Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 26. Sunrise is 7:02 and sunset 4:23 for 9h 21m 17s of daytime. The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets at 6 PM and the full board at 7 PM. Earlier, Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM.

  On this day in 1945, CARE (then the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe) is founded to send CARE Packages of food relief to Europe after World War II.

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com

  John Davis reports Car-deer accidents in Wisconsin in 2023 are expected to be similar to recent years (‘In the last 15 years, the chances of hitting a deer have increased’): 

Wisconsin drivers are on pace to hit as many deer this year as they have in each of the past three years.

Car-deer accidents in the state have been declining recently according to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. But according to data from an insurance company, there’s still a greater chance of hitting a deer now in Wisconsin than there was 15 years ago.

“Recently, it’s been holding pretty steady,” said David Pabst, director of the Bureau of Transportation Safety for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. “We’re still doing over 16,000 crashes over the last three years, and we’re on that same track right now for 2023.”

Pabst said there have been about 11,000 car-deer accidents as of mid-October of this year. Between 25 and 33 percent of all the state’s car-deer accidents happen in October and November each year. This is the mating season for deer, also known as the rut, and deer are on the move. Most deer accidents this time of year happen in the dark, especially around dawn and dusk.

….

“We’ve always thought of deer hunting as a northern thing and that was certainly the case in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s,” said DNR deer program specialist Jeff Pritzl. “There’s still deer up north, but at the turn of the century, the deer population in the southern half of Wisconsin blossomed and continues to.”

This libertarian blogger uses a Mac, not a PC, but millions of Americans use their PCs for work and gaming. Many gamers enjoy snacks when battling monsters or fighting enemy armies while communicating with other players via headset. Where there’s a will, there’s a way: Steve Mollman reports Doritos is offering gamers AI-powered software that cancels out annoying crunching sounds. Mollam reports: 

Consider eating Doritos while playing video games. For many, gaming and the popular PepsiCo snack go hand-in-hand, but there’s a problem for players communicating via headset mics: crunching sounds. Many complain the noises distract them and hurt their performance.

AI has come the rescue in the form of Doritos Silent, described in a PepsiCo promotional video as “the world’s first AI-augmented snack powered by crunch cancellation.” The idea is that players can munch away without fear of disturbing other players. In addition to the snack there is software available for free download (it only works with Windows PCs for now).

Developing the product took six months and involved artificial intelligence and machine learning analyzing more than 5,000 crunch sounds, according to the snacks-and-beverage giant.

….

Of course, many observers might dismiss Doritos Silent as a trivial development, or a mere marketing ploy. A PC Gamer review called it “profoundly stupid,” while admitting it worked well enough with Doritos, if not always with competing snacks.

Either way, Doritos Silent speaks to how drawn marketers are to the video game industry (including Heineken, which recently offered a gaming PC that doubles as a fridge). Globally this year, that industry is expected to generate $188 billion in revenue, up 2.6% from 2022, according to a report from Newzoo, an Amsterdam-based industry tracker.