Category: Office Tech

I recently received a box of sachets like what you see in the photo at right.  Each sachet contains a few grams of white powder which, if mixed with 250 ml of water, yields a stable buffer solution of one of the pH values mentioned in the subject line.

What is so interesting about these three pH values?  Why did the maker of these sachets pick these three pH values?  And, the alert reader demands to learn, what exactly is in the sachets? Continue reading “What is interesting about pH values of 4.01, 6.86 and 9.18?”

Some water softeners recharge on a predetermined schedule, but other water softeners recharge when they feel like it.  If your water softener is the latter kind, then you might want to somehow get notified each time that it decides to recharge.  This article describes a successful design and implementation of a system to monitor such recharging.

Here is a Youtube video with a cogent analysis of publicly available information about the tragic airplane accident at National Airport this past Wednesday.  The video is about fourteen minutes in length and I think for any reader it would be time well spent.

I was in Washington earlier this week to argue an ex parte patent appeal before the PTAB.  The way I arrived in Washington on Tuesday was through National Airport.  Yes, the same approach from the south, with a glide slope down to Runway 1.  My flight was not asked to swing over to Runway 33.

My return flight from Washington was on Thursday, through Dulles.

As mentioned in a previous post, USPTO will be required to hand in its report detailing its plan for eliminating work-from-home within the next nine business days.  I don’t envy the USPTO’s task on this.  Many of us recall a song by Miley Cyrus (Wikipedia article) that says:

And we can’t stop …
And we won’t stop …

I predict that USPTO’s report, reduced to its essence, will be along the lines of:

And we can’t stop [doing work-from-home]
And we won’t stop [doing work-from-home]

In our law firm shopping cart we sell a lot of books.  For as long as I can recall, each book purchaser has at to pay at least ten dollars’ postage to get a book from us.

Finally today I got a clue and realized that if I were to try hard enough I could probably figure out how to configure our law firm shopping cart to offer “book rate” as a shipping option.  Continue reading “Something I should have enabled a long time ago — media mail postage”

Recently I have had reason to try to learn a bit about a type of AI (artificial intelligence) called machine learning.  It turns out that sometimes a researcher in this area will encounter the Helvetica scenario, which is a phenomenon where a machine learning model gradually degrades due to errors coming from uncurated training on the outputs of another model, including prior versions of itself.  The Helvetica scenario, also called “Model Collapse” (Wikipedia article) is a common problem when training generative adversarial networks (GANs) (Machine Learning Glossary).  The natural question for the reader is where this terminology came from?  Continue reading “The Helvetica Scenario”

A few days ago I got to see Apex, which is thought to be the largest and one of the most complete stegosaurus specimens ever uncovered.  I am sure that most museumgoers had the same reaction I had, which was a sense of profound wonder at the fact that the stegosaurus (and indeed nearly all dinosaurs) had a radius and ulna below the elbow of each forelimb, exactly like humans (and nearly all mammals), and had a tibia and fibula below the knee of each hindlimb, again exactly like humans.

Given that dinosaurs and mammals are different branches of the evolutionary family tree, separated for tens of millions of years, how can this possibly have worked out this way?  Continue reading “Why dinosaurs and humans both have a radius and ulna”

Hello dear reader.  It was on July 23, 2024 (blog post) that I first tried to get my blog set up so that it would auto-post to Bluesky.   By now it seems I have succeeded (Bluesky).  Another notable intellectual property blog that has succeeded is The TTABlog (Bluesky).  The World Intellectual Property Organization has succeeded (Bluesky).

This is a fourth Bluesky test.  The previous post (called “third”) seemed to have worked.  Now let’s see if this one works.

FedNow (Wikipedia article) is an instant payment service developed by the Federal Reserve for depository institutions in the United States, which allows individuals and businesses to send and receive money.  FedNow is intended to be faster and less expensive than other traditional ways that banks in the US send money to each other.  FedNow is instant, which is better than the delays of hours or even days for ACH and bank wire transactions.  Bank customers, including businesses and individuals, can benefit greatly from FedNow.  Does your financial institution participate in FedNow?  Continue reading “Does your bank participate in FedNow?”