomware infection that brought most of the county’s IT systems to a halt. That’s probably a bargain; the city of Atlanta paid $17 million to rebuild its IT infrastructure after a similar ransomware attack in 2018.

That cute little T-rex game that appears when Google Chrome loses its Internet connection is now available in a $24 plastic version.

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