Facial recognition cameras installed in UK school canteens

Hooters under fire over new ‘crotch string’ uniform shorts

According to economist George Taylor’s hemline index theory, the length of women’s skirts and dresses can be indicative of the direction of financial markets. Meaning, hemlines rise in times of economic prosperity and elongate when the economy slows.

Is the Hemline Index Actually Real?

Emotion in relation to ham varied. FaceReader was used to determine the facial expression.

Do elites capture foreign aid? This paper documents that aid disbursements to highly aid-dependent countries coincide with sharp increases in bank deposits in offshore financial centers known for bank secrecy and private wealth management, but not in other financial centers.

Piece by piece, the mythology around ridesharing is falling apart. Uber and Lyft promised ubiquitous self-driving cars by as soon as this year. They promised an end to private car ownership. They promised to reduce congestion in the largest cities. They promised consistently affordable rides. They promised to boost public transit use. They promised profitable business models. They promised a surfeit of well-paying jobs. Heck, they even promised flying cars. Well, none of that has gone as promised. […] Uber and Lyft envisioned a future where software algorithms would push each car to host three or more passengers, easing traffic and providing a complement to public transit options. Instead, […] The duration of traffic jams increased by nearly 5 percent in urban areas since Uber and Lyft moved in. […] The efficiencies of ride hailing were supposed to all but end car ownership — instead vehicle sales are on the rise again this year, after a down year in 2020. [NY Times]

When companies start secret projects it’s common that everyone involved has to sign an NDA [Non-disclosure agreement]. The development of the original iPhone was so secret that people had to sign an NDA in order to sign the iPhone’s NDA

People Are Taking Out Loans Against Their NFTs—And Defaulting

Disguises and the Origins of Clothing

Sexual vocalization was most frequent during penetration itself compared with other forms of sexual activities, which supports its signaling function. The most frequently reported sexual vocalizations were moaning/groaning, followed by screams and instructional commands, squeals, and words. About 38% of females reported that they pretended vocalization.

Congenitally blind participants facially imitate smiles heard in speech, despite having never seen a facial expression

Research finds that creative ideas are generated by two cognitive pathways: insight and persistence […] people’s beliefs about creativity undervalue persistence and overvalue insight

The proliferation of homemade “ghost guns” has skyrocketed in Los Angeles. […] The weapons typically are made of polymer parts created with 3D printing technology and can be assembled using kits at home. They often are relatively inexpensive. Because they are not made by licensed manufacturers, they lack serial numbers, making them impossible to track.

Most wildfires are started by humans – downed powerlines, an unattended campfire, a flat tire that sends sparks into dry brush. But arson – the criminal act of deliberately setting fire to property – isn’t all that common. In 2019, the most recent year for which data is available, arson was found to be the cause of about 9% of the 3,086 fires Cal Fire responded to, and responsible for 2% of all acres burned that year.

How to Fire Frank Lloyd Wright — “1½ feet is not enough space between the tub and the wall. I wonder how many bathrooms Mr. Wright has cleaned.”

Andrew Clemens (1857 – 1894) was a sand artist […] He would collect naturally colored grains of sand […] Clemens separated the sand grains into piles, by color, and used them to form the basis for his art. [more]

It’s not the first time drones rained down from the skies [Thanks Tim]

Police find accused prosthetic leg thief with leg strapped to head

Demi Lovato thinks the term ‘aliens’ is ‘derogatory’ to extraterrestrials

Psychedelic use associated with lower odds of heart disease and diabetes, study finds [full study]

studies have demonstrated a decrease in brain pH (meaning the conditions are more acidic) in neuropsychiatric disorders

Do the easy boring job regularly, instead of the hard scary job in a panic

Already own a trained arabian hunting falcon? Collateralize it. Secure a loan financing another falcon. That falcon? Collateralize it too. They can be trained to disarm an active shooter.

It’s our cashier, Sheila’s, birthday today!

Artist who squirts paint with his eyes destroys canvases to create NFTs

We trained two monkeys to play the Pac-Man

They fed forty ducks a diet of commercial duck mash salted with powdered depleted uranium. None of the ducks died of it, or got sick, or even lost weight. Moreover, the researchers reported, the ducks “were in fair to excellent flesh” when slaughtered.

Forty-one percent of children claimed that bacon came from a plant

Norway to hit 100 per cent electric vehicle sales early next year

Johns Hopkins researchers find thousands of unknown chemicals in electronic cigarettes

Italian sailors knew of America 150 years before Christopher Columbus, new analysis of ancient documents suggests

Compared to vegans, meat consumers experienced both lower depression and anxiety

How to Grow Your Bangs Out So Much You Escape the Surveillance State [Thanks Tim]

Porn star Belle Delphine makes $1.2 million in a month with OnlyFans. Delphine is perhaps best known for her “gamer girl bathwater” stunt where she sold $30 jars of her own used bathwater

Old NY mobsters fear handing over the reins to the new generation of mafiosi because they’re softer and dumber —and are too obsessed with their cellphones

US man sues ‘Psychic Love Specialist’ for fraud, seeks US$25,000 in damages. He paid her US$5,100 to remove spell by witch hired by ex-girlfriend.

Stare at a blank wall in any room, and you are unlikely to learn much more than the paint color. But a new technology can inconspicuously scan the same surface for shadows and reflections imperceptible to the human eye, then analyze them to determine details, including how many people are in the room—and what they are doing.

Because single-use plastics are largely derived from petroleum, by 2050 plastics might account for 20% of the world’s annual oil consumption. Reducing our dependence on plastics, and finding ways to reuse the plastic that’s already out in the world, could greatly reduce emissions. Right now, only about 15% of all plastics worldwide are collected for recycling each year.

We’ve long assumed that one of the fundamental functions of the brain is its ability to store memories, thus allowing animals, including humans, to alter behaviour in light of past experience. If the seat of all memory was truly the brain, then to ensure long-term stability of stored information, the brain cells and their circuits would need to remain stable, like the books on your bookshelf. If someone started to tear pages out from these books, not only would the books be seriously damaged but you would have lost forever these books’ contents. Yet, animals such as the planaria that exhibit a remarkable capacity to quickly regrow new body parts, including their brains, confront us with a fascinating question: how can fixed memories persist when bodies and even brains do not? […] Some biologists have succeeded in chopping up one planarian into 279 pieces. Each tiny piece eventually formed a miniature complete worm, which grew in time to its normal size of up to ¾ inches, depending on the species and the availability of food.

Birds Have a Mysterious ‘Quantum Sense’. Scientists Have Now Seen It in Action

Hundreds of three-eyed ‘dinosaur shrimp’ emerge after Arizona monsoon — Their eggs can stay dormant for decades, waiting for water

Disney cancels Siamese cats from Lady and the Tramp reboot

A week in Lagos — The Nigerian megacity is a massive experiment – unregulated and wild, with endless traffic jams, waterfront slums and an impressively resilient population.

Offshore havens and hidden riches of world leaders and billionaires exposed in unprecedented leak [More]

The documents reveal a company [Facebook] worried that it is losing power and influence, not gaining it, with its own research showing that many of its products aren’t thriving organically. Instead, it is going to increasingly extreme lengths to improve its toxic image, and to stop users from abandoning its apps in favor of more compelling alternatives. […] What I’m talking about is a kind of slow, steady decline that anyone who has ever seen a dying company up close can recognize. [NY Times]

i have stolen over 4 terabytes of NFTs via the little known hacker technique known as “right click -> save as”. my collection has a net estimated value of over 8 trillion dollars

A Danish Museum Lent an Artist $84,000 to Reproduce an Old Work About Labor. Instead, He Pocketed It and Called It Conceptual Art [Thanks Tim!]

Woman charged for crying during surgery […] an $11 charge for “Brief Emotion” and a billing code of CPT Code 96127. […] “CPT Code 96127: How to Increase Revenue with This NEW Behavioral or Emotional Assessment” CPT Code 96127 “is a code that may be used to report brief behavioral or emotional assessments for reimbursement” and “may be billed four times for each patient per visit, utilizing four different instruments or assessments. So not only will clinicians have more efficient practices by utilizing these screenings, but they can also use them to build revenue.”

A Brooklyn NYPD stationhouse became flooded after a sergeant tossed a set of patrol car keys to a colleague and accidentally struck a ceiling sprinkler

A missing man in Turkey accidentally joined a search party for hours before realising he was the person they were looking for

There’s a Multibillion-Dollar Market for Your Phone’s Location Data — A huge but little-known industry has cropped up around monetizing people’smovements

The new dot com bubble is called online advertising [2019]

Apple Pay with Visa Hacked to Make Payments via Locked iPhones — Researchers have demonstrated that someone could use a stolen, locked iPhone to pay for thousands of dollars of goods or services, no authentication needed

The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a computer model of wealth creation confirms.

The U.S. was ranked first among nations in pandemic preparedness but has among the highest death rates in the industrialized world. […] More Americans have been killed by the new coronavirus than the influenza pandemic of 1918, despite a century of intervening medical advancement. […] the U.S. had “failed to sustain progress in any coherent manner” in its capacity to handle infectious diseases.

Lead contamination found in blood of half of young kids in U.S.

Why do people eat the same breakfast every day?

At first blush, condemnation of other individuals’ drug use can seem puzzling because one individual’s use of drugs has little to no impact on an observer’s outcomes. Recent work aimed at solving this puzzle suggests that much of the variability in drug condemnation overlaps with orientations toward a more versus less committed sexual strategy, presumably because of associations between drug use and casual sex. For example, adolescent recreational drug use covaries with earlier sexual debut, more sexual partners, and engaging in unprotected sex, and recreational drugs are often used at events where people seek out uncommitted sex. People who invest heavily in long-term, committed relationships have more to lose in social ecologies that afford opportunities for mate switching or so-called extrapair copulations, and people who pursue short-term mates benefit from such ecologies. Hence, individuals who are more commitment oriented should support rules that shift the social ecology toward high commitment in relationships. Individuals who are less commitment oriented should resist such rules because they would be the targets of condemnation and punishment simply for engaging in their preferred sexual behaviors. Accordingly, findings indicate that sexual strategy (i.e., being more vs. less open to sex outside of a committed relationship) relates to moral views toward contraception and abortion, pornography, and same-sex marriage. […] Results are consistent with the proposal that some moral sentiments are calibrated to promote strategic sexual interests, which arise partially via genetic factors.

New study uncovers consistent patterns in the metaphors that people use to describe God

How an eccentric engineer at the Beatles’ record company invented the CT scan

Beethoven began to lose his hearing at age 28. By age 44, his hearing loss was complete, most likely caused by compression of the eighth cranial nerve associated with Paget’s disease of bone. Beethoven’s head became large, and he had a prominent forehead, a large jaw, and a protruding chin (see picture)—features that are consistent with Paget’s disease. Eventually, his hat and shoes did not fit because of bone enlargement.

Beethoven never finished his 10th Symphony. AI just did

The Church of Ambrosia is a nondenominational, interfaith religious organization that supports the use and safe access of all Entheogenic Plants, with a focus on Cannabis and Magic Mushrooms. More: Zide Door is a Church in Oakland supporting the safe access and use of Entheogenic Plants. We follow a nondenominational, interfaith religion, The Church of Ambrosia

The world’s first gold-plated hotel tower in Hanoi has a golden shower on its rooftop terrace

This past winter, Goldman Sachs was closing in on a $40 million investment in Ozy, a digital media company founded in 2013, and there seemed to be a lot of reasons to do the deal. Ozy boasted of a large audience for its general interest website, its newsletters and its videos, and the company had a charismatic chief executive, Carlos Watson, a onetime cable news anchor who had worked at Goldman Sachs early in his career. And, crucially, Ozy said it had a great relationship with YouTube, where many of its videos attracted more than a million views.

That’s what the Zoom videoconference on Feb. 2 that Ozy arranged between the Goldman Sachs asset management division and YouTube was supposed to be about. The scheduled participants included Alex Piper, the head of unscripted programming for YouTube Originals. He was running late and apologized to the Goldman Sachs team, saying he’d had trouble logging onto Zoom, and he suggested that the meeting be moved to a conference call […] Once everyone had made the switch to an old-fashioned conference call, the guest told the bankers what they had been wanting to hear: that Ozy was a great success on YouTube, racking up significant views and ad dollars, and that Mr. Watson was as good a leader as he seemed to be. As he spoke, however, the man’s voice began to sound strange to the Goldman Sachs team, as though it might have been digitally altered, the four people said.

After the meeting, someone on the Goldman Sachs side reached out to Mr. Piper, not through the Gmail address that Mr. Watson had provided before the meeting, but through Mr. Piper’s assistant at YouTube. […] A confused Mr. Piper told the Goldman Sachs investor that he had never spoken with her before. Someone else, it seemed, had been playing the part of Mr. Piper on the call with Ozy. […]

Within days, Mr. Watson had apologized profusely to Goldman Sachs, saying the voice on the call belonged to Samir Rao, the co-founder and chief operating officer of Ozy, according to the four people.

In his apology to Goldman Sachs and in an email to me on Friday, Mr. Watson attributed the incident to a mental health crisis and shared what he said were details of Mr. Rao’s diagnosis.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Home delivery drones in Australia had to be suspended after they were repeatedly attacked by birds

Crypto-Trading Hamster Performs Better Than Warren Buffett And The S&P 500

Illegal massage parlors outnumber Starbucks 2 to 1 in NYC

This ballistics study examines whether saline breast implants can decrease tissue penetration in firearm injuries

I argue that much of the unconsciousness of high-level cognition is plausibly due to internal inattentional blindness […] In other words, rather than being structurally unconscious, many higher mental processes might instead be “preconscious”, and would become conscious if a person attended to them.

Extinction of Indigenous languages leads to loss of exclusive knowledge about medicinal plants

San Francisco’s bizarre, costly quest for the perfect trash can — Rather than use off-the-shelf models, San Francisco has engaged in a years-long process to design cans that’ll cost thousands of dollars apiece. And it’s not nearly done.

Engineer Devises “UFO Patents” for the U.S. Navy — The patents include designs for a futuristic hybrid vehicle with a radical propulsion system that would work equally well in the air, underwater, and in space, as well as a compact fusion reactor, a gravitational wave generator, and even a “spacetime modification weapon” […] it’s evident that the tech necessary to actually create the devices described is beyond our current capabilities.

a succession of women appeared in public performance as Circassian beauties, with a carefully crafted foreign allure and a particular visual script: voluminous Afro-like hair, exoticized peasant costumes, a bit of skin (more as time went on: dresses eventually gave way to ruffly shorts and tights), and a name that usually began with the letter “Z” — Zula Zeleah, Zoe Zobedia, Zuruby Hannum, and Zobeide Luti, to name a few.

Men take vehicle with ‘free car’ sign, later find body in trunk

Polyglot parrots are receiving daily language lessons in preparation for addressing guests when their hotel home opens next June.

Man Ejaculates From Anus, Urinates Feces for Two Years Before Seeking Help

The smart toilet era is here! Are you ready to share your analprint with big tech?

Baby Poop Is Loaded With Microplastics

The pattern of music downloads after their release appears to closely resemble epidemic curves for infectious disease

Young investors have a new strategy: watching financial disclosures of sitting members of Congress for stock tips.

Apple memo from Tim Cook denouncing leakers gets leaked

Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story.

Cognitive Boost Technology™

The most detailed image ever of a human cell- And we have trillions of these making up our body.

The companies polluting the planet have spent millions to make you think carpooling and recycling will save us

Manufacturers of soda pop and other fizzy beverages have “only a few days” of carbon dioxide left in reserve to produce stock, Britain’s Soft Drinks Association warned Monday, adding that 340,000 jobs in the industry could be affected by the United Kingdom’s ongoing gas shortage. Carbon dioxide is used in hundreds of products to add bubbles and extend shelf life. […] The impact of the cut to carbon dioxide supplies extends beyond drinks — it’s also used to package food and to stun animals before they are humanely slaughtered. [Washington Post]

Lawyers from top firms often work brief stints in the Treasury Department and then return to corporations with better titles and pay, public records reveal. The revolving door is viewed even by some industry veterans as part of the reason that tax policy has become so skewed in favor of the wealthy. [NY Times]

Zuckerberg agreed to not fact-check political posts if the Trump administration would steer clear of any “heavy-handed regulations,” Peter Thiel told an associate. Related: Facebook’s policy of pursuing profits regardless of documented harm — “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.”

the root causes of the obesity epidemic are more related to what we eat rather than how much we eat

about 88% of recent viruses that have been sequenced belong to the Delta family. “Basically everything that is circulating is Delta, so then the only avenue for evolution becomes mutations on top of Delta” […] “I’m hoping the virus has gotten itself to a point where it’s basically trapped now. That it can’t get any better at transmission, and any adaptation it makes in the immune response is going to make it less transmissible.” […] “My expectation would be that it will become a seasonal respiratory disease […] something that circulates at three times the level of flu and has a similar [infection fatality rate] to flu. So maybe causing three times flu’s deaths every year.”

Did James Joyce invent oat milk?

Financial domination involves the payment of cash or gifts from a wish list by a money slave to a money mistress, financial dominatrix, or findomme. Although financial domination clearly elicits sexual arousal for clients, the relationship can also be exclusively psychological and focus on the relinquishing of control to a money mistress for a prescribed period.

American CEOs make 351 times more than workers. In 1965 it was 15 to one

What Scientists Saw When They Put a Crocodile in an MRI Scanner and Played Classical Music

Adult female giraffes who spend time in larger groups with other females live longer than less sociable individuals

Generic drugs are considered equal to and interchangeable with one another — and also with the name brand. This gospel has existed since 1984, when a law known as Hatch-Waxman was passed, allowing companies to make drugs that had gone off patent without having to replicate the same expensive clinical trials. For the most part, all they had to do was prove that the generic was manufactured using good practices and worked in the body in a similar way, within an acceptable range. […] Major companies have been caught faking and manipulating the data that is supposed to prove that drugs are effective and safe. Probable carcinogens have been discovered in the drug supply. [NY Times]

To understand why pathogens can spread through the air, it helps to understand just how much of it we breathe. “About eight to 10 liters a minute,” says Catherine Noakes, who studies indoor air quality at the University of Leeds, in England. Think four or five big soda bottles per minute, multiply that by the number of people in a room, and you can see how we are constantly breathing in one another’s lung secretions.

Pairs of electrons and positrons—particles of matter and antimatter—can be created directly by colliding very energetic photons, which are quantum “packets” of light. This conversion of energetic light into matter is a direct consequence of Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation, which states that energy and matter (or mass) are interchangeable. Nuclear reactions in the sun and at nuclear power plants regularly convert matter into energy. Now scientists have converted light energy directly into matter in a single step.

When caterpillars of a beautiful butterfly were introduced on to the tiny island of Sottunga in the Åland archipelago, scientists hoped to study how the emerging butterflies would disperse across the landscape. But researchers did not realise that their introduction of the Glanville fritillary (Melitaea cinxia) led to the emergence of three other species on to the Baltic Sea island, which sprang out of the butterfly like Russian dolls. Some of the caterpillars contained a parasitic wasp, Hyposoter horticola, which bursts from the caterpillar before it can pupate and become a butterfly. Living inside some of these small wasps was another even tinier, rarer parasite, a “hyperparasitoid” wasp known as Mesochorus cf. stigmaticus. It kills the parasitic wasp around the same time as the wasp kills the caterpillar, and emerges 10 days later from the caterpillar’s carcass.

El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law: The system doesn’t work, the currency crashed, and the public hates it.

Your hedge fund is in the business of getting “edge.” It wants to know things that other people do not know, in order to buy the stocks that will go up. One way to get edge is to bribe the assistant treasurer of a public company to give you the company’s earnings release in advance, but this is strongly disfavored and your hedge fund has effective policies against it. Another way to get edge, quite popular these days, is to buy “alternative data.” Somebody has a satellite and they fly it over mall parking lots and count up the cars in front of each store, and you pay them and they give you those numbers, and then you buy the stocks of the stores with lots of cars in front of them, and then a month later those stores announce good earnings and you make a profit. The car-counting is a classic story of alternative data, but the way alternative data mostly works in practice is that a lot of people use apps on their mobile phones, and everyone involved in the mobile app business is harvesting data and frantically selling it to each other and to hedge funds.

I don’t expect this will be the next “big” search engine. This is and will remain a niche tool for a niche audience.

Researchers are toilet-training cows to reduce ammonia emissions caused by their waste

Posing as Walmart, scammers send crypto surging 25%

Sleep duration was reduced on nights during the waxing phase of the lunar cycle. The effects of the lunar cycle on human sleep are more pronounced among men.

After years of development, the company recently released eight kinds of whey protein isolate that dissolve in water and become practically undetectable to the senses: essentially no taste, smell, cloudiness or dry mouthfeel. The protein isolates are food ghosts, an essence of nutrition utterly devoid of substance. Arla Food Ingredients sells the protein isolates to companies that add them to consumer products. All eight have the same general properties, with each individually tuned for different applications. Lacprodan SP-9213, for instance, remains stable under acidic conditions. Imagine a glass of orange juice with the protein of an omelette. […] Arla’s whey protein isolate is part of the latest phase of an important ongoing trend: after modern production drove the cost of food way down, our attention shifted from eating enough to eating the right things.

Advantages of Square Cigarettes [focus-group report, 1999]

Scientists Use Lasers to See Inside a Locked Room

There are entire terminals in U.S. airports that offer a touchless experience, using passengers’ facial scans to do everything from check in for a flight, drop off luggage, get through the security line, board a plane, and be processed by Customs and Border Protection. How exactly do you opt out?

Sexual intercourse with climax can improve nasal breathing to the same degree as application of nasal decongestant for up to 60 minutes in patients having nasal obstruction

Horizontal Stripes and Dark Clothes Make You Look Thinner

the well-being benefits of social interactions are nearly negligible after moderate quantities of interactions are achieved

this study explores if there is a significant longevity effect of intercessory prayer (praying on behalf of others) for a named individual’s well-being […] based on data from 1988 to 2018, including 857 Roman Catholic bishops, 500 Catholic priests, and 3038 male academics from six countries. […] The first analysis proved that bishops live longer than priests

Chewing gums may have been used for thousands of years, since wood tar from the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods have been found with tooth impressions, which suggests a role in teeth cleaning as well as its usage as early adhesives. The first modern chewing gum was introduced in the market in the late 19th and chewing gums are today vastly consumed worldwide: it is estimated that Iran and Saudi Arabia are the countries with the highest chewing gum consumption, where 80% of the population are regular chewing gum consumers. […] Wasted chewing gums are often improperly discarded and end up as long-lasting residues on both indoor and outdoor pavements and surfaces. Local councils spend millions of euros cleaning up gum residues from the pavement. For instance, it is estimated that in the UK the annual cost of cleaning up wasted gums form streets is almost 70 million euros. […] Here we show the bacteriome of wasted chewing gums from five different countries and the microbial successions on wasted gums during three months of outdoors exposure.

Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, never had the abortion she was seeking. She gave her baby girl up for adoption, and now that baby is an adult.

A New Method of Cockroach Control on Submarines

Dürer’s Rhinoceros is the name commonly given to a woodcut executed by German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer in 1515. The image is based on a written description and brief sketch by an unknown artist. Dürer never saw the actual rhinoceros

The realistic bronze statue of an exhausted traveler in Orlando International Airport. By artist Duane Hanson.

mRNA cancer therapy now in human trials after shrinking mouse tumors

California moves to be the first state to outlaw ’stealthing,’ which is removing a condom without permission during intercourse. [via gettingsome]

Humans can infer the heartbeats of others when looking at their face — performance decreases when the visual properties of the videos of the faces are altered (inverted, masked, static)

Being a parent does not reduce dishonesty

abstinence from alcohol is associated with an increased risk for all-cause dementia

Facebook Users Liable for All Comments Under Their Posts, According to Australia High Court

Vine creator Dom Hofmann on creating Loot, an open-source, decentralized game / financial asset / art project / metaverse (?)

machine-bones.net

A non-lethal device developed by the US Navy aims to surreptitiously render a person unable to speak

Man who ‘married’ a sex doll is now ‘in love’ with an ashtray with an artificial vagina — he does engage in sexual intercourse with humans sometimes — he just prefers engaging with “objects” much more frequently.

Satanists may be the last hope to take down Texas’s abortion bill — The temple is attempting to use its status as a religious organization to claim its right to abortion as a faith-based right.

Familiar categories of mental functions such as perception, memory and attention reflect our experience of ourselves, but they are misleading about how the brain works. More revealing approaches are emerging.

Sometimes Mindlessness Is Better Than Mindfulness

Ability To Name Unrelated Words Is A Good Test Of Creativity

Elephant, Giraffe Populations Rebound as Kenya Fights Poachers

Thousands of new satellites are being launched into areas where orbital rubbish has been accumulating since early space missions nearly 65 years ago. The surging collision risks have left the handful of insurers that offer satellite coverage pulling back or exiting the market

Lawsuits say Siri and Google are listening, even when they’re not supposed to — The lawsuits allege the technology is turning on when not activated and using the information for marketing. In responses to the lawsuit, Apple says it does not sell Siri recordings and recordings are not associated with an “identifiable individual.”

effect of sneeze at 68° Fahrenheit, 50% relative humidity, and 90% relative humidity

Why do helical seashells resemble spiralling galaxies and the human heart? Kevin Dann leads us into the gyre of James Bell Pettigrew’s Design in Nature (1908), a provocative and forgotten exploration of the world’s archetypal whorl

Cow stuck in tree after Hurricane Ida

Men perceived women with nipple erection as more deserving of altruism, especially if that altruism involved greater interaction with the woman, and they expected these same women to behave more altruistically toward them.

We sought to understand how the pandemic and associated public health control measures have affected group sex practitioners and activities. […] group sex events were cancelled […] Participants reported attending online group sex events (e.g. Zoom orgies) as well as skill-building classes (e.g. rope bondage).

Both intra-rectal O2 gas and oxygenated liquid delivery were shown to provide vital rescue of experimental models of respiratory failure, improving survival, behavior, and systemic O2 level. More: A breathing tube through the butt could be an alternative to mechanical ventilators

Forms of music torture that are discussed in the article include exposure to loud music, forced singing, and the use of music in connection with other forms of enforced physical activity

Thirty four (94%) of 36 AI systems evaluated in these studies were less accurate than a single radiologist, and all were less accurate than consensus of two or more radiologists.

Putting the Meme Stocks in the Index — Every so often a weird stock goes up a lot, and it becomes so valuable that it qualifies for the S&P 500, the main index of U.S. large-cap stocks, and then people write articles that are like “oh no all the index funds are being forced to buy this weird stock at a huge valuation that makes no sense.” […] The fundamental active investors, remember, underperform the index in aggregate. So when they go around saying “hahaha the index funds are so dumb for buying this crazy overvalued stock,” they are wrong slightly more often than they are right.

More skunks can do handstands than we thought

Fake Banksy NFT sold through Banksy’s website for $336,000 [more]

Growing NFT Industry Sees Signs of ‘Amiss’ Behavior, Study Shows […] indication of “wash trading,” a practice where a trader or group of traders buy and sell the same asset to create the illusion of heightened demand.

World’s Fastest-Accelerating Roller Coaster Closes After Breaking Riders’ Bones

About 9% of respondents reported having ever experienced exercise-induced orgasm

The “Next” Effect: When a Better Future Worsens the Present — As people continually await exciting things still to come, they may be continually dissatisfied by exciting things already here.

Man can change his pupil size on command, once thought an impossible feat

Consumers Believe That Products Work Better for Others

Wall Street Is Looking to Reddit for Investment Advice

Facebook used facial recognition without consent 200,000 times

Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out 6% of office workers — Amazon systematically attempts to channel 6% of its office employees out of the company each year, using processes embedded in proprietary software to help meet a target for turnover among low-ranked office workers, a metric Amazon calls “unregretted attrition.”

Toxic PFAS compounds are contaminating the air inside homes, classrooms and stores at alarming levels, a new study has found. […] PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 9,000 compounds used to make products water-, stain- or heat-resistant. Because they are so effective, the chemicals are used across dozens of industries and are in thousands of everyday consumer products such as stain guards, carpeting and shoes. Textile manufacturers use them to produce waterproof clothing, and they are used in floor waxes, nonstick cookware, food packaging, cosmetics, firefighting foam and much more.

Starbucks at Shenzhen Airport in China

Nude man stabs second nude man on Seattle sidewalk

Which Saint to Pray for Fighting Against a Covid infection? A short survey

We report the first outbreak of a new type of mass sociogenic illness […] initiated by a “virtual” index case, who is the second most successful YouTube creator in Germany and enjoys enormous popularity among young people. Affected teenagers present with similar or identical functional “Tourette-like” behaviours, which can be clearly differentiated from tics in Tourette syndrome.

More Than 80 Cultures Still Speak in Whistles — They use a whistled form of their native language for long-distance communication.

Forensic facial examiners vs. super-recognizers

We found that eating one hot dog costs a person 36 minutes of “healthy” life. In comparison, we found that eating a serving size of 30 grams of nuts and seeds provides a gain of 25 minutes of healthy life – that is, an increase in good-quality and disease-free life expectancy. Our study also showed that substituting only 10% of daily caloric intake of beef and processed meats for a diverse mix of whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes and select seafood could reduce, on average, the dietary carbon footprint of a U.S. consumer by one-third and add 48 healthy minutes of life per day.

This AI Can Spot an Art Forgery

ART IN THIS COUNTRY HAS NOT ADVANCED PAST A LITTLE TECHNICAL COURSE FOR EXERCISING MEDIOCRITY DECORATIVELY

Today, the Federal Trade Commission filed an amended complaint against Facebook in the agency’s ongoing federal antitrust case. The complaint alleges that after repeated failed attempts to develop innovative mobile features for its network, Facebook instead resorted to an illegal buy-or-bury scheme to maintain its dominance. It unlawfully acquired innovative competitors with popular mobile features that succeeded where Facebook’s own offerings fell flat or fell apart. And to further moat its monopoly, Facebook lured app developers to the platform, surveilled them for signs of success, and then buried them when they became competitive threats. Lacking serious competition, Facebook has been able to hone a surveillance-based advertising model and impose ever-increasing burdens on its users.  

“Facebook lacked the business acumen and technical talent to survive the transition to mobile. After failing to compete with new innovators, Facebook illegally bought or buried them when their popularity became an existential threat,” said Holly Vedova, FTC Bureau of Competition Acting Director. “This conduct is no less anticompetitive than if Facebook had bribed emerging app competitors not to compete. The antitrust laws were enacted to prevent precisely this type of illegal activity by monopolists. Facebook’s actions have suppressed innovation and product quality improvements. And they have degraded the social network experience, subjecting users to lower levels of privacy and data protections and more intrusive ads. The FTC’s action today seeks to put an end to this illegal activity and restore competition for the benefit of Americans and honest businesses alike.”

{ Federal Trade Commission | Continue reading }