MSP43 Silly Season

It’s Silly Season. The time of the year when the news goes on holiday. Which means it’s time to catch up on some of the really cool tech and science stories we missed like fiery webcams and livestreamed fatbergs.

Matt's Notes: This is the quiet time of the year for news and developments. It’s been such a crazy year that we’ve had a lot to catch up on. This week, I’m going back to some of the smaller stories, such as the discovery of a new shape, the scutoid, and its implications for building human organs. And why fatbergs, for all their colossal disgustingness, may be the cultural symbol of our times. On with the episode!

Transcript Excerpt:
Are we in the Mattsplained equivalent of a desert?
•That is normally the case most years.
•We get to a point where, sometime during July August and really isn’t anything to talk about.
•This is been such a tumultuous and topsy-turvy year that the stories have kept on coming.
•And as you said, this year I’ve had more to rant about than I’ve had time to rant.
•The silly season has been a chance to catch up.
•And as we doing on and off of the last few weeks I thought we’d catch up on some of the smaller stories and developments that have come out recently.

We have a topic, or topics, I suppose. That means it’s time to Mattsplain.
•Let’s start with some environmental stories.
•We don’t cover nearly as many environmental stories on the show as we probably should.
•One caught my eye this week was from the wildfires that are raging across California.
•The one that that Pres Trump says that because there is enough water fight them and the California fire service says comma Nonsense, of course there is.
•One of things things I can talk about on the show is technology doesn’t always get used for the purpose for which it was originally designed.

This is the story about Daniel Perez, who livestreamed the wildfire raging outside his home?
•Yes. Perez lives in a small town outside LA.
•When the police issued a mandatory evacuation order for the town, the last thing Perez did was to turn on his home security cameras and connect them to the Internet before driving over to a relative’s house in a safe zone.
•As the Flames reached the backyard of this house in the middle of the afternoon, the dead smoke activating the night mode on his camera, Perez was able to watch as the blaze was brought under control.
•What was really nice about the story was that once the place was under control, Perez notice that his door bell camera was capturing a fireman walking up onto the porch of his house.
•And is able to use the intercom to talk to the fireman, reassured him that the house was intact, that the flames had damaged garden but not the house itself, and Paris was able to thank the man and his colleagues for their hard work.

We often talk about our tech infrastructure being very delicate. This story shows another side, that it’s robust enough to work during a disaster.
•That’s the weird thing, isn’t it?
•Wildfire is a very very strange creature.
•I won’t bore you all the details of our story I read about to have a type of roof you have often determines whether or not your house gets burned out during world,
•I can only guess here, but I’m assuming that either the web coverage came along overhead cables along streets that were protected by the firemen or they were underground and similarly protected.
•And Not just the Internet, obviously the power was still running even though the town was surrounded by flames.
•And it’s not the first time this has happened. Back in 2016 another guy in the US watched his house burn to the ground over his WebCam.
•In this instance, I thought it was nice that somebody was able to thank the fireman in person for saving the home.
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