Four Random Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. The German word of the week is Deppenapostroph, as explained below:

Establishments that feature their owners' names, with signs like "Rosi's Bar" or "Kati's Kiosk" are a common sight around German towns and cities, but strictly speaking they are wrong: unlike English, German does not traditionally use apostrophes to indicate the genitive case or possession. The correct spelling, therefore, would be "Rosis Bar", "Katis Kiosk", or, as in the title of a recent viral hit, Barbaras Rhabarberbar.

However, guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography have clarified that the use of the punctuation mark colloquially known as the Deppenapostroph ("idiot's apostrophe") has become so widespread that it is permissible -- as long as it separates the genitive 's' within a proper name.

And yes, dear reader, I shall save you the trouble of visiting Google Translate: Depp does indeed mean idiot.

Poor Johnny... I'll never complain about my own name again!

2. If you're old enough to remember Atari, you may have wondered how games like Pong were implemented without computers:

They were made by mostly avoiding 'computing' concepts altogether, and treating it more like a mechanical thing.

For example with Pong a major component is usually timers - every xth of a second the timer will emit a signal. You have timers calibrated to match the horizontal refresh of the screen, so they'll 'ring' at the same point on each scanline. Then you have timers calibrated to the vertical refresh, so they'll ring on the same scanline each frame.

The ball is then just two discrete timers for vertical and horizontal position, and their rings are sent through an AND gate that will raise the voltage going to the display when both are ringing causing a white dot to appear. The paddles build on this concept with a medium length timer that can be started and stopped to define the length...

The above is from the top-rated Stack Exchange answer, but another points to an online emulation of Pong that demonstrates how the schematics work.

3. If you were as impressed as I was with last month's pager attacks against Hezbollah, you might find this 2021 account of the assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist interesting. "The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine" reads like a science fiction/spy novel hybrid:

[T]he machine gun, the robot, its components and accessories together weigh about a ton. So the equipment was broken down into its smallest possible parts and smuggled into the country piece by piece, in various ways, routes and times, then secretly reassembled in Iran.

The robot was built to fit in the bed of a Zamyad pickup, a common model in Iran. Cameras pointing in multiple directions were mounted on the truck to give the command room a full picture not just of the target and his security detail, but of the surrounding environment. Finally, the truck was packed with explosives so it could be blown to bits after the kill, destroying all evidence.

...

The time it took for the camera images to reach the sniper and for the sniper's response to reach the machine gun, not including his reaction time, was estimated to be 1.6 seconds, enough of a lag for the best-aimed shot to go astray.

The A.I. was programmed to compensate for the delay, the shake and the [target] car's speed.

The detailed account was unfortunately made possible by the fact that the device was not successfully destroyed as planned by the post-kill explosion.

4. Good news! The subtitle says just about all you need: "Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touch screens. Buttons are back!" The author has many of the usual misconceptions about capitalism, but he is a bearer of good news in what I would call the stupid smart car front.

-- CAV