Grain

Take a virtual tour of Port of Newcastle, Australia
Port of Newcastle
If you listen to the news reports it kind of looks like the whole world has lost its mind. In normal times the media are full of all kinds of bullshit, but ever since Russia attacked Ukraine it seems like someone has turned the level of idiocy up to eleven.

I put up a post the other day about how Russia has a stranglehold on Europe's supply of natural gas. Today I came across a report about grain that contained this bit:

Russia is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, accounting for over 18% of international exports. Together with Ukraine, which has also stopped shipping grain, the two countries account for about 30% of global wheat supplies. The crisis threatens to push food prices across the world to an all-time high.

Our fearless leaders are probably jabbering about more sanctions on Russia. What is that going to do to the price of bread? Wait, don't tell me, I'll bet it's going to go up. So not only are a bunch of people going to freeze to death, they're also going to starve. Vunderbar. All so Biden can continue to collect his measly few million in commissions from pipeline tariffs. I hope you're happy, Marky.

Okay, enough about the bullshit. Time for a little technological wonder. Looking for a picture of a ship loading Russian grain, I found this one:

Ship Loading Grain

The page I found it on is talking about Russian wheat, but that picture sure doesn't look like any Russia I know, so I ask Google about it and Google points to the video (at the top of this post). I watched the video, and I did not see this ship anywhere in there. But the setting looks the same. So I'm thinking Google scanned the video and recognized the buildings on the docks, or maybe the configuration of the land, or something and concluded it was the same place. I understand how you can compare different size still images through some mathematical function and tell whether they are the same image or not. If you can do it for still images, you could do it for videos as well, but given that a zillion hours of new video is uploaded to YouTube everyday, it would be a massive undertaking to run a computational analysis on all of them. Just comparing frames of the video to image wouldn't be enough though, because this ship isn't in there. They would have to analyze the scene enough to be able to recognize the place, with or without the ship. It just boggles my mind. Anyway, if you're curious the place is Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia.

To give you some idea of just how out-of-control this whole internet server business has gotten, here's a Google Streetview of the new QTS Data Center on what used to be Shute Road.

QTS Data Center

This image may be a year old. I drove by it today and the building is finished. It's not fancy, bare concrete walls and a wall of screens around the top that barely conceal the army of industrial sized air conditioning equipment, but it's big, and it's not the only one in the area.