Ex-Meta employee Madelyn Machado recently posted a TikTok video claiming that she was getting paid $190,000 a year to do nothing. Another Meta employee, also on TikTok, posted that “Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us, and then they were just kind of like hoarding us like Pokémon cards.”

The big innovation in crypto in early 2024, the thing that has driven up prices, is anticipation that the US Securities and Exchange Commission will approve a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund this month. Then ETF providers — including traditional financial firms like BlackRock and Fidelity — will be able to hold Bitcoins in a pot, and institutional and retail investors will be able to buy and sell shares of that pot to get exposure to Bitcoin’s price without actually owning Bitcoin. This, it is thought, will increase the price of Bitcoin. […] Some investors want to be crypto investors, but a lot of institutional investors very much do not — they do not want to spend time or money on understanding blockchains or keeping track of private keys or complying with SEC requirements about crypto custody — but still want to own Bitcoin. Owning regular shares of stock that happen to be Bitcoins is, for them, very useful; it domesticates Bitcoin into the regular financial system.

Firm develops jet fuel made entirely from human poo

What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year?

What Horrible Things Did We Do To Our Penises Last Year?

In 1967, Singapore’s political and administrative leadership unexpectedly confronted a ‘pre-modern’ public health scare that threatened their still fragile aspirations for national development. Hundreds of people suddenly became overwhelmed by intense alarm. Sufferers (mostly men, but sometimes women; almost entirely ethnically Chinese) suddenly believed that their genitals were disappearing. This medical condition, known as Koro, was sparked by a false rumour among residents of Singapore that eating pork from pigs vaccinated against swine fever caused genital shrinkage. [PDF | more]

I moved to Finland after reading it’s the happiest place on Earth. It’s exceeded all my expectations.

A list of ideas that help explain how the world works (90% of everything is crap, noticing an idea everywhere you look as soon as it’s brought to your attention in a way that makes you overestimate its prevalence, avoiding effort because you don’t want to deal with the emotional pain of that effort failing, people can’t be fully rational because your brain is a hormone machine…)

Our results indicate that countries with the greater meat intake have greater life expectancy and lower child mortality. Over the last 50 years, although the associations between meat eating and illness are circumstantial and controversial to some extent, they have prompted the spread of vegetarianism and veganism, based on the assumption that non-meat diets provide more health benefits than diets that include meat. The suggestion that vegetarian diet improves longevity is questionable. […] It is worth noting that, in this study, countries on the Mediterranean diet have a greater life expectancy if there is more total meat in their diet. […] Meat contains high protein with all the essential amino acids, and is a good source of minerals (iron, phosphorus, selenium and zinc) and vitamins (B12, B6, K, choline, niacin, riboflavin). Simply put – a human animal consuming a body of another animal gets practically all constituent compounds of its own body. Recently, massive agricultural production and advanced food manufacturing technologies have made it possible to replace the beneficial nutrients of meat with other agricultural industry products and/or synthetic chemicals. For example, proteins are easy to obtain by incorporating nuts and beans into diet. Vitamin B12 can be absorbed adequately from cheese, eggs, milk, and artificially fortified pills, and iron can be found in legumes, grains, nuts, and a range of vegetables.84,85 Relying on meat nutrient replacements and available food products, well-planned vegetarian diets, including vegan diets, are nutritionally adequate and are appropriate for various individuals during all stages of life, but it is only because their nutritional composition adequately imitates and replaces what is commonly provided by meat.

New research links high salt consumption to risk of Type 2 diabetes

A retired nurse had her life savings stolen from her bank account after inadvertently downloading a malicious mobile app (PDF reader)

New Jersey Used COVID Relief Funds to Buy Banned Chinese Surveillance Cameras

23andMe tells victims it’s their fault that their data was breached

A biohybrid computer combining a “brain organoid” and a traditional AI was able to

According to a new study, the human brain has two separate ways of processing numbers of things: one system for quantities of four or fewer, and another system for five and up.

Twitch will ban people pretending to be naked. The platform already prohibits nudity, but Twitch’s new attire policy, which goes into effect today, also doesn’t allow streamers to “imply or suggest that they are fully or partially nude”

Gong Hengliang, who has been a “fish beautician” for 4 years, performs cosmetic surgery on an Asian arowana fish in 2020 in Lanzhou, China. — The crazy market for the world’s most expensive pet fish

Driverless cars immune from traffic tickets in California under current laws

Generative AI systems produce materials that infringe on copyright. They do not inform users when they do so. My guess is that none of this can easily be fixed. […] In all likelihood, the New York Times lawsuit is just the first of many.

Get Ready for Corporate Digital Currency — Facebook failed, but another tech giant might soon pull it off

Lying lowers people’s self-esteem and increases negative experienced affect

Our results suggest that maternal use of hormonal contraception may be associated with autism risk in children, especially for the progestin-only products.

There are few cases of creative and intellectual theft more egregious than the origins of the billion-dollar grossing Monopoly. The short version: a brilliant woman economist invented an anti-capitalist board game that was stolen by a lying, opportunistic man and repackaged as capitalist family fun. […] Included in every new Monopoly box for decades was a story about how Darrow invented the game while tinkering around in his basement

Why are Bloody Marys only for the morning?

On June 14, 2015, sheriff’s deputies in Greene County, Missouri, United States, found the body of Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard (née Pitre; born May 3, 1967, in Chackbay, Louisiana) face down in the bedroom of her house just outside Springfield, lying on the bed in a pool of blood from stab wounds inflicted several days earlier. There was no sign of her daughter, Gypsy Rose, who, according to Blanchard, had chronic conditions including leukemia, asthma, and muscular dystrophy and who had the “mental capacity of a seven-year-old due to brain damage” as the result of premature birth.

After reading troubling Facebook posts earlier in the evening, concerned neighbors notified the police, reporting that Dee Dee might have fallen victim to foul play and that Gypsy Rose, whose wheelchair and medications were still in the house, might have been abducted. The next day, police found Gypsy Rose in Wisconsin, where she had traveled with her then-boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn, whom she had met online. When investigators announced that she was actually an adult and did not have any of the physical and mental health issues her mother claimed she had, public outrage over the possible abduction of a disabled girl gave way to shock and some sympathy for Gypsy Rose.

Further investigation found that some of the doctors who had examined Gypsy Rose had found no evidence of the claimed disorders. One physician suspected that Dee Dee had factitious disorder imposed on another, a mental disorder in which a parent or other caretaker exaggerates, fabricates, or induces illness in a person under their care to obtain sympathy or attention. Dee Dee had changed her name after her family, who suspected she had poisoned her stepmother, confronted her about how she treated Gypsy Rose. Nonetheless, many people accepted her situation as true, and the two benefited from the efforts of charities such as Children’s Mercy Hospital, Habitat for Humanity, Ronald McDonald House, and the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Dee Dee had been making her daughter pass herself off as younger and pretend to be disabled and chronically ill, subjecting her to unnecessary surgery and medication, and controlling her through physical and psychological abuse. […]

Many people who met Gypsy were charmed by her. Her 5-foot (150 cm) height, nearly toothless mouth, large glasses, and high, childlike voice reinforced the perception that she had all the problems her mother claimed she did. Dee Dee regularly shaved Gypsy’s head to mimic the hairless appearance of a chemotherapy patient, allegedly telling Gypsy that since her medication would eventually cause her hair to fall out, it was best to shave it in advance; Gypsy often wore wigs or hats to cover her baldness. When they left the house, Dee Dee often took an oxygen tank and feeding tube with them; Gypsy was fed the children’s liquid nutrition supplement PediaSure well into her 20s. […]

Marc Feldman, an international expert on factitious disorders, said this was the first case he knew of in which an abused child killed an abusive parent. Gypsy Rose pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and served 8 years of a 10-year sentence. She was granted parole in September 2023 and was released from prison on December 28, 2023. After a brief trial in November 2018, Godejohn was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

related { Most viewed pages of en.wikipedia.org, daily }

CLEAR, a publicly traded company, allows its subscribers to bypass the security line at more than 50 U.S. airports.

Comment on schneier.com: Google no longer needs to collect and store the data from maps on their servers because they have been working with the NSA for a few years now on “how to ID any location on the planet without a geolocation reference attached to the image”.

how to find a street from an album cover in 2 minutes

In China, up to 90 percent of teenagers and young adults are myopic. In the 1950s the figure was as low as 10 percent. A 2012 study in Seoul found that an astonishing 96.5 percent of 19-year-old men were nearsighted. Among high schoolers in Taiwan, it’s around 90 percent. In the US and Europe, myopia rates across all ages are well below 50 percent, but they’ve risen sharply in recent decades. It’s estimated that by 2050, half the world’s population will need glasses, contacts, or surgery to see across a room. High myopia is now the leading cause of blindness in Japan, China, and Taiwan.

Until now, most of the focus on antimicrobial resistance has been on the inappropriate use of existing antibiotics and the dwindling global supply of new ones as pharmaceutical companies have steadily withdrawn from the market. These have certainly been the main drivers of drug resistance over time, but conflict is now also playing an increasingly significant role, because of its potential to drastically accelerate the emergence and spread of drug-resistant bugs

NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances — The suit seeks nothing less than the erasure of both any GPT instances that the parties have trained using material from the Times, as well as the destruction of the datasets that were used for the training. It also asks for a permanent injunction to prevent similar conduct in the future. The Times also wants money, lots and lots of money: “statutory damages, compensatory damages, restitution, disgorgement, and any other relief that may be permitted by law or equity.”

Copyright for original Mickey Mouse persona to run out 1 January 2024

How to perfectly crack an egg (with one hand)

the trapezoid-shaped Chrysler Building

Burger King in Brazil has launched a “Hangover Whopper” campaign that provides hungover consumers with discounts on the brand’s sandwiches. Accessible through a microsite and the brand’s mobile app, the effort uses facial recognition technology to scan a consumer’s face, with the degree of hangover detected corresponding with the size of the recommended combo and discount offered.

Our results show that humans engage in self-sniffing behaviour quite often […] respondents with lower standards of hygienic habits engage significantly more in intimate self-inspection (sniffing body parts such as genitals, anus, or navel). Interestingly, individuals who reported more frequent health issues sniff more frequently areas such as the armpits, feet, or own breath (Social acceptability self-inspection), probably to check for possible changes in smell due to illness.

most viewers either did not care about the male ejaculation or its placement, or preferred for it to be in the female partner’s vagina. In contrast to common assumptions found in the literature, very few viewers expressed a preference for ejaculation on a woman’s face or in her mouth and many of them found such practices disturbing.

research suggests that normal body temperature has decreased from 98.6 degrees (37 degrees Celsius) by about 0.05 degrees every decade since the 19th century to about 97.9 degrees (36.6), probably the result of better living conditions and health care that reduce inflammation, which causes temperature to rise

Moderna CEO Says Melanoma Vaccine Could Be Available By 2025

Patients are more likely to fall, get new infections, or experience other forms of harm during their stay in a hospital after it is acquired by a private equity firm, study

Not all animals experience ageing during their lives. Some animals’ bodies do not gradually degenerate as they get older the way our bodies do. But for humans once they reach about age 30 their chance of dying doubles roughly every eight years. […] the reason humans age so markedly may be due to the fact our ancestors evolved during the time of the dinosaurs. […] For 100 million years, during the time of the dinosaurs, mammals were at or near the bottom of the food chain. Mammals were more often prey than predators. During this time there was no reason for mammals to keep processes and genes related to long life, such as DNA repair and tissue regeneration systems. My longevity bottleneck hypothesis proposes that repair and regeneration systems were lost, mutated or inactivated by the evolution of early mammals.

‘Zombie deer disease’ epidemic spreads in Yellowstone as scientists raise fears it may jump to humans — Warnings that ‘slow-moving disaster’ in North America raises chances of fatal mad cow-type disease jumping species barrier

An international team of researchers looked for all the cases of infections acquired in a laboratory or times a pathogen accidentally “escaped” from a laboratory setting. They found 309 laboratory-acquired or -associated infections from 51 pathogens; eight of these cases were fatal, including one of “mad cow” disease. The 16 incidents they found of a pathogen escaping a lab setting included well-publicized accidents such as the time where a West Nile researcher became infected with the first SARS virus in 2003 after handling contaminated samples in Singapore.

Crown shyness is a feature observed in some tree species, in which the crowns of fully stocked trees do not touch each other, instead forming a canopy with channel-like gaps

By the end of the 18th century, however, the Enlightenment dream had become a nightmare. […] Religious superstition was replaced by political enthusiasm. Just as soon as people stopped being willing to kill and die for their religion, they started killing and dying for their country. Human beings are naturally violent creatures, simultaneously suspicious of difference and perfectly content to live within oppressive systems that provide some degree of affluence.

Tech bubbles come in two varieties: The ones that leave something behind, and the ones that leave nothing behind. […]

cryptocurrency/NFTs, or the complex financial derivatives that led up to the 2008 financial crisis. These crises left behind very little reusable residue. […]

World­Com was a gigantic fraud and it kicked off a fiber-optic bubble, but when WorldCom cratered, it left behind a lot of fiber that’s either in use today or waiting to be lit up. On balance, the world would have been better off without the WorldCom fraud, but at least something could be salvaged from the wreckage.

That’s unlike, say, the Enron scam or the Uber scam, both of which left the world worse off than they found it in every way. Uber burned $31 billion in investor cash, mostly from the Saudi royal family, to create the illusion of a viable business. Not only did that fraud end up screwing over the retail investors who made the Saudis and the other early investors a pile of money after the company’s IPO – but it also destroyed the legitimate taxi business and convinced cities all over the world to starve their transit systems of investment because Uber seemed so much cheaper. Uber continues to hemorrhage money, resorting to cheap accounting tricks to make it seem like they’re finally turning it around, even as they double the price of rides and halve driver pay (and still lose money on every ride). The market can remain irrational longer than any of us can stay solvent, but when Uber runs out of suckers, it will go the way of other pump-and-dumps like WeWork.

What kind of bubble is AI? […]

Accountants might value an AI tool’s ability to draft a tax return. Radiologists might value the AI’s guess about whether an X-ray suggests a cancerous mass. But with AIs’ tendency to “hallucinate” and confabulate, there’s an increasing recognition that these AI judgments require a “human in the loop” to carefully review their judgments. In other words, an AI-supported radiologist should spend exactly the same amount of time considering your X-ray, and then see if the AI agrees with their judgment, and, if not, they should take a closer look. AI should make radiology more expensive, in order to make it more accurate. […]

Cruise, the “self-driving car” startup that was just forced to pull its cars off the streets of San Francisco, pays 1.5 staffers to supervise every car on the road. In other words, their AI replaces a single low-waged driver with 1.5 more expensive remote supervisors – and their cars still kill people. […]

Just take one step back and look at the hype through this lens. All the big, exciting uses for AI are either low-dollar (helping kids cheat on their homework, generating stock art for bottom-feeding publications) or high-stakes and fault-intolerant (self-driving cars, radiology, hiring, etc.).

{ Locus/Cory Doctorow | Continue reading }

Female visitor inadvertently locked overnight at Orange County jail. Sheriff’s deputies did not notice the woman had fallen asleep in a jail visiting booth

beautiful people are more likely to trigger disappointment since they do not live up to the high expectations others put into them.

New nuclear deflection simulations advance planetary defense against asteroid threats

Did he own a tank, live in a bank and do a DJ set using solely sandpaper and a food mixer?

Cryonics — attempting to cryopreserve the human body — is widely considered a pseudoscience. […] When a cryonic patient dies, a race begins to prepare and cool the body before it decays and then to place it inside a Dewar: a thermos bottle full of liquid nitrogen (LN). The inner vessel of the Dewar contains a body, or bodies, wrapped in several layers of insulating material, attached to a stretcher, and suspended in LN. The head is oriented downward to keep the brain the coldest and most stable. […] So far, bodies that have been examined following cryopreservation are hopelessly beyond repair.

What is Generative AI? It’s going to alter everything about how we use the internet

Who cares if AI books are reviewed by AI critics? […] Much like advertising, another unwanted kind of discourse, automated content — which is intrinsically intrusive, interruptive, the voice of someone who doesn’t really know what they are talking about but insists on being heard anyway — will be injected into all occasions for communication, polluting the discursive space between any subject and object and pre-empting the possibility of intersubjectivity with endless loops of noise that make it so that we can’t hear ourselves think. The skills necessary to communicate with other people or to even carry out an inner dialogue with oneself will presumably atrophy as we are cocooned in thickets of automatic language aimed at eliminating the need for any effort of attunement. AI books will read themselves and tell us what they were about, and we won’t be able to get them to shut up about it.

Risk of penile fractures rises at Christmas, doctors find “This injury tends to occur during wild sex – particularly in positions where you’re not in direct eye contact [with your partner] […] When [patients] present to their doctor their penis often looks like an eggplant”

Tiny “biobots” made from human windpipe cells encouraged damaged neural tissue to repair itself in a lab experiment — potentially foreshadowing a future in which creations like this patrol our bodies, healing damage, delivering drugs, and more.

From plaque cleaning to drug delivery, nanoelectronics are rapidly developing, with major implications for medicine

A tiny ball of brain cells hums with activity as it sits atop an array of electrodes. For two days, it receives a pattern of electrical zaps, each stimulation encoding the speech peculiarities of eight people. By day three, it can discriminate between speakers. Dubbed Brainoware, the system raises the bar for biocomputing by tapping into 3D brain organoids, or “mini-brains.” These models, usually grown from human stem cells, rapidly expand into a variety of neurons knitted into neural networks. […] In another test, the system successfully tackled a complex math problem that’s challenging for AI.

A car dealership added an AI chatbot to its site. Then all hell broke loose. Pranksters discovered that a local car dealer’s AI chatbot could be used as a way to access ChatGPT. People shared attempts to trick the chatbot into selling them a new Chevy for as little as $1.

CaliExpress in Pasadena touted as world’s first fully autonomous, AI-powered restaurant

A stalker haphazardly posing as a cop demanded sensitive data from Verizon. Verizon complied, and the stalker drove to an address armed with a knife.

“In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts’ui Pen, he chooses — simultaneously — all of them” (The Garden of Forking Paths, 1941). Because Borges could not possibly write this almost unfathomable book using a pencil or a typewriter, he instead chose to write about the book as an idea. He can imagine the book without writing it down in the same way that we can imagine the number π without writing down all its digits. Can a computer provide an approximation of the garden of all plausible texts like it provides approximations of the transcendental number π? PDF

The once-prophesized future where cheap, AI-generated trash content floods out the hard work of real humans is already here, and is already taking over Facebook.

Although people can identify judgment biases and their consequences, they tend to perceive their peers as more susceptible to such biases than themselves: a phenomenon called “bias blind spot”

Higher pathological narcissism is associated with greater involvement in feminist activism, US sample (N = 458)

This study addresses the challenge of measuring the stream of consciousness by introducing a classification system, CoMS-5T, encompassing five mental states: focus, task-related interference, external distraction, daydream, and blank. [PDF]

Light may cause water to evaporate (even without heat)

Daily vocal exercise is necessary for peak performance singing in a songbird

Here we tested whether alcohol exposure affected female mate-preference, choosiness, and copulation duration in the fly Drosophila simulans, while simultaneously testing for genetic variation in these effects. We found that alcohol exposure did not affect copulation duration, but did weaken mate-preference, as females copulated with a broader range of males after exposure, and it tended to reduce female choosiness as females mated more quickly.

A turbo-jet engine from a British Airways Concorde is being sold to the public on eBay

A marketing team within media giant Cox Media Group (CMG) claims it has the capability to listen to ambient conversations of consumers through embedded microphones in smartphones, smart TVs, and other devices to gather data and use it to target ads. […] Until now, there was no evidence that such a capability actually existed, but its myth permeated due to how sophisticated other ad tracking methods have become. More: MindSift has been deleting details about its technology from the internet in recent days, but two of the three founders of the company go into detail about their technology on a small podcast. […] Most episodes of the podcast have under 50 views on YouTube.

Without realizing it, most salesclerks do their job using something called the Greedy Algorithm, in which the changemaker starts with the largest possible coin and works down. Thus, for 41 cents the clerk hands back a quarter, a dime, a nickel and a penny. The Shallit system assumes that the clerk abandons Greedy in favor of a mental calculation that considers all possible combinations of coins and selects the optimal one–here, two 18-cent coins and a nickel. ■ Counting all possible change amounts from 0 to 99 cents, Shallit found that the average transaction, if handled in optimal fashion by the 7-Eleven clerk, involves 4.7 coins. It just so happens that if the Mint ditched the dime and added an 18-cent coin, the average number of coins would fall to 3.9. ■ What This Country Needs is an 18¢ piece

Snacks constitute almost a quarter of a day’s calories in U.S. adults and account for about one-third of daily added sugar, new study suggests

‘You didn’t just succeed, you Exceled’: Sydney man dubbed the ‘Annihilator’ wins spreadsheet world championship

Another wild story is about Napoleon. He was dead and they did an autopsy. At the time, the doctor who did the autopsy thought, “I know, I’ve got a good idea. I’m going to cut off this man’s penis.” And he did. And he handed it to a priest who smuggled it off Saint Helena island. It was passed between booksellers—booksellers are strange people—and put on display. Eventually it was bought by a urologist, and it now lives in a basement in New Jersey.

New Paper Argues That the Universe Began with Two Big Bangs

Researchers have made significant strides in understanding the neurological process of dying. The ‘wave of death’ in the brain, marking the transition to total cessation of brain activity, originates in the neocortex’s layer 5. This wave can be reversed if resuscitation occurs within a specific time window, indicating the possibility of preserving brain function. The study provides a deeper understanding of the neural mechanisms as death approaches, challenging the notion of a flat EEG as a definitive marker of ceased brain functions.

hormone made by fetus may cause nausea and vomiting during pregnancy

Developing driverless cars has been AI’s greatest test. Today we can say it has failed miserably, despite the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars in attempts to produce a viable commercial vehicle. […] First to go was Uber after an accident in which one of its self-driving cars killed Elaine Herzberg in Phoenix, Arizona. […] Uber’s business model had been predicated on the idea that within a few years it would dispense with drivers and provide a fleet of robotaxis. That plan died with Herzberg, and Uber soon pulled out of all its driverless taxi trials. Now Cruise, the company bought by General Motors to spearhead its development of autonomous vehicles, is retreating almost as rapidly. The trigger was also an accident. […] Tesla is also in defence mode. It has long marketed its driver aid software as “full self-driving”, but it is nothing of the sort. Drivers must stay alert and ready to take over, even though the car can operate itself much of the time, particularly on motorways. In the US, where there have been numerous accidents with Teslas in “full self-driving” mode, the manufacturer is facing several lawsuits. […] If this is the best that AI can do, maybe fears about its capabilities and its ability to put humans out of work are misplaced.

New York City’s Forgotten Neighborhood A 12-block neighborhood just 10 miles from Manhattan’s glittering towers is perhaps best known for constant flooding, vacant cars and a mob graveyard. But hope for change may be stirring. […] Residents call it The Hole because it sits 10 to 15 feet below the surrounding streets, creating a natural funnel for rainfall. It’s also long served as a graveyard or, occasionally, a parking lot for all sorts of industrial equipment. The city says it has already towed away nearly 100 abandoned or illegally parked vehicles and removed more than 100,000 pounds of trash from vacant lots and illegal dumps.

OnlyFans subscribers can access exclusive and often pornographic content that models, ordinary people, and adult film stars make available in exchange for an average monthly sum that can start from $10 per month and reach up to $30. But the biggest profits lie elsewhere: in personalized chats with subscribers. […] as OnlyFans models accumulate hundreds of thousands of followers, they lose the ability to communicate with everyone. That’s where the chatters come in. They are specialized workers who hold conversations posing as the stars of the show […] They send new hires scripts that predict conversations, personality guides for each model, and a small dictionary explaining their subscribers’ fetishes. “You have to know how to portray the model, speak like them, and know their background,” he explains. “Sometimes you go crazy with so many personalities,” Hernández confesses. He is currently a chatter for three models. […] Hernández confesses that “part of the job of talking to sexually aroused men” is constantly receiving photos of their penises.

A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways. The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth.

The Emergence of Full-Body Gaussian Splat Deepfake Humans

The previous plague, in the view of Martin Scorsese, was the Hollywood superhero-franchise blockbuster. “That’s not cinema,” the auteur-cinephile told Empire magazine in 2019. “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks.”

TV detector vans are vans which contain equipment that can detect the presence of television sets in use. These vans have been used by the General Post Office and later by contractors working for the BBC to enforce the television licensing system in the UK, the Channel Islands and on the Isle of Man.

List of shoe-throwing incidents

Woman shot in butt by own gun after sneaking it into MRI. The magnet attracted the handgun, which fired a round and left the patient wounded.

Ex-commissioner for facial recognition tech joins Facewatch firm he approved

Pharmacies share medical data with police without a warrant, inquiry finds — Pharmacies’ records hold some of the most intimate details of their customers’ personal lives, including years-old medical conditions and the prescriptions they take for mental health and birth control.

Why scientists are making transparent wood (smartphone screens, insulated windows…)

The brain undergoes a great “rewiring” after age 40

Twenty-year study confirms California forests are healthier when burned — or thinned

Twitter Is Just Running Ads for Stealing Semen Now — “You don’t need his permission to get pregnant”

Crime has not just proliferated online but mutated. […] You are now ten times more likely to be a victim of fraud than of theft. Romance fraud is the fastest-growing category, increasing by almost a third last year (to £93m) according to UK Finance, which collates data on behalf of high street banks. Two in five online daters have been asked for money, and over half of those gave it.

One air traffic controller went into work drunk this summer and joked about “making big money buzzed.” Another routinely smoked marijuana during breaks. A third employee threatened violence and then “aggressively pushed” a colleague who was directing airplanes. […] nationwide staffing shortage, driven by high turnover rates and budget constraints, has led many controllers to work extended hours, including six-day weeks and 10-hour days. This staffing crisis has resulted in a fatigued, distracted, and demoralized workforce, increasing the likelihood of mistakes and safety concerns. […] The FAA reported 503 significant air traffic control lapses in the fiscal year ending September 30, a 65% increase over the previous year, despite only a 4% rise in air traffic.

Largest brain study of 62,454 scans identifies drivers of brain aging […] Schizophrenia, cannabis use, and alcohol abuse are just several disorders that are related to accelerated brain aging

Circe is the daughter of Helios, god of the sun. She is described as polupharmakos, one who works with “many drugs”

From Unicorns to Zombies: Tech Start-Ups Run Out of Time and Money — WeWork raised more than $11 billion in funding as a private company. Olive AI, a health care startup, gathered $852 million. Convoy, a freight startup, raised $900 million. And Veev, a home construction startup, amassed $647 million. In the last six weeks, they all filed for bankruptcy or shut down. They are the most recent failures in a tech startup collapse that investors say is only beginning.

The Year A.I. Ate the Internet

This cyborg cockroach could be the future of earthquake search and rescue

Jellyfish don’t have brains. They instead have simple nervous systems dispersed throughout their transparent bodies. […] The researchers found that the jellyfish learn with the same repetition rate of a fruit fly or mouse.

Australia’s animals beat the summer heat using mucous, saliva and precision engineering

This timeline traces our evolving understanding of time through a history of observations in CULTURE, PHYSICS, TIMEKEEPING and BIOLOGY.

Why read Chateaubriand?

For a quarter century, Gerry Fialka, an experimental film-maker from Venice, California, has hosted a book club devoted to a single text: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, one of the most famously difficult texts in literary history.

Starting in 1995, between 10 and 30 people would show up to monthly meetings at a local library. At first they read two pages a month, eventually slowing to just one page per discussion. At that pace, the group – which now meets on Zoom – reached the final page in October. It took them 28 years. […]

This November, they started back on page three.

“There is no next book,” Fialka told me. “We’re only reading one book. Forever.”

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

Finnegans Wake was first published in 1939 and it is widely regarded as being one of the most challenging novels in English literature.

Written in a torrent of idiosyncratic language over more than 600 pages, it includes made-up words in several languages, puns and arcane allusions to Greek mythology.

{ The Times | Continue reading }

The club is among several around the world devoted to collectively untangling the meaning of Joyce’s 1939 novel, which tells many stories simultaneously, and is dense with neologisms and allusions. Critics have considered the work perplexing; a review in The New Yorker suggested it might have been written by a “god, talking in his sleep.” […]

Margot Norris, a professor emerita of English at the University of California, Irvine, and a Joyce scholar, described “Finnegans Wake” as “dramatic poetry” that instead of following a typical plot plays with the very nature of language. “We get words in ‘Finnegans Wake’ that aren’t words,” Dr. Norris said, referring to a passage of seemingly nonsense phrases: “This is Roo- shious balls. This is a ttrinch. This is mistletropes. This is Canon Futter with the popynose.” The novel, she added, “draws your attention to language, but the language isn’t going to be exactly the language that you know.” […]

“People think they’re reading a book, they’re not,” he said. “They’re breathing and living together as human beings in a room; looking at printed matter, and figuring out what printed matter does to us.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

previously { Joyce invented a unique polyglot-language or idioglossia solely for the purpose of this work. }

Persons with psychiatric disorders were approximately 3 to 4 times more likely than their siblings without psychiatric disorders to be either subjected to violence or to perpetrate violence […] with the sole exception of schizophrenia, which was not associated with the risk of subjection to violence.

Lantern Bioworks says they have a cure for tooth decay. Their product is a genetically modified bacterium which infects your mouth, outcompetes all the tooth-decay-causing bacteria, and doesn’t cause tooth decay itself. If it works, it could make cavities a thing of the past

Light can be reflected not only in space but also in time

Interview with Nick Bostrom “I think AI is likely to greatly increase the ability of centralised powers to keep track of what people are thinking and saying. We’ve already had, for a couple of decades, the ability to collect huge amounts of information. You can eavesdrop on people’s phone calls or social-media postings — and it turns out governments do that. But what can you do with that information? So far, not that much. You can map out the network of who is talking to whom. And then, if there is a particular individual of concern, you could assign some analyst to read through their emails. With AI technology, you could simultaneously analyse everybody’s political opinions in a sophisticated way, using sentiment analysis. You could probably form a pretty good idea of what each citizen thinks of the government or the current leader if you had access to their communications. So you could have a kind of mass manipulation, but instead of sending out one campaign message to everybody, you could have customised persuasion messages for each individual. And then, of course, you can combine that with physical surveillance systems like facial recognition, gait recognition and credit card information. If you imagine all of this information feeding into one giant model, I think you will have a pretty good idea of what each person is up to, what and who they know, but also what they are thinking and intending to do. If you have some sufficiently powerful regime in place, it might then implement these measures and then, perhaps, make itself immune to overthrow.”

Google’s new Gemini AI model is getting a mixed reception after its big debut yesterday, but users may have less confidence in the company’s tech or integrity after finding out that the most impressive demo of Gemini was pretty much faked.

Apple report finds steep increase in data breaches, ransomware […] One in four people in the US had their health data exposed in a data breach during the first nine months of 2023.

“There’s been studies that swab the bottom of shoes and something like 99% of the shoes test positive for fecal material.”

To my surprise, this not only hasn’t collapsed, but has attracted people outside the usual prediction market community — Manifold founded a dating site, manifold.love. The idea is, you bet on who would be a good match, and make (play) money if they end up having a second date or continuing on to a relationship.

The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets

Wasabi, beloved on sushi, linked to “really substantial” boost in memory, Japanese study finds Half of them took 100 milligrams of wasabi extract at bedtime, with the rest receiving a placebo. After three months, the treated group registered “significant” boosts in two aspects of cognition, working (short-term) memory, and the longer-lasting episodic memory, based on standardized assessments for language skills, concentration and ability to carry out simple tasks. No improvement was seen in other areas of cognition, such as inhibitory control (the ability to stay focused), executive function or processing speed.

Bottlenose dolphins can sense electric fields, study shows — Many creatures in the animal kingdom are able to sense an electric field—some sharks and the platypus, for example—but only one type of marine mammal has been found to have the ability: the Guiana dolphin. In this new effort, the research team wondered if other types of dolphins have the ability. […] The ability to detect electric current likely helps bottlenose dolphins to detect and capture prey, and might also help them navigate using the Earth’s electric field.

Push notifications can reveal private information and governments can essentially access this data if they want.

Interview with Francesca Mani — In October, Francesca Mani was one of reportedly more than 30 girls at Westfield High School in New Jersey who were victims of deepfake pornography. Boys at the school had taken photos of Francesca and her classmates and manipulated them with artificial intelligence to create sexually explicit images of them without their consent. […] 15-year-old Francesca started speaking out and calling on lawmakers to do something about the broader problem. Her efforts are already starting to pay off with new momentum behind proposals for state and federal legislation.

San Francisco now at 35% office vacancy rate, highest ever recorded

New theory claims to unite Einstein’s gravity with quantum mechanics — Modern physics is founded upon two pillars: quantum theory on the one hand, which governs the smallest particles in the universe, and Einstein’s theory of general relativity on the other, which explains gravity through the bending of spacetime. But these two theories are in contradiction with each other and a reconciliation has remained elusive for over a century.

ChatGPT will provide more detailed and accurate responses if you pretend to tip it, according to a new study

23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9 million users

A study had found that living in a private rental property accelerates the biological ageing process by more than two weeks every year. The research found renting had worse effects on biological age than being unemployed (adding 1.4 weeks per year), obesity (adding 1 week per year), or being a former smoker (adding about 1.1 weeks). […] Biological ageing refers to cumulative damage to the body’s tissues and cells, irrespective of chronological age.

The Time Julius Caesar Was Captured by Pirates — After 38 days, the ransom was delivered and Caesar went free.

• You buy a stock, its value keeps going up, you don’t sell it and you don’t pay taxes.

• If you need cash, you go to your broker and take out a loan, secured by the value of the stock.

• If the stock keeps going up, you never pay back the loan, and you can borrow more money if you want.

• Eventually you die, your heirs get the stock, and they don’t pay taxes on your gains. (This is called the “basis step-up”: When you inherit stock, the IRS pretends that you paid market value for it, so you don’t have to pay taxes on the previous gains.)

This is sometimes called the “buy, borrow, die” tax strategy.

{ Bloomberg/Matt Levine | Continue reading }

Harvard University dismantled its prestigious team of online disinformation experts after a foundation run by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated $500 million to the university

“The concept of normal sleep does change as we age, and recognizing these shifts is essential for maintaining optimal health.” The real culprit to watch out for as we age isn’t the amount of sleep, but quality of it.

Just like LDL cholesterol, high levels of lipoprotein(a) in your blood raises your risk of heart disease. Unlike LDL cholesterol, your Lp(a) level is determined almost entirely by genetics, which means little can be done to change it. Pharma giant Eli Lilly recently released the results of a phase 1 trial of an experimental drug called lepodisiran that lowers participants’ high Lp(a) levels by as much as 96%.

Male mosquitoes likely used to suck blood too — The origin of blood feeding in insects is something of a mystery. Scientists suspect that at some point, insects that evolved sharp mouthparts to suck sap from plants turned towards animals. Current-day male mosquitoes feed on nectar from plants and generally avoid blood even when it’s offered in the lab.

Scientists have spent 18 years looking for the elusive Cross Seamount beaked whale — a potentially new species they’ve heard but never seen

Europe’s commercial ports are top entry points for cocaine flooding in at record rates. The work of a Dutch hacker, who was hired by drug traffickers to penetrate port IT networks, reveals how this type of smuggling has become easier than ever.

I am making a web service to print that video. [PrintThatVideo.com]

Madness and James Joyce

researchers have almost always taken participants’ identified age at the time of their first memory at face value. But these age estimates seem to be vulnerable to consistent errors.

As a consequence, the long-standing belief of when earliest memories begin may be wrong, and memories may be much earlier than prior research suggests. […]

Thus, if someone thinks that they remember an event that occurred when they were 3 or 4 years of age, they were probably much younger. In other words, many people can remember back to when they were 2 years of age or even younger, but do not realize it because of systematic errors in memory dating and because they only tried to recall a single memory.

{ Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition | Continue reading }