Lucky Charms is trending on Iwaspoisoned.com today. 
Report Food Poisoning Now. Protect Others. (iwaspoisoned.com)

Report Food Poisoning Now. Protect Others. (iwaspoisoned.com)
TIL:
[Propaganda]
Spreading the Faith, In Religion Or Politics
IN THE INFORMATION WAR that has accompanied the shooting war in Ukraine, Russian propagandists have gone to extreme measures to promulgate disinformation about the invasion. The very word “propaganda” has become a kind of rhetorical weapon, with the Kremlin dismissing reports of atrocities perpetrated by Russian military forces, such as the mass killing of civilians in the town of Bucha, as nothing more than “Ukrainian propaganda.”
TIL that when it comes to chicken meat, "free range" means "not housed for more than 12 weeks", and as most chickens are killed at 8 weeks or earlier then they can count as free range even when never allowed outside.
Acoma is an interesting place. Growing things there is always a challenge. It is in a desert that has been getting drier for the past 20 years. In spite of the many other issues Indians have, they have been good at trying to preserve ancient agriculture and their languages.Today I found an article which might interest Farm Boy:
Blue corn and melons: meet the seed keepers reviving ancient, resilient crops
I get it, complaining about autocorrect feels very 2000-and-late. Yet here in 2022, nearly 15 years since the iPhone’s debut, Apple’s smart typing software can still make us want to break the Guinness World Record for phone throwing. The system still introduces annoying—OK, sometimes hilarious—typos, misspellings and grammatical errors. Perhaps even more than ever before. But before I git into thast, allow me to make a pont. Go itnto hour iPhone settings and turn off autocrrct. Yeaaasah. Good lyuck typig without it!
If you didn’t catch that, I turned off autocorrect for a day and barely lived to tell the tale. Within minutes, it was clear how much the software is saving us from ourselves. “But therein lies the rub,” Ken Kocienda, who created the iPhone’s autocorrect software, told me. “The more you ask it to do, the more potential there is for bugs and unexpected behaviors.” I tracked down Mr. Kocienda, who left Apple in 2017, as well as other former and current Apple employees to explain autocorrect errors I continue to experience, and if recent system updates have made the software worse. I also sought out tricks to help autocorrect behave better.
Word Swaps
For months one autocorrect error has stuck like a poppy seed in my teeth. Apple insists on correcting the word “newsgrid,” my fast-typed rendition of a tool we use at work, to “newsgirl,” as if Teddy Roosevelt were still president. Sure, you likely don’t see that exact error, but you’ve probably experienced your own annoying word swaps. When you type, the autocorrect algorithms are trying to figure out what you mean by looking at various things, including where your fingers landed on the keyboard and the other words in the sentences, while comparing your word fragment to the words in two un- seen dictionaries: Static Dictionary: Built into iOS, this contains dictionary words and common proper nouns, such as product names or sports teams. There were over 70,000 words in this when the first iPhone launched and it’s gotten bigger.
Dynamic Dictionary: Built over time as you use your phone, this consists of words that are unique to you. The system looks at your contacts, emails, messages, Safari pages—even the names of installed apps. It’s also where new words unique to your vocabulary get logged: By the third time you type an unknown word, the software will typically add it to the dynamic dictionary, said Mr. Kocienda and others.
“The static dictionary and the dynamic dictionary would be in a little bit of a battle with each other,” Mr. Kocienda said. The software is designed to break the tie, he added, but it doesn’t always pick what you would pick. An Apple spokeswoman confirmed the learning rule and explained that with “NewsGrid,” the learning may have been delayed because of its unique capitalization.
What you can do: The surefire way to make sure your phone knows your personal vocabulary? On your iPhone, go to Settings —> General —> Keyboard —> Text Replacement. Now add your words or phrases to both the Phrase and Shortcut fields, which will add them to the dynamic dictionary. Since adding NewsGrid here, there have been no newsgirls in sight.
Foul Language
I know what you’re thinking: I’ve typed some curse words way more than two times and the software has never learned those! When working on the original iPhone, Mr. Kocienda had a peculiar job. He made a list of bad words— profanity, curses, slurs—and put them into the static dictionary. But he programmed these with a special rule: “Never ever help anybody type these words,” he said. What you can do: Type your ducking curse words correctly. You can also add them to that Text Replacement database. My trick? I entered my favorite profanities as contacts in my address book.
Grammatical Errors
Another pet peeve? All the grammatical errors autocorrect introduces. I frequently see “in” instead of “on,” “it’s” instead of “its” and “we’ll” instead of “well.” Over time, Apple’s autocorrect has become more sophisticated and aggressive, correcting words based on the previous words in a sentence and even retro-correcting words after you’ve typed a few more words. It does that by using machine-learning algorithms that absorb what people have written on the internet. With iOS 15, Apple started using a privacy-focused method for training its algorithms using iPhones in the wild, without collecting typing data from them. The improvements from this can then be shared in iOS updates, the Apple spokeswoman said.
The good? The autocorrect system can be updated frequently with our more casual English. The bad? Some argue it can pick up our typos and our no-good-very-bad writing habits. What you can do: Sadly, Apple doesn’t offer a way to disable auto-apostrophes, though you can disable auto-capitalization.
There’s another option. You can download a third-party keyboard from the app store, like Google’s Gboard or Microsoft’s SwiftKey (though I suggest looking into what data they might collect and share).
One option called Typewise has an autocorrect undo button. So has autocorrect gotten worse? Part of me—the part that just had to retype “part” because it was corrected to “pet”—says “100% yes.” The other part of me thinks the software has just gotten more aggressive.
As the machines learned more and helped us type better and faster, we became lazier typers. We’re blissfully oblivious to autocorrect’s many fixes, but we do notice the errors. Are some errors dumb?
Do they seem avoidable, especially if the system just did nothing instead? Sure, which is why I think we need more control over the machines. I’d like to see an autocorrect aggressiveness dial where I could adjust the level of correction. At the very least I’d like to disable some of those auto-apostrophe’s.
Duck!
Ken Kocienda created the iPhone’s autocorrect software, which you can turn off. Autocorrect won’t help you type certain bad words.
You can download a third-party keyboard, like Typewise, below.
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CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM LEFT: PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY CHAYA HOWELL/ WSJ; KARL MOLLOHAN; KENMY WASSUS/ JOANNA STERN/ WSJ
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These green books are poisonous—and one may be on a shelf near you
A toxic green pigment was once used to color everything from fake flowers to book covers. Now a museum conservator is working to track down the noxious volumes.
During the 19th century, emerald green pigment was all the rage in fashion and home decor—despite the fact that it contains arsenic.
BYJUSTIN BROWER
PUBLISHED APRIL 28, 2022
• 10 MIN READ
Libraries and rare book collections often carry volumes that feature poisons on their pages, from famous murder mysteries to seminal works on toxicology and forensics. The poisons described in these books are merely words on a page, but some books scattered throughout the world are literally poisonous.
These toxic books, produced in the 19th century, are bound in vivid cloth colored with a notorious pigment known as emerald green that’s laced with arsenic. Many of them are going unnoticed on shelves and in collections. So Melissa Tedone, the lab head for library materials conservation at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library in Delaware, has launched an effort dubbed the Poison Book Project to locate and catalogue these noxious volumes.
To date, the team has uncovered 88 19th-century books containing emerald green. Seventy of them are covered with vivid green bookcloth, and the rest have the pigment incorporated onto paper labels or decorative features. Tedone even found an emerald green book on sale at a local bookstore, which she purchased.
While these poisonous books would likely cause only minor harm unless someone decided to devour a nearly 200-year-old tome, the alluringly vibrant books are not totally without risk. People who handle them frequently, such as librarians or researchers, may accidentally inhale or ingest particles that contain arsenic, which could make them feel lethargic and light-headed or suffer from diarrhea and stomach cramps. Against the skin, arsenic can cause irritations and lesions. Serious cases of arsenic poisoning can lead to heart failure, lung disease, neurological dysfunction, and—in extreme situations—death.
So just how common are these poison green books? “It's somewhat hard to predict because our data set is still small, but I would certainly expect there could be thousands of these books around the world,” Tedone says. “Any library that collects mid-19th-century cloth publishers' bindings is likely to have at least one or two.”
copper acetoarsenite. The toxic pigment was commercially developed in 1814 by the Wilhelm Dye and White Lead Company in Schweinfurt, Germany. It was used everywhere, from clothing and wallpaper to fake flowers and paint. To say that Victorian England was bathed in emerald green is an understatement: By 1860 more than 700 tons of the pigment had been produced in the country alone.
Arsenic’s toxicity was known at the time, but the vibrant color was nevertheless popular and cheap to produce. Wallpapers shed toxic green dust that covered food and coated floors, and clothing colored with the pigment irritated the skin and poisoned the wearer. Despite the risks, emerald green was ingrained into Victorian life—a color to literally die for.
While toxic green goods flooded parts of Europe and the United States, another invention transformed the bookmaking industry. Early 19th-century books were handcrafted, leather-bound artisan creations, but the industrial revolution quickly provided a way to mass produce books for a growing population of readers.
positively identified the pigment as the infamous emerald green.
Handling poison literature
The team next used the University of Delaware soil laboratory to measure the amount of arsenic in the cover of Rustic Adornments. They found that the bookcloth contained an average of 1.42 milligrams of arsenic per square centimeter. Without medical care, a lethal dose of arsenic for an adult is roughly 100 milligrams, the mass of several grains of rice.
“What are the implications of having so much arsenic in bookcloth, on your gloves, during treatment? What does that mean for your health and safety?” Grayburn asks.
To answer these question, Tedone and Grayburn reached out to Michael Gladle, the director of environmental health and safety at the University of Delaware. “Arsenic is a heavy metal and does have some toxicity associated with it, principally, either inhalation or ingestion,” he says. The relative risk of emerald green bookcloth “depends on frequency,” Gladle says, and is of primary concern “for those that are in the business of preservation.”
Gladle suggests that anyone handling these tomes should isolate the books and work on them on tabletops with fume hoods to control any arsenic particulates. “People that have access to these old books for research should be wearing gloves and using a designated space to review those books,” he says.
Following Gladle’s recommendations, Winterthur library removed nine green, arsenic-clothed books from circulation and placed them in large sealable polyethylene plastic bags. When handling or conserving afflicted books, they wear nitrile gloves, and afterward they wipe down hard surfaces and wash their hands.
The team then launched a search for more books, travelling 25 miles northeast to the oldest library in America, the Library Company of Philadelphia. There they identified an additional 28 emerald green cloth books. With a larger sample size, they discovered that most books with arsenic-containing emerald green bookcloth were published in the 1850s.
To help others identify the arsenic-clad books and their potential risks, the team designed full-color bookmarks with images of emerald green covers as well as handling and safety precautions. They’ve mailed over 900 of these bookmarks throughout the United States and to 18 other countries, resulting in six other institutions identifying arsenic-laced books in their collections.
Despite the toxicity of arsenic-based emerald green in household goods, wares, and clothing, it was never prohibited. Instead, its use died out naturally, either from its toxic reputation or the color simply falling out of fashion, much like the avocado green appliances in the 1970s.
And the most important message from Tedone, ever the conservator, is to not discard the poison books. “You don’t need to panic and throw them away,” she says. “We just want people to take it seriously.”