The Weekly Glean: Robots Take Over Your Kitchen

This year, like last year but more so, manufacturers are endeavoring to stick, basically, guts from your cellphone into everything in your kitchen. Some of these aren’t terrible ideas! I was fond of the Drop scale, for example. Along those lines is the Perfect Bake scale, similar to Drop except it comes with its own bowls and an oven thermometer, which is fine, I suppose, although you should really already own an oven thermometer. Then there’s iKettle, which I actually think is kind of a good idea: it’s a kettle that can bring water to a precise temperature based on which kind of tea you want to drink. Serious tea-drinkers are very finicky about this kind of thing. But our regular appliances will probably soon have internet connections, too; GE showed off stuff like a fridge/freezer that alerts you via an app on your phone when you’re running low on milk and a washer/dryer that does the same when it’s time to transfer the clothes from wash to dry. Useful, I guess?

Other not-so-useful creations include a fridge with a Twitter app, which is bad and dumb, and a “3D printer for food,” which I’ve seen before. A 3D printer is basically a device that squeezes melted…something, usually plastic, into a 3D shape you’ve fed into it. It’s sort of like those Play-Doh extruders except you just tell it, “I want a cheap plastic chess piece with my face on it,” and it automatically makes one. But 3D printers have serious limitations on what kinds of materials they can extrude and what they can do with them, so the food one is basically limited to squeezing melted chocolate onto a slice of Wonderbread. If that sounds like something you’d want, get out.

IN THE NEWS

Four California activists may become the first people charged under Utah’s “ag-gag” law.

The Federal Aviation Commission is allowing the use of drones (which, in this case, are nothing more than fancy remote-controlled helicopters) to monitor crops.

U.S. ranchers are excited to ship red meat to Cuba, now that the restrictions are loosening.

U.S. dietary guidelines may be changed to take into account the environmental impact of various foods in 2015.

“McDonald’s Corp. officials in Japan bowed deeply Wednesday to apologize for a human tooth, plastic pieces and other objects found in the burger chain’s food.”

WEIRD WIKIPEDIA

For the first year or two I attended CES, the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo ran at the same time, leading to what seemed for at least five minutes like a fun juxtaposition of nerds and porn stars. But that’s not so exciting anymore. Know what’s exciting? World of Concrete, a convention in January or February which takes over the entire Las Vegas Convention Center, the same venue that CES uses, but just for concrete and concrete-related products.

WEEK IN WEATHER

A crazy blast of arctic air is sending temperatures in the Upper Midwest down into the -20s.

Washington, D.C., where it snows almost every year, received three inches of snow over the holiday and is freaking out in a very unflattering way. That said, the pandas at the National Zoo seem to be enjoying it.

That’s it for the first Weekly Glean in 2015! Hope you enjoyed! For more agricultural news, parenthetical jokes, and deep Wikipedia dives, don’t forget to sign up to receive the Glean as a newsletter each week.

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