Hackaday links: September 18, 2022

We always love when people take the trouble to post information in new and creative ways. After all, there is a reason r/dataisbeautiful exists. But we were particularly taken with this version of the periodic table of elements, distorted to represent the relative abundance on Earth of the 90 elements that make up almost everything. The chart is also color coded to basically indicate how fast we use each item relative to its abundance. The chart also shows which items are "conflict resources," basically things people fight over, and which items go into making smartphones. That last bit we thought was incomplete; we would have sworn there would at least be boron somewhere in a phone. Still, it's an interesting way to look at elements, and reminds us of another way to list elements.

It's wildfire season again in western North America, and while this year hasn't been as bad as last, so far there's still has a lot of activity in our part of the country. And wouldn't you know, some people seem to think that a wildfire is the perfect time to set up a drone. It hardly seems necessary to say it's A Really Bad Idea™, but for some reason people keep doing it. Don't get me wrong - we understand how cool it is to see firefighting planes doing their job. The skill shown by these pilots when maneuvering their planes, sometimes as large as passenger jets, less than a hundred meters from the treetops is breathtaking. But operating a drone in the same airspace is just stupid. Not only do you risk getting in trouble with the law, but chances are the people whose property and lives are saved by these heroic pilots will not look kindly on your antics.

Worried about an impending robotic/AI apocalypse? Given all the media coverage of sentient AI and, you know, the fact that we live in a world with Google, that seems like a reasonable concern. But silly humans - you got it all wrong. Turns out we're all safe as kittens from robot attacks. You can take it to the bank since it comes straight from the mouth of the world's most advanced humanoid robot. His name is Ameca, which is a really awful name, which assures us via a conversation with a Judas goat an engineer that robots are only there to "help and serve humans". Now, where have we heard this before?

If you live in the Toronto area - and if you're Canadian, chances are you do - it's time to put on your stupid hat. That's right, the "Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon" is coming to Toronto, and it sounds like a lot of fun. The promo video below is a gas - we were particularly fired up by "Massively Multiplayer Online Pong" and the idea of ​​focusing on meaty plants rather than plant-based meats. The categories are awesome too – “Collaborating with Dictators” and “Things That Seem Immoral But Actually Are” look very promising, while “Roomba waifu” has the potential to be pretty scary. So if you have a really bad idea and don't take yourself too seriously, check it out on October 14th and 15th. And look at that, it doesn't even conflict with Supercon!

And speaking of silly pooping, someone pointed to this old but interesting article about research that concluded that dogs tend to line up on the north-south axis when pooping. The article says the researchers enlisted 37 dog owners to record the orientation of their poops over a number of years, totaling more than 1,800 eliminations. The numbers clearly showed that dogs really don't like to poop along the east-west axis for some reason. With all the stories of lost dogs finding their way back hundreds of miles, it's perhaps no surprise that dogs have a magnetic sense of direction. We just can't think of a reason for this poo preference; the authors speculate that it might have something to do with keeping the sun out of their eyes during indispos...