me. So I learned something anyway.

Looks like there might be coming a ban on Chinese connected car software. Ars Technica is talking about that. I guess Congress is working on that. There might be some exemptions, but it would block Americans from having cars with Chinese software. Now I don't know what the real potential risk is for having, let's call China an adversary, having them have control over some number of cars in America. But how many cars do you think are on the road at any one time in America? It's a big number, right? Would it be five or ten million at any moment during the day? I don't know what the number is, but it's got to be millions. And suppose we become a self-driving car society. Seems inevitable. Might be only a few years away. What would happen if an enemy just got a hold of a million cars and just drove them into ditches? It is a weapon of mass destruction potentially to have a million cars drive off the road at the same time. So yeah, I'm in favor of banning the Chinese software even if there's no indication there's something wrong with it. There will be.

Meanwhile over at Interesting Engineering there's a pine cone inspired building shades. So they studied pine cones that apparently, I guess the little whatever you call it, the little leaves or whatever on the pine cone, it's probably a word for that, but apparently they move based on the sun. So they wanted to find some way that you can make your windows and your building open up and close based on sun and without using electricity. So we call them needles. I don't know. I'm not sure if that's right. But they do it without electricity, so that's the important part. The sun directly causes the pine cone like parts to open. Now my take on this is, doesn't your window look like a pine cone? Do you ever want your window to look like a pine cone? I don't know. I'm not sure this has potential.

Meanwhile there's the TikTok ban. As far as I know it's going to go into effect on Sunday unless something miraculous happens between now and then. Can you give me a fact check on that? Is that correct that TikTok is going to be done in the United States? It'll still be international, but is it going to be done in the United States? Because I feel like there might be another thing coming. You know there were some reports that Elon Musk was talking to China. I don't think that's true. That was never confirmed, so I don't think that was ever true. But do you think anybody could put together a purchase deal in a few days? You know I suppose they could if they felt the price was right. But I don't see any possibility that TikTok's going to say yes even if the price is right. So I don't know exactly what would be purchased if somebody purchased TikTok. But it makes me wonder if China is willing to give up billions and billions and billions of dollars they must be hiding something. In other words if somehow we got control of their software and their algorithms, would we be able to determine how much they've been putting a finger on the algorithms? Would we be able to know that just by buying it, looking at whatever they sold us? It could be that they're worried that they don't have a way to scrub that. Because you know how when Musk bought Twitter there were so many little censoring tags in it that even the owner couldn't tell what it was censoring. Like it was just too complicated. So what if China said get rid of all the incriminating stuff and then maybe we can sell it. And then TikTok would have said we could try but we probably wouldn't get close to knowing that we had all the incriminating stuff out of the software because it's not that easy. And then China might say you can't sell that thing because if they find out what we've been doing there will be repercussions. So this is speculation, but I suspect that TikTok would be unsellable unless they're hiding something and they don't know how to unhide it or they don't know how to hide it completely. I guess anyway.

If you're saying