my most controversial ship? heh…the Thomas W Lawson
motherfucker unlimited
you like that? I got more, how bout the SS Bessemer
This experimental piece o’ shit, courtesy of Sir Henry Bessemer, had a stabilized cabin meant to combat seasickness. Unfortunately, due to the kinetic consequences of building a ship like that, it also combatted seaworthiness, and the instant this thing touched water it enthusiastically slammed itself into the pier with all the grace of a twelfth round boxer.
Not to be deterred, Bessemer repaired the ship, hired a veteran sea captain, slapped the stern and sent her out for a second go. The ship then proceeded to crash into the Same Fucking Pier even harder, demolishing it.
The SS Bessemer, her bloodlust satiated, retired from the cruise ship life and settled down in Swanley, where she became a billiard room, and then a lecture hall, and then rubble, due to an encounter with bombs.
This one’s for the SS Bessemer. Rest in peace you wild bitch.
New problematic ship just dropped.
(To be fair there was nothing wrong with the Thomas W Lawson as such. But the Bessemer… nuts).
Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.
But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.
So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.
But then in 2017 a doctor saw an ad for this bakery scanning system and it occurred to him that cells under a microscope don’t look all that different from weird loaves of bread. And it turns out that yeah, you can use almost all of the same code to analyze a tissue sample and pick out any potentially cancerous cells in it. Other people have started buying the same program for everything from analyzing the readout from big physics experiments to labeling charms and amulets for sale at shrines to detecting problems in the wiring on jet engines.
ALT
