Agreed. Apple's $3T+ is built on a colossal mountain of e-waste fueled by consumerism. Like bottled water companies saying their plastic caps are 30% smaller.
For the record, we're already dumping hundreds of millions of kilos of poison on our food in the form of glyphosate and other pesticides, albeit not PFAS. Whereas the shock here is that we're already so full of poisons that our own sewage is untenable for use as fertilizer.
Also, if this data is for sale then it's a reasonable bet that other governments have bought it too (i.e., Russia, China, etc). Is that "legal", then? What's the difference?
Related ~100 pg report from Dec 2022. We'll researched and well articulated, in my opinion at least.
In history books it's appropriately shocking to see those photos of kids playing in clouds of DEET sprayed by trucks, 1950s and 60s, yet today we're many orders of magnitude beyond that with glyphosate.
Perhaps at least some of that "non-functional" DNA is so only after the completion of our nanotechnological self-assembly process, which is surely somewhat complex.
>> is simple and selects the single best candidate about 37% of the time
Not a mathematician but 1 / e = 0.367, so is this just a way to ensure a 37% percentile of accuracy across normal distribution? Like Anchorman Sex Panther, "37% of the time it works every time"?
The dodecahedron Wikipedia article already mentions spool knitting [1]. This awesome video shows knitting for different-sized fingers on a 3d-printed replica [2]. An initial question could be whether 6 equally-sized holes align with each other, or if there are 12 different hole sizes for finer sizing options (hard to tell from internet images). And as for no wear on the tool, hardness of wool << metal. It's not as if the dodecahedron is being used as a pulley block.
2. Hair braiding
layer8 mentioned these dodecahedrons being found in wealthy women's graves; I'd offer they could have been for braiding hair -- seemed important to wealthy Roman women back then [3].
Speculative scenario:
Could sit in a chair with back to a table (or just lie down on the floor), with hair strands laid outward from the person's head. Selected strands are pulled through the dodecahedron tool, and braided. The dodecahedron tool moves incrementally away from the person's head as the braid forms. The knobs on the top-side help organize each strand, and the knobs on the reverse (bottom) side creates standoff for the braided hair to emerge. Hands-free tool for making perfect mini-braids.
I wonder if some statues might be realistic enough to depict braids [4] (and from similar time periods as dodecahedrons' manufacture date) to match with a 5- or 10-strand sinnet pattern (e.g., ABOK#3037) [5].
