The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders. || Well, it must’ve rattled loose. || At last, a robotic bartender. || Bird feeder. || I bring you art. || Babe detected. || His back-yard view is better than yours. || You can’t go far wrong with accelerated penguins. || In fairness, it was his first attempt. || Just wind and frozen sand. || Phantom nipples. || Near miss detected. || Now you do it. I’ll start the clock. || Incoming. || Satisfied customer. || Strange dog. || Dentist’s magic hat. || When the day just keeps getting worse. || You want one and you know it. || He has a theory, ladies. || The tardigrade’s toes (and tiny things digesting other tiny things). || And finally, for the sleepy kiddies, there are goblins lurking under the bed.

Oh, and a reminder that I now have a Gettr account. 

Lifted from the comments, a technological feat:

Traffic cameras in Chicago disproportionately ticket Black and Latino motorists.

Readers are invited to spot the word that’s doing the heavy lifting. It appears 1o times in the article quoted above, excluding variations.

The red-light and speed cameras are, we’re told, “distributed roughly evenly among the city’s Black, Latino and white neighbourhoods.” Despite which, “the ticketing rate for households in majority-Black ZIP codes” is “more than three times that of households in majority-white areas.” And so, explanations are searched out, including the width of a given road, the effect of passing vacant lots, and the geographical distribution of grocery stores. “Structural racism” is of course invoked, a phenomenon that apparently includes ticketing cyclists who choose to ride on the pavement, illegally.

Those presented as victims of injustice, of “racial inequity,” include Mr Rodney Perry, whose photograph accompanies the piece, and who, in a single year, has received eight tickets for speeding and three for running red lights. The article appears not to have had room to include the views of those injured or bereaved by Chicago’s law-breaking motorists, despite an eye-widening spike in accidents, fatalities, and hit-and-run crashes. Nor, it seems, was there room to consider the possible effect of endless, widespread excuse-making for antisocial behaviour, and its role in making such behaviour more likely, not less.

See also the words disparate, disparity and disparities, which occur no fewer than 22 times.

Update, via the comments:

Rafi notes the article’s supposed candidates for our sympathy – the best that could be mustered, presumably – and adds, “They chose poorly.” Well, as a pin-up for victimhood, a basis for our collective weeping, Mr Perry is a, shall we say, suboptimal choice. But apparently, we are expected to sympathise with Mr Perry, our habitual lawbreaker, and to indulge his excuses, on account of his difficulty paying the $700 in fines that resulted from his repeated law-breaking. As if the financial consequences were inexplicable and somehow unforeseeable. Though it seems to me that not being in the best position to pay the fines that normally result from such law-breaking is a pretty good reason to avoid said law-breaking – specifically, repeatedly running red lights and thereby endangering other people’s lives.

At which point, it’s perhaps worth noting that many of the, as it were, racially insensitive cameras are located near schools.

Goldfish are capable of navigating on land, Israeli researchers have found, after training fish to drive. The team at Ben-Gurion University developed an FOV – a fish-operated vehicle. The robotic car is fitted with lidar, a remote sensing technology that uses pulsed laser light to collect data on the vehicle's ground location and the fish's whereabouts inside a mounted water tank. A computer, camera, electric motors, and omni-wheels give the fish control of the vehicle.

Hey, I’m just reading what it says here. And yes, there’s video. 

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Scenes. (h/t, Darleen) || Not without its uses. || When your ‘they-ness’ isn’t noticed. || Amblin’ by. || He does, er, this better than you do. || Assorted bus tickets. (h/t, Things) || Bread bugs. || Restoration of note. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Residential Los Angeles, 1940s. || Ring for service. || For sequencing. || Samantha has conditions. || Snowflake generator. || Little helper. || He loves his 28 head-mates. || Mixed messages. || “Your mind should automatically say father.” || “Whiteness is the overarching disease.” || The joys of public transport, part 4,862. || An archive of paper bags, and a plastic bag museum. (h/t, Things) || How far could you throw a ball on the Moon? || And finally, does yours do this?

Oh, and for those that care about such things, I now have a Gettr account. 

Speaking of ladies who write for The Atlantic, here’s senior editor Honor Jones a-gush with expression in the Family section:

I loved my husband; it’s not that I didn’t. But I felt that he was standing between me and the world, between me and myself… I had caused so much upheaval, so much suffering, and for what? He asked me that, at first, again and again: For what? So I could put my face in the wind. So I could see the sun’s glare.

It’s a tale of divorce, you see, and rather sad, and just a little confusing. For instance, exactly why the divorce came about is not immediately obvious. There’s no mention of affairs, or hardship, or emotional cruelty. In fact, and despite 3,000 words, the husband is barely mentioned, except as an unwitting hindrance to some nebulous fantasy of self-exploration, or at least self-dramatization. Indeed, we’re presented with a loving husband and comfortable middle-class life, in which one chats with architects and browses the Instagram accounts of cabinet makers, while weighing the merits of soapstone kitchen counters.

Slowly, I realised, I didn’t want this life. I didn’t want to renovate. I wanted to get divorced… I started imagining other lives. Other homes.

Here, I should point out that Ms Jones also has three small children. Though their wellbeing doesn’t appear to figure too heavily, or much at all, in the extended ramble of the article. However, we do hear a lot about other, more important matters:

the crumbs got me down.

Crumbs are a recurring topic, mentioned seven times, along with a dislike of vacuuming. Truly, a life of unrelenting hell. Albeit with a cleaner to do much of the heavy lifting:

I hired a woman named Luba to clean… I loved talking with her. She was full of sensible advice, like how I should really stop washing the cleaning rags along with the children’s clothes, because the chemicals could irritate their skin.

Not the worst opinion we’ll hear today.

We’re then informed that a comfortable middle-class life, in which time can be spent choosing new kitchens and chatting with the cleaner, is actually an oppressive experience: