In January 2023, short seller Hindenburg Research put out a report claiming that executives at one of India’s largest conglomerates were manipulating the company’s stock price.

The Adani Group and its multibillionaire founder Gautam Adani strenuously deny the accusations, but the report instantly wiped off as much as $140bn from the conglomerate’s market value and sent ripples through the country’s establishment. It also catapulted the New York-based Hindenburg and its founder Nathan Anderson into Wall Street lore.

Few saw it coming. But one that did was a hedge fund in New York almost 13,000 kilometres away from the Indian conglomerate’s headquarters.

Kingdon Capital Management had received a draft of the short seller’s report in November 2022 as part of an agreement it had signed with Hindenburg a year earlier, India’s markets regulator revealed in June.

The hedge fund, which was founded by Mark Kingdon in the 1980s, had set up a special fund in Mauritius and had started building a short position on Adani two weeks before Hindenburg released its report.

Kingdon, which has less than $1bn in assets under management, turned a $22mn profit from the trade. As part of the agreement, Hindenburg received a 25 per cent cut of the spoils. […]

activist short sellers tend to explicitly look for evidence suggesting malfeasance. […] Hindenburg, for example, says that it seeks out situations where there might be some combination of accounting irregularities, undisclosed related-party transactions, and illegal or unethical business or financial reporting practices.

{ Financial Times | Continue reading }

oil on canvas { Francis Bacon, Man in blue IV, 1954 }

Excessive Bell-Ringing By Priest Takes Its Toll On Italian Community

Have we finally found the recipe for making rain? — Research suggests electric shocks could be key to growing raindrops

One in three Americans have high levels of toxic weed-killing chemical in their bodies

Two chemists from the University of Copenhagen have studied which chemical substances are released into liquids by popular types of soft plastic reusable bottles. “We were taken aback by the large amount of chemical substances we found in water after 24 hours in the bottles. There were hundreds of substances in the water – including substances never before found in plastic, as well as substances that are potentially harmful to health. After a dishwasher cycle, there were several thousand.” […] They detected more than 400 different substances from the bottle plastic and over 3,500 substances derived from dishwasher soap. A large portion of these are unknown substances that the researchers have yet to identify. But even of the identified chemicals, the toxicity of at least 70 % remains unknown.

how recycling pee could help to save the world

People See Political Opponents As More Stupid Than Evil

A nursing mom was shocked to discover her armpits were leaking milk. “it’s totally normal for the breast to have tissue that extends into your armpit.”

Sleeping for an extra hour every night can help you lose weight, study finds

Casual sex, also referred to as a hookup, has been associated with a range of negative emotional outcomes for women, including regret, anxiety, depression and social stigma. Gender differences were found for both sexual motivations and emotional outcomes of casual sex, with women generally having more negative emotional outcomes than men.

The somatosensory homunculus shows an exaggerated human figure that illustrates the proportion of the brain devoted to the sense of touch in each part of the body. Until recently, these homunculi have been male due to the lack of information on the female somatosensory cortex. Based on more current brain research, the authors present the first sculpted 3D female somatosensory homunculus

In many cases, human decision-makers are just as much of a black-box as the algorithms that are meant to replace them

“The left hemisphere analyses lifeless parts; the right synthesises the living Gestalt whole.” Here we go again with lateralization nonsense.

It has been said that (in some cases) court judges are more lenient on those accused of crimes if the date of the court hearing falls on the defendant’s birthday. But can things also work in the reverse direction? What if, for example, the judge’s favorite football team have just lost a match?

SpaceX just lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm

At the time of the American Revolution the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ themselves did not yet exist… they originally referred to the respective seating positions of aristocratic and popular factions in the French National Assembly of 1789.”

The Messinian salinity crisis was a geological event during which the Mediterranean Sea went into a cycle of nearly complete desiccation (drying-up) from 5.96 to 5.33 Ma (million years ago). It ended with the Zanclean flood, when the Atlantic refilled the Mediterranean Sea.

Russian teenager, 16, sentenced to five years for alleged plan to target FSB building in Minecraft

The black death, which plagued Europe, West Asia and North Africa from 1347 to 1352, is the most infamous pandemic in history. Historians have estimated that up to 50 percent of Europe’s population died during the pandemic. Now, a new study demonstrates that the plague’s mortality in Europe was not as universal or as widespread as long thought.

“My original starting point with grey squirrel was taste. But it’s also great for the environment,” says Paul Wedgwood, one of Scotland’s leading chefs, whose restaurant on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile has had grey squirrel on the menu since 2008. “It’s mellow, nutty and a bit gamey. It’s just a really nice flavour, and it’s easy to match. Anyone who’s doing rabbit could just easily swap in squirrel”

British tourist reunited with false teeth he lost while vomiting in Spain 11 years ago

Gelignite, or blasting gelatin, is a mixture of nitroglycerin, gun cotton, and a combustible substance like wood pulp. It resembles dynamite (also invented by Alfred Nobel) but can be conveniently molded into shape with the bare hands.

The October 6, 1904 issue of Russian Doctor contained a dispatch about a young woman who “found a cartridge containing this substance in her husband’s trunk and ate it, taking the cartridge for a piece of confectionery.” Despite her husband’s fears, she neither exploded nor expired from the effects of the poison, as summarized in the New York Medical Journal six weeks later.

{ Improbable | Continue reading }

art { Francis Bacon, Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1966 }

Psychoactive Plants in the Bible

[…]

The holy anointing oil is essentially an anxiolytic-hallucinogen. The transdermal application of it led to its absorption and psychoactive effects, even in extremely low doses. […]

Myrrh is a resin that is used widely in the bible. Myrrh contains the terpenes furanoeudesma-1,3-diene and curzarene which are Mu-opioid agonists. This opioid receptor is the same one that morphine activates. This means that inhaling or absorbing myrrh incense can cause a drug reaction.

{ NeuroBrainstorm | Continue reading }

art { Francis Bacon, Portrait of George Dyer Talking, 1966 }

Francis Bacon’s 1969 triptych, “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” sold for $142.4 million at Christie’s, described as the highest price ever paid for an artwork at auction. […]

Sometime in the 1970s the three panels were sold separately. The right-hand panel was bought by a collector in Rome who spent 20 years trying to reunite the triptych. He bought the middle panel from a Paris dealer in the early 1980s. Then, in the late ‘80s, he bought the left and final panel from a collector in Japan. It is also one of just two full-length triptychs that Bacon painted of Freud — the other, from 1966, is missing.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

previously { List of most expensive paintings }

Faking emotions is often necessary for both communicating partners. Van Kleef argued that emotional regulation is affected by social norms in society. People regulate their positive or negative emotions instinctively by decreasing or escalating them, as well by managing them or using controlled processes. Therefore, faking is a possible alternative. It is thought that people fake their emotions to mask their genuine feelings, to avoid a painful truth, or in response to social influence such as peer pressure or ex- pectations and to follow social norms. Such influences may cause individuals to fake their emotions simply to make life more comfortable by pleasing others or avoiding social disapproval. […]

Emotions expressed in an interaction may transmit important information to the observer which may be essential for the relationship. Relationships can be classified in terms of their expected benefits. Clark and Mills distinguished between two types of relationships. In the communal type of relationship (between close friends or family members), the interacting partners experience concern for their partner’s wellbeing. Emotional authenticity is important and crucial for the fulfillment of the emotional needs of both parties in the inter- action; it reflects the meaning and the depth of the relationship. On the other hand, exchange relations are those that take place between associates who are together for the purpose of doing business or working (e.g., colleagues). In these cases the other’s emotional well-being may be irrelevant or even a burden. Thus, in exchange relationships people may prefer others to fake emotions rather than display authentic ones.

Our study investigates anger because anger is the most common negative emotion.

{ Interpersona | Continue reading }

art { Francis Bacon, Study for Self Portrait, 1982-84 }

The great innovations come with side-effects. I have encountered people who said this about our chronic back pains being a side-effect of upright walking. It is a great thing but may have a couple of weak spots. We would actually be surprised if evolution didn’t take some time in a shake down of a new species.

A recent paper in Cell by 20 authors has tackled the question of whether autism is the unfortunate result of the malfunctioning of a relatively new aspect of the human brain.

{ Thoughts on thoughts | Continue reading }

painting { Francis Bacon, Portrait of Michel Leiris, 1976 }

{ Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 }

{ Francis Bacon, Second Version of Triptych 1944, 1988 }

Second Version of Triptych 1944 is a 1988 triptych painted by the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon. It is a reworking of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944, Bacon’s most widely known triptych, and the one which established his reputation as England’s foremost post-war painters. Bacon often painted second versions of his major paintings. In 1988, Bacon completed this near copy of the Three Studies. At 78 × 58 inches, this second version is over twice the size of the original, while the orange background has been replaced by a blood-red hue. His reason for creating this rework remain unclear, although Bacon did say to Richard Cook that he “always wanted to make a larger version of the first [Three Studies…]. I thought it could come off, but I think the first is better. I would have had to use the orange again so as to give a shock, that which red dissolves. But the tedium of doing it perhalps dissuaded me, because mixing that orange with pastel and then crushing it was an enormous job.”

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953 | Maurizio Cattelan, La Nona Hora, 1999 }

related:

{ The Pope of Greenwich Village | video | jump to the 2:00 mark }