Trouble Coffee on Judah Street in S.F.’s Outer Sunset has closed. The joint was apparently an early promoter of “artisanal toast.” But as SFGate laments, avocado toast
is now a nationwide brunch phenomenon. But, like many things in life, the “cool” ideas are often co-opted and flipped into a big moneymaker as larger corporations find trends and suck the life out of them.
Damn those life-sucking corporations. Fight The Man! Eat only artisanal, hand-crafted avocado toast! Just . . . somewhere other than Trouble Coffee.
Dog Noses (awesome!) meet Machine Learning (even awesomer!)
Fortune’s Jeremy Kahn “is a senior writer focused on artificial intelligence and other disruptive technologies, including quantum computing.”
Oooh, he must be super smart! His latest story is
Here’s his lede:
It’s well known that dogs have superpowers when it comes to smell.
Aargh. That’s some lazy writing. But the real problem is his follow-on assertion about canine olfactory acuity:
This is a sensitivity hundreds of thousands of times greater than humans.
Hey, J. That is Simply. Not. True. [But he has a degree from Penn!—Ed.] [So do I.]
Kahn’s story is about a startup called Canaery. Gabriel Lavella, the company’s founder and CEO, wants to put an array of electrodes on top of a dog’s olfactory bulb and record patterns of neural activation as the dog sniffs all kinds of smells. Using an A.I. processor Lavella aims to get a real-time readout of what the dog is smelling. One that is not limited to odors for which the dog has been trained.
Interesting idea. I’ll just note that the sensitivity of the canine nose—which Jeremy Kahn stresses—is largely irrelevant to Lavella’s goal. What he really needs is a biological system that is extremely good at olfactory discrimination. Meh.
And in any case, Canaery is using rats as their initial experimental animals which makes Kahn’s lede even dopier.
Reviving the Stinks of Old Europe
From The Guardian:
“algorithms” . . . “consortium of experts” . . . “a lecturer in sustainable heritage” . . . “a €2.8m grant from the EU’s Horizon Programme” . . .
Sorry. I feel asleep there for a sec. If you really want to read the story it’s here.