Italian man accused of skipping work for 15 years straight

valuing happiness often predicts worse well-being and mental health

Manhattan District Attorney To Stop Prosecuting Prostitution

Do voices carry valid information about a speaker’s personality?

Groundbreaking effort launched to decode whale language

Dr. Marr uses a simple two-out-of-three rule for deciding when to wear a mask. In every situation, she makes sure she’s meeting two out of three conditions: outdoors, distanced and masked. “If you’re outdoors, you either need to be distanced or masked,” she said. “If you’re not outdoors, you need to be distanced and masked. This is how I’ve been living for the past year. It all comes down to my two-out-of-three rule.” [NY Times]

Higher mushroom consumption is associated with a lower risk of cancer

China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran contribute to amplifying the QAnon conspiracy theory online

‘Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act’ Would Ban Clearview and Warrantless Location Data Purchases — The sweeping bill has support from both Democrats and Republicans, and will address multiple forms of surveillance

Debuted as part of an ongoing project titled NFTheft, sleepminting serves as a crypto-counterfeiting exercise. Sleepminting enables [the artist] to mint NFTs for, and to, the crypto wallets of other artists, then transfer ownership back to himself without their consent or knowing participation.

Hard Drive and SSD Shortages Could Be Imminent If New Cryptocurrency Blooms — With the emergence of the Chia cryptocurrency, miners in China are reportedly frantically snatching up every hard drive and SSD they can find. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, you don’t mine Chia with a processor, graphics card or ASIC miner. Instead, you farm Chia with storage space, which is where hard drives or SSDs come in.

LVMH, Prada, and Richemont Build a Blockchain

You Can Sell the Trees You Don’t Cut

Anti-venom is snake-specific, meaning if you’re bitten by a king cobra, you need king cobra anti-venom. If there’s 70 different venomous snakes in one place, I can’t carry a refrigerator with 70 different anti-venoms. […] On his way to work, he’s thinking nasal spray for snakebites. On his way home from work - nasal spray for snakebites. He is obsessed. [NPR | Audio + Transcript]

The researchers estimated there could be between 200,000 and 2 million bubbles released before a half-pint of lager would go flat.

Interrupted Maps, Butterfly Maps, Retroazimuthal Projections…

Colors of noise

Really Bad Chess

Patrick Mimran (born 1956 in Paris, France) is a contemporary French multimedia artist, composer, and the former owner and CEO of Lamborghini. […] In 1987 he sold Lamborghini to Chrysler and made, so it is said, «enough profit to be completely satisfied».

{ Wikipedia | Hamlet Hamster }

still { Con Artist (2009), a documentary about Mark Kostabi — not Patrick Mimran }

Musk tweeted on Monday that “data logs recovered so far” show the car’s Autopilot feature was not enabled […] The NHTSA currently has about two dozen active probes into Tesla vehicle crashes that may have involved Autopilot […]

Tesla in the past has drawn the ire of federal agencies for how it markets Autopilot and whether there’s true understanding on the part of passengers/drivers that the cars can’t fully drive themselves.

Tesla has warned that drivers must remain fully engaged while using these features.

Tesla told California regulators that its latest “full self-driving” software doesn’t actually make the car autonomous, seemingly contradicting its name.

{ Axios | Continue reading }

Real estate agent is auctioning off an NFT that comes with a duplex in Thousand Oaks, California

Crypto’s Coming of Age May Kill the Bitcoin Bubble and Dogecoin has risen 400 percent in the last week because why not

Two die in Tesla car crash in Texas with ‘no one’ in driver’s seat

Defense Department confirms leaked photos and videos of triangle-shaped objects blinking and moving through the clouds are real

Women have higher magical beliefs than men. Women have stronger reliance on intuition than men.

Account of what it’s like to work as a Facebook content moderator — The employee is based in Austin, TX and works for Accenture, a company that provides content moderation contractors for Facebook.

A Former Alt-Right YouTuber Explains His Method — Focus on conflict. Feed the algorithm. Make sure whatever you produce reinforces a narrative. Don’t worry if it’s true.

In the last decade, I have revised 3,000 résumés while working as a college career adviser. Here is my advice: The strongest will fit on a single page. Exceptions are few.

Drug Cartel Now Assassinates Its Enemies With Bomb-Toting Drones

{ Seventy-seven cases of a new variant linked to a surge in Covid-19 cases in India have been found in the UK | FT | full story }

“And so we had a demolition team in there for a week blowing up buildings, and the art director spent about six weeks with a guy with a wrecking ball and chain, knocking holes in the corners of things and really getting interesting ruins — which no amount of money would have allowed you to build,” Kubrick says.

Kubrick’s Hue was finished off with grillwork and other architectural accents, 200 palm trees imported from Spain and thousands of plastic plants shipped from Hong Kong. Weeds and tall yellow grass — “which look the same all over the world,” he notes — were conveniently indigenous. Four M41 tanks arrived courtesy of a Belgian army colonel who is a Kubrick fan, and historically correct S55 helicopters were leased and painted Marine green. A selection of rifles, M79 grenade launchers and M60 machine guns were obtained through a licensed weapons dealer.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

In 2008, the report warned about the potential emergence of a pandemic originating in East Asia and spreading rapidly around the world.

The latest report, Global Trends 2040, [was] released last week […] “Large segments of the global population are becoming wary of institutions and governments that they see as unwilling or unable to address their needs.” […] Experts in Washington who have read these reports said they do not recall a gloomier one.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

art { Günter Fruhtrunk, Rote Vibration, 1970 | Bridget Riley, Ra, 1981 }

France cuts two nuclear-powered submarines in half to make one new one

STDs reach all-time high for 6th consecutive year

We finally know how the FBI unlocked the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone — Too bad it cost $900,000 and led to nothing

Doctors Forgot to Warn People With Breasts That the Covid Vaccine Could Affect Their Next Mammogram

Humans can read the heart rate of others when looking at their face

What happens when you have a heart attack on the way to Mars?

for some people, making or receiving calls is a stressful experience

How Airbnb and Uber use activist tactics that disguise their corporate lobbying as grassroots campaigns

Madoff paid “gains” to older investors with money coming in from newer ones. […] After he went to jail, Madoff dismissed the people who fell for his scam as “greedy” […] More than money was lost. At least two people, in despair over their losses, died by suicide. A major Madoff investor suffered a fatal heart attack after months of contentious litigation over his role in the scheme. Some investors lost their homes. Others lost the trust and friendship of relatives and friends they had inadvertently steered into harm’s way. […] His older son, Mark, died by suicide in his Manhattan apartment early on the morning of Dec. 11, 2010, the second anniversary of his father’s arrest. […] On Sept. 3, 2014, his younger son, Andrew, died of cancer at the age of 48. He had blamed the stress of the scandal for the return of the cancer he had fought off in 2003. […] The actual cash losses from his fraud, not counting fictional profits, were most recently estimated at between $17 billion and $20 billion. […] Through the bankruptcy process, some victims were able to recover all or part of the cash principal they invested with Mr. Madoff. Irving Picard, the court appointed trustee who has spent the last decade trying to recoup most of the money for Mr. Madoff’s investors, has, to date, recovered $14.4 billion from lawsuits and settlements — roughly covering all the money investors gave to Mr. Madoff. [Washington Post | NY Times]

Interested in alternative investments but don’t know where to start?

toilet rats, toilet squirrels, toilet spiders, toilet possums, toilet frogs, toilet birds, toilet bats, toilet scorpions

Dr. I.C. Notting, an ophthalmologist at Leiden University, is a classic case of nominative determinism

Woman gets pregnant while already pregnant

“Ambiguous Objects” that change their appearances in a mirror

The top 1% of Americans have taken $50 trillion from the bottom 90% … over the past several decades. This is not some back-of-the-napkin approximation.

How people get rich now

First GMO Mosquitoes to Be Released In the Florida Keys

CEO of a top bitcoin exchange warns a crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

Acting Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Allison Lee, for example, has been very active. She has returned power to senior enforcement staff, who had it stripped from them in 2017, to open probes without seeking senior approvals, and has reversed a 2019 policy that critics said made it too easy for companies that broke the rules to continue with business as usual.

Twitter won’t let federal archivists host Trump’s tweets on Twitter

When BitClout arrived on the internet last month, it befuddled much of the cryptocurrency world. That was not least because the company, which describes itself as “not a company,” but a “new type of social network” — a sort of bitcoin-meets-Twitter — had ripped off some 15,000 profiles of famous people and influencers from actual Twitter and opened accounts in their names without their permission. […] Perhaps the most suspicious part, though, to many outsiders, was the insistence by BitClout’s founders that they themselves remain anonymous […] And yet, BitClout’s backers have poured more than $100 million into it.]

The FBI has arrested a Texas man who planned to blow up one of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in an attempt to “kill of about 70% of the internet.”

Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So Are Scientists — papers containing higher proportions of jargon in their titles and abstracts were cited less frequently by other researchers […] Jargon doesn’t always associate with negative outcomes […] abstracts that contained fewer common words tended to garner more grant funding [NY Times]

For two decades, from its genesis in the mid-nineties, Vice Media branded itself in the image of the dispossessed. The earliest issues of its magazine, originally called the Voice of Montreal, were supported by a Canadian welfare grant and copublished by a Haitian nonprofit. But by the summer of 2017, two of its founders—Suroosh Alvi and Shane Smith—had traded government funding for private investment and dropped their titular claim to communal representation with the jettison of a single vowel: the Voice became Vice. The company received multimillion-dollar investments from Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, but still self-described as “countercultural.” […] Outwardly, Vice aimed to preserve its brand by cultivating an ethos of unconventionality and titillation. Internally, however, the culture was troubled—a problem not only of self-presentation, but also of management. Upon their hire, employees were asked to sign a “non-traditional workplace agreement” that contractually obliged them to feel at ease. “Although it is possible that some of the text, images and information I will be exposed to in the course of my employment with VICE may be considered by some to be offensive, indecent, violent or disturbing,” read the agreement, “I do not find such text, images or information or the workplace environment at VICE to be offensive, indecent, violent or disturbing.” [CJR]

Legends and science of bottomless pits, bogs, and lakes via things magazine

100 Greatest Korean Films Ever

Illegal number

In 1997, David Bowie issued “bonds” that enabled their holders to earn a percentage of royalties from his back-catalog for the next ten years. An owner of a $1000 “Bowie Bond” would receive a 7.9% coupon each year. Prudential Insurance bought the first batch for $55 million.

At the outset, these securities seemed like a safe investment. Bowie’s songs were played regularly on the radio, and his albums were selling well, even decades after they were published.

Royalties from his work generated a steady income stream that was likely to continue. Bowie Bonds received a triple-A rating from Moodys, indicating they were as safe as U.S. government bonds.

But as online music sharing grew in popularity, Bowie’s album sales declined, and the bonds started to trade at a discount.

{ Dror Poleg | Continue reading }

also { Supervising cryptoassets for anti-money laundering | PDF }

The most widespread use of augmented reality isn’t in gaming: it’s the face filters on social media. The result? A mass experiment on girls and young women.

{ Technology Rreview | Continue reading }

Bill Hwang Had $20 Billion, Then Lost It All in Two Days

This man is looking for the friends who shipped him overseas in a crate in 1965

Experiments with particles known as muons suggest that there are forms of matter and energy vital to the nature and evolution of the cosmos that are not yet known to science. [NY Times | Quanta]

Can Blood from Young People Slow Aging? Silicon Valley Has Bet Billions It Will

Rates of Parkinson’s disease are exploding — Researchers believe a factor is a chemical used in drycleaning and household products such as shoe polishes and carpet cleaners in the US

People tend to assign higher attractiveness to an individual viewed from the back than head on. This tendency is pronounced when males rate the attractiveness of women.

A series of problem-solving experiments reveal that people are more likely to consider solutions that add features than solutions that remove them, even when removing features is more efficient.

The real reason why the Salvator Mundi didn’t make it into the Louvre’s Leonardo show

Onfim was a boy who lived in Novgorod in present day Russia in the 13th century. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod.

Over 110 million Americans have now had a taste of universal health care.

This is the final motherfucking website. Inspired by the geniuses behind motherfuckingwebsite.com

Facebook Says It’s Your Fault That Hackers Got Half a Billion User Phone Numbers

While Vancouver is technically one of the warmest cities in Canada, this fact is greatly diminished when one learns that it is also one of the wettest places in the country. So, though a visitor may not encounter the frigid temperatures common in other parts of Canada during non-summer seasons, any outdoor experience will undoubtedly be damp and depressing.

Visitors will find many of the supposed must-see attractions pushed by other travel blogs quite lacklustre. The Granville Island Public Market for instance, often deemed an essential stop, offers nothing particularly exceptional beyond what can be found in many other cities around North America.

The same can be said about the city’s famed ‘Steam Clock’, which despite having been styled to appear as a relic from the 19th-century, was in fact only built in 1977.

{ Snarky Travel | Continue reading }

“Time Slows Down Whenever You Are Around” for Women but Not for Men

Completed in nine days, massive hospital opens in London — Thanks to a herculean collaborative effort carried out by the National Health Service (NHS), the British Armed Forces, the Royal Engineers, the facilities management team at ExCeL London, private contractors, and international architecture firm BDP, the 1-million-square-foot convention center in the docklands of East London has been transformed in just over a week into what’s not only the largest hospital in the United Kingdom but, per CNBC, the largest critical care unit in the world. [Thanks Tim]

Children now playing ‘huge role’ in spread of COVID-19 variant — “We’re not going to have nearly enough (vaccine doses) in the next 6 to 8 weeks to get through this surge”

B.1.1.7 is about 60 percent more contagious and 67 percent more deadly than the original form of the virus. Infected people seem to carry more of the B.1.1.7 virus and for longer […] “The best way to think about B.1.1.7 and other variants is to treat them as separate epidemics” [NY Times]

In their efforts to rein in illicit massage businesses across the country, police sometimes rely on sting operations in which undercover officers engage in sex acts with spa workers

Here we demonstrate that environmental DNA can be collected from air and used to identify mammals

Known as the “torpedo,” the remotely controlled submarine would use magnets to attach to the bottom of cargo ships. The operator could later detach the drone, which would send a GPS signal with its location. Then, prosecutors allege, the trafficking ring would send a fishing boat to meet the submarine about 100 miles off the coast of Europe and collect the cocaine.

Fugu can be lethally poisonous due to its tetrodotoxin, meaning it must be carefully prepared to remove toxic parts and to avoid contaminating the meat. The restaurant preparation of fugu is strictly controlled by law in Japan and several other countries, and only chefs who have qualified after three or more years of rigorous training are allowed to prepare the fish. […] Researchers have determined that a fugu’s tetrodotoxin comes from eating other animals infested with tetrodotoxin-laden bacteria, to which the fish develops insensitivity over time. As such, efforts have been made in research and aquaculture to allow farmers to produce safe fugu. Farmers now produce poison-free fugu by keeping the fish away from the bacteria; Usuki, a town in Ōita Prefecture, has become known for selling non-poisonous fugu.

Some of the World’s Top Artists Are Trying Their Hand at NFTs. The World’s Top Galleries Are a Bit More Skeptical.

In 1930, engineers accomplished something remarkable: they rotated an 8-story, 11,000 ton building a full 90 degrees

How long would it take to walk around the moon?

MARCH (PARKING) MADNESS: Welcome to the Finals — the 114th vs. the 34th

Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald J. Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500.

It was a big sum for a 63-year-old battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help.

What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.

the Trump campaign and the for-profit company that processed its online donations, WinRed, […] begun last September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors, for every week until the election.

Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.

As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language. […]

Several bank representatives who fielded fraud claims directly from consumers estimated that WinRed cases, at their peak, represented as much as 1 to 3 percent of their workload. [..]

All the banking officials said they recalled only a negligible number of complaints against ActBlue, the Democratic donation platform, although there are online review sites that feature heated complaints about unwanted charges and customer service. […]

Over all, the Trump operation refunded 10.7 percent of the money it raised on WinRed in 2020; the Biden operation’s refund rate on ActBlue, the parallel Democratic online donation-processing platform, was 2.2 percent, federal records show.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Swiss robots use UV light to zap viruses aboard passenger planes

Update on the 3 major variants

How America’s surveillance networks helped the FBI catch the Capitol mob — Installed on thousands of streetlights, speed cameras, toll booths, police cars and tow trucks across the United States, the scanners record every passing vehicle into databases run by contractors such as Vigilant Systems, which reports that it has recorded 5 billion license plate locations nationwide. In Maryland alone, government and police scanners captured more than 500 million plates last year, state data shows. […] Agents got a D.C. judge to issue a “ping order” for his cellphone, which had been registered with T-Mobile under the name of Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent, the affidavit said. That ping order allegedly pinpointed Alam’s location to Room 17 of the Penn Amish Motel in rural Pennsylvania. FBI agents arrested him there the next day.

“his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.”

New study detects lottery-like behavior in cryptocurrency markets

Now, all of those people who were tweeting and Clubhousing about NFTs are on to the next: DAOs. Launched on April 30, 2016, The DAO was an early Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) and venture capital fund.

Facebook shorted video creators thousands of dollars in ad revenue. Due to a ‘technical issue.’

Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

Mapping the World’s Key Maritime Choke Points

What happens to a tree when it dies?

into the woods to cut down trees via things magazine

My Bloody Valentine is working on two new albums

Every Noise at Once

Interesting wardrobe

My favorite line from this 9 page long paper (citing another study): “greater gender diversity in boards leads to excessive monitoring of executives.” P. 5.

Monitoring of executives is what boards are supposed to do. So the problem is that women directors do their jobs.

{ Richard W. Painter | Continue reading }

unrelated { “Females were less likely than males to approach a person in public to obtain drugs through cash and noncash transactions. […] Females were more likely than males to acquire drugs through sex.” | Gender Differences in Drug Market Activities | PDF }

Woman accused of hitting child with car claims she was trying to run over someone else

Man accused of assault and robbery outside a restaurant told detectives his DNA was planted at the crime scene by an airplane in order to frame him

New drug to regenerate lost teeth

We theorize that reconnaissance satellites have revolutionized the use of information gleaned from spying in ways that discourage states from engaging in serious conflicts with one another. We find that when either the potential aggressor or target in a dyad possess reconnaissance satellites, they are significantly less likely to become involved in serious militarized interstate disputes.

Venomous people could become a reality, scientists say

Scientists built a perfectly self-replicating synthetic cell

Scientists Get Closer To Redefining The Length Of A Second — The worldwide standard atomic clocks have for decades been based on cesium atoms — which tick about 9 billion times per second. But newer atomic clocks based on other elements tick much faster [and] are 100 times more accurate than the cesium clock.

Even before the pandemic, Americans were already flushing far too many wipes into the sewer system. After a year of staying at home, the pipe-clogging problem has gotten worse.

Nearly 500 bee species are thriving in a small patch of US desert — There are about 20,000 known species of bee on the planet, and nowhere else is this diversity more concentrated than in southern Arizona along the US-Mexico border. Hundreds of bee species can be found in a patch of desert there about the size of Heathrow airport, meaning it has the world’s densest aggregation of bee species yet measured.

We identified 110 shades from 73 products that contained the word “nude” in the name. […] Roughly 40% of beauty brands use a sequential numbering system to organize their foundation shades. Yet only 4 out of those 130 products ordered their shades from dark to light.

“There was no history of my ever purchasing it, or ever owning it,” said one confused NFT buyer. “Now there’s nothing. My money’s gone.” People’s Expensive NFTs Keep Vanishing.

Inside a viral website

Church membership in US via Gallup poll:

2000: 70%

2005: 64%

2010: 61%

2015: 55%

Now: 47%

{ @ryanstruyk via ny mag }