There are some scientific and medical scenarios (e.g. particle detection) that require instruments made with steel with as little radioactive contamination as possible. This is challenging as atomic-bomb testing during the 20th century resulted in persistent airborne nuclear fallout, and so there’s apparently some industry in salvaging steel from ships which sank prior to the Trinity tests. This is known as “Low-background steel.“

“AI Slop” is an increasingly popular term to describe the growing amount of AI-generated content on the web, much of it intended to draw page views, spread falsehoods, and the like.

Last week, I learned of the “Low-background Steel” blog which is dedicated to sources of data from before the end of 2022 (because ChatGPT premiered in November of that year). At the moment, it only has a half-dozen entries.

Fanboy’s Convention List hasn’t been updated since 2012 — I wonder if they’d like a copy?

• Intelligent Machines episode 826, interview with John Graham-Cumming
• YouTube video of the interview
• John Graham-Cumming’s web site

(Cover image, a Bessemer Converter in Sheffield England. Chemical Engineer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.)

I recently encountered a list of “Falsehoods programmers believe about time.” With the possible exception of the one about black holes (third from the end), they’re all false.

“There are always 24 hours in a day”? Not when we “spring forward” to Daylight Saving Time; that day only has 23 hours. Likewise, when we “fall back” to Standard Time, that day has 25 hours. Of course, even those rules aren’t true if you live in a region that doesn’t observe Daylight Saving Time.

Even Google has trouble with this. Monday morning, at 9:07 AM Eastern Daylight Time, I asked Google what time zone Colorado is in. The response was Mountain Time, which is what I was expecting.

Google then offered a little extra information. In Maryland, it was 9:07 AM Monday morning. But in Colorado, according to Google, it was 8:46 AM on Sunday.

That time zone offset is a bit more complicated than I expected!