You beat me to it; this is something that I picked up from when I was riding Greyhound to go to and from college during breaks that I'll do for truckers, especially at night when it's harder to judge distances. It's a little thing, but it can improve the flow of traffic; I've been a passenger several times when I've seen someone behind a passing semi cut across in the gap between the semi and the car I was in because they couldn't wait for the semi to pull back to the right and the trucker wasn't sure he had clearance to come back
Well, if you've read Grant Callin's novel "Saturn Alia", and it's sequel "A Lion on Tharthee", you'd know why arranging for a pattern like that to develop would be perfectly in character for the denizens of Tharthee...
That was one of the things that immediately struck me about the cyberpunk concept of 'simsense' -- a full-sensory VR experience that completely replaced your normal senses. It seemed that it was a mechanism tailor-made for criminal rehabilitation -- put the convict into a long-term simsense experience that -- because all of the 'people' that they would interact with were computer-generated, could be as patient and unrelenting as needed -- would take the convict through a rehabilitation process over and over again until it 'took', with no way for the convict to harm themselves or others.
Going down the slope into greyer applications, it could also be used for various forms of conditioning that ranged from beneficial -- controlling the urge to overeat, redirecting dietary choices, breaking a tobacco habit, etc. -- to all the different forms of indoctrination to a social or political cause, or to an organization.
This reminds me of the now-defunct 'furnitureporn' website, which went a little further than 'Hot Malm' does, in that it had pictorial sets mimicking cheezy 1970s porn shoots using furniture in place of people ("Hot Louis XIV action!"). Someone with sufficient interest could probably turn it up in the Internet Archive site.
Judging from the two knobs at the bottom corners and the grid of lights, it's an example of an extremely early attempt at making an electronic Etch-a-Sketch. Unfortunately, the low resolution of the 'screen' due to the size of the bulbs made it impossible to recognize any of the pictures drawn on it, and the inventor was never able to acquire relays small enough to allow him to use grain-of-wheat bulbs on the display; the smallest such a device could be was the size of an upright piano, which was impractical for a child's handheld toy.
It looks like a coal torpedo -- one of the fake lumps of coal that were used to sabotage trains and coal-fired boilers in the North during the Civil War; filled with explosives, they were added to the coal piles used for fuel, where they would explode in the heat when added to the fire, leaving no clues beyond the boiler explosion.
Ahh, the joys of timely, accurate, up-to-date reporting. Xu Xing described microraptor gui from fossil specimens back in 2003 (National Geographic article), but the LA Times article makes no mention of the fact that the four-winged body plan is not a new discovery. Sensationalism wins out over accuracy; "Archaeologists find other birds with four wings" just doesn't have the same impact.
There is another way for Brian to set his clocks correctly that does not involve him receiving anything but the time from Amy. Before he leaves, he sets one of his clocks to a fixed time, such as noon. He walks to Amy's home, gets the correct time, and walks back. The clock that he set will then show, in the time since noon, the time it took him to walk to Amy's and back, which is _twice_ the time since Amy told him what time it was. By adding half of the time since noon shown on that clock to the time Amy gave him, he can set all of his clocks to the correct time.
The local Whole Foods is selling bags of chocolate-covered kale... which appears to be ideal to keep around for an emergency backup chocolate supply, because from the way it tastes there's no way in hell you'd eat it if there were _any_ other chocolate available.
How could the _future_ president of the Confederacy be involved in a riot at West Point in _1926_, more than 60 years _after_ the Confederacy ceased to exist?
And clue #4 is the large casing length for a 4.5mm projectile, indicating that an increased amount of propellant is required, which would be the case for a bullet fired in a much denser medium, like water.
Going down the slope into greyer applications, it could also be used for various forms of conditioning that ranged from beneficial -- controlling the urge to overeat, redirecting dietary choices, breaking a tobacco habit, etc. -- to all the different forms of indoctrination to a social or political cause, or to an organization.