Mildly Interesting

I have a bird feeder in front of my house and I fill it up with this generic bird seed that has many different kinds of seeds. I’ve watched the birds come up there and eat but then they take the corn kernels and toss them out. A bunch of the corn has fallen on the ground and now I have corn growing!

cross-posted from: https://feddit.dk/post/22309729

Scientists discovered that sleep deprivation damages a key brain circuit responsible for social memory, making it harder to recognize familiar individuals. In laboratory studies, caffeine restored communication between neurons in this pathway and reversed the memory deficits caused by lost sleep. The effect was remarkably targeted, helping the impaired circuit recover without overstimulating normal brain function.

It's album named Virgin from Lorde. Not quite my taste of music, but the disc itself is pretty interesting.
Though it does have issues. Since the reflective layer is very thin, a lot of light passes through.

Even beaming through the lid:

Here's a blog post about it on Hackaday, also showing the lower signal amplitude compared to regular CD.
For me, so far it worked in 2 out of 4 CD players/drives. And I didn't even try with those that can't read CD-RW, as those can probably be crossed off right away.

Anyway, what happens when it's upside-down? Obviously, "doesn't work" is the answer. But at least we can see the lens dance a bit, trying to read the disc:

If you're worried about data consumption, this video is less than 300KB in size thanks to AV1. ^Although^ ^it^ ^took^ ^7^ ^minutes^ ^to^ ^encode...^

And something funny to add.
I ripped it once, there was weird noise, so I tried it again. I played random track, "David", and skipped through it. It sounded corrupted. So I tried playing it directly using VLC. Still the same. Thinking it was the drive, I tried my Discman. Same issue.
Is the disc bad?
But, after finally getting the track from the internet, I found it just sounds like that.

Purcell got the idea for "The Wealth Walk’" — which debuted last year but returned this month and plays through June 7 — during the pandemic, scrolling through viral videos that tried to illustrate massive wealth with metaphors.

For instance: If a grain of rice represented $100,000, how many would Jeff Bezos have? (Fifty-eight pounds of rice, it turns out.)

Paris’ oldest bridge has vanished. This week, the artist known as the “French Banksy,” JR, inflated a giant “cave” over the Pont Neuf — a monumental, rocky illusion swallowing the 17th-century landmark whole. (AP video by Alexander Turnbull and Nicolas Garriga)