It seems like everyday you look at any news feed all you see is terrible stuff. Earthquakes, volcanoes, Super El Nino, Polarizing Politics, War, etc... Everything seems so negative and honestly its a little draining. Today's episode is about some good news stories.... things that are positive and hopeful. Oh, and the coffee was great!

Back in the day, underground miners would have canaries in a cage to test the air to make sure it was safe to breath. If the canary stopped singing and died, it meant that the air was bad and a big risk to the miners (they needed to get out!). Did we just see an AI equivalent of a dead canary? The Hugging Face attack by Open AI agents in July was so much worse than originally thought with the agents persistently attacking the Hugging Face infrastructure to figure out how some phantom graders would be assessing the agents' performance. There was so much to unpack. Mark and Jeff discuss this and the real fear for the future, which is not a single sentient AI but a swarm of powerful misguided AI agents trying to do something and devastating the internet or world.

Mark has a special guest today with Kayla Gordon, from Winnipeg, with whom Mark has been travelling all over this planet with on several photographic trips. Both Mark and Kayla have competed in a number of image competitions with a range of results. They discuss the process and what you get as a benefit from these competitions. Just a special note, the recording was done via a zoom meeting, so the sound is not quite good as usual (sorry about that).

We have been able to travel at supersonic speeds for decades, the technology is well know as are the consequences of going very fast. There used to be Concordes but nothing after them. What happened, why don't we do air travel at supersonic speeds (at the moment) and why almost all commercial airplane travel is in a sweet spot of about 0.85 Mach (speed of sound) at an elevation of 35,000 - 45,000 feet.

Passwords protect our digital online lives but they keep getting more complicated and there is so many of them, people start getting lazy so that they can actually remember their passwords. This makes passwords unreliable as a security feature. Passwords are the first line of defense for your personal information but there are other options including password managers and Passkeys. Mark and Jeff discuss online security and what your options are to protect yourself.

In this day and age, we are now relying on mapping applications on our phones to get us to our destination more and more. Google Maps and Apple Maps are great. They find a route to where you are going fast and predict the time so much better than even a couple of years ago. But, how do they do that? How do they predict how long it takes and how do they know about traffic. Better yet, which one is better. Mark and Jeff explore this topic

Alcohol is ingrained and accepted in our society. But is it safe to consume? Alcohol is a Class 1 carcinogen just like Tobacco and Asbestos. What??? Yep. So why do we consume it still? Good question. Let's explore that.

GPS is a technology that has been around for a while and has become incredibly integrated into our lives. It is so ubiquitous but most people don't know how it works. Some people think the system is dumbed down from Military systems but that's not entirely true and there are multiple systems out there. The physics about GPS is very cool