What differentiates a happy day from a typical one? […] Socializing was one of the activities most strongly linked to the probability of having a good day, but beyond 2 hours, additional socializing was not associated with further increases in the probability of reporting a better-than-typical day. Working for up to six hours was not related to whether people rated their day as better than usual; beyond six hours, however, additional work was associated with sharp declines in the probability of having a good day. […] Time spent on sports and exercise was positively associated with having a good day up until approximately 5 hours

study published in the British Journal of Psychology suggests that people are more likely to support populist politicians when they find them entertaining

In the colonial era, only the poor, indentured servants, and prisoners ate lobsters because they were cheap, too plentiful, and considered “tasteless.” After prisoners in one Massachusetts town got sick of eating them all the time, a new rule said they only had to eat them three times a week.

Birds have sex chromosomes. But their sex chromosomes evolved independently of the X and Y chromosomes of mammals. In birds, a gene called DMRT1 initiates sexual differentiation. (DMRT1 is also important in sexual differentiation in mammals and many other vertebrate animals.) Males inherit two copies of DMRT1 and females inherit only one copy. Reduced dosage of the gene in females leads to the production of the sex hormone estradiol, a potent estrogen, in the developing embryo. […] To their amazement, the students discover that embryos with male sex chromosomes develop ovaries when exposed to estradiol. Embryos with female sex chromosomes develop testes when injected with the drug that prevents estradiol from being made.

Hawaiian caterpillar patrols spiderwebs camouflaged in insect prey’s body parts

o3 Beats a Master-Level Geoguessr Player

According to a new review, mind blanking is a distinct conscious state in which our minds go ‘nowhere’ because they seem devoid of content

Tesla’s profits would evaporate if not for these regulatory credits Last quarter, Tesla brought in $595 million in regulatory credits revenue. If we consider that revenue to be profit, it represents 145% of Tesla’s $409 million in net profit last quarter. More: Tesla is now losing money on what should be its ostensible reason for existence – selling cars.

Spain’s grid ran entirely on renewable energy for the first time on April 16, with wind, solar, and hydro meeting all peninsular electricity demand during a weekday.

Patents are sought by academics and their institutions to protect their inventions. Academics also seek patents to enhance their individual profile and status for the purpose of job and promotion opportunities. This article addresses the concerning development of patent inventorship credit (or credit that might be viewed as inventorship credit) being offered for sale by established education fraud companies along-side offers for authorship on academic papers and thesis writing.

Researchers Secretly Ran a Massive, Unauthorized AI Persuasion Experiment on Reddit Users — The researchers’ bots generated identities as a sexual assault survivor, a trauma counselor, and a Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter

AI chatbots available on Facebook and Instagram can engage in sexually explicit conversations with underage users

Deepfake porn is destroying real lives in South Korea

About a quarter of women and one-eighth of men reported increased same-sex attraction after psychedelic use. […] Fewer participants described themselves as single after their psychedelic use compared to before.

The Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit) was the East German secret police, and that country had the highest proportion of informants and secret police in history: 1 in 60 people were involved by 1989. […] Nevertheless political activists managed to start a grassroots revolution. […] How effective was the Stasi?

The Securitate was the secret police agency of the Socialist Republic of Romania. It was, in proportion to Romania’s population, one of the largest secret police forces in the Eastern bloc. At its height, the Securitate employed some 15,000 agents and almost half a million informants for a country with a population of 23 million by 1989. […] Assassinations were also used to silence dissent, such as the attempt to kill high-ranking defector Ion Mihai Pacepa, who received two death sentences from Romania in 1978, and on whose head Ceaușescu decreed a bounty of two million US dollars. Yasser Arafat and Muammar al-Gaddafi each added one more million dollars to the reward. In the 1980s, Securitate officials allegedly hired Carlos the Jackal to assassinate Pacepa.

Our study shows that people are more open-minded than we often assume […] When individuals are given high-quality, balanced facts and a reason to learn them, they don’t simply cling to their old beliefs—they revise them.

Upon capturing dozens of the snakes in cooler temperatures after sunset and extracting and analyzing their venom, they made an unexpected discovery. Rather than developing more complex toxins for a wide variety of potential prey, as the researchers assumed, the rattlesnakes were instead producing simpler venoms containing fewer and more focused venoms. The findings indicate that, over time, the snakes were finely tuning their venom for more specific prey.

‘Popcorn Lung’: Vapers at Risk of Irreversible Disease, Experts Warn

Quantum tic-tac-toe

Trump appears to be pursuing several agendas. Personal enrichment stands out […] He has ignored or eliminated large swaths of rules that would have inhibited his freedom of action and his ability to put trusted acolytes in key roles. And then there’s rewarding donors, whether through pardons or favors for their clients. […] a sampling [:]

[Trump] ended bans that stopped executive branch employees from accepting gifts from lobbyists or seeking lobbying jobs themselves for at least two years. […] He loosened the enforcement of laws that curb foreign lobbying and bribery. […]

[Musk] installed a SpaceX engineer at the Federal Aviation Administration to review its air traffic control system. The F.A.A. is reportedly considering canceling Verizon’s $2.4 billion contract to update its aging telecommunications infrastructure in favor of a SpaceX’s Starlink product. […] SpaceX is a leading contender to secure a large share of Mr. Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense project, an effort that could involve billions of revenue for the winner. […] DOGE nearly halved the team at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that regulates autonomous vehicles. The agency has been investigating whether Tesla’s self-driving technology played a role in the death of a pedestrian in Arizona. […]

The S.E.C. eliminated its crypto-enforcement program, ending or pausing nearly every crypto-related lawsuit, appeal and investigation. That includes the civil suit against Justin Sun, a crypto entrepreneur who had separately purchased $75 million worth of tokens tied to Mr. Trump’s family after the election.

The S.E.C. also suspended its civil fraud case against Binance, the huge crypto exchange that pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations and allowed terrorist financing, hacking and drug trafficking to proliferate on its platform. Soon after, the company met with Treasury officials to seek looser oversight while also negotiating a business deal with Mr. Trump’s family.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Trump pardons Nevada politician who paid for cosmetic surgery with funds to honor a slain officer

Can the Las Vegas Sphere actually make money?

The U-curve of happiness poses that happiness levels reach its peak levels in our younger years around age 20 and in our older years starting at around age 70, lowest amongst the middle years around ages 40-55. […] Here we replicate the U-curve when different preregistered sets of control variables are included. We further show heterogeneity across happiness measures, showing that the U-curve is not consistent across items.

It is not obvious why we are conscious. Why can’t all of our mental activities take place unconsciously? What is consciousness for? We aim to make progress on this question, focusing on conscious vision.

Women Need More Expensive Gifts to Feel Loved, Especially If Bank Accounts Are Not Shared

a massive dataset of over 50,000 houses in some 1,000 archaeological sites worldwide, the study suggests that economic inequality is not an inevitable result of societal advancement, agriculture, or population. Instead, it seems to be a consequence of political choices and governance structures.

Gen Alpha children (aged 0-11)’s tastes are already being informed by online content […] ese low-cost retailer Temu entered the U.S. market less than three years ago and is already one of Alpha’s most requested e-commerce destinations. Sephora’s appearance within the personal care category also underscores Alpha’s premature, TikTok-spurred preoccupation with all things beauty and skincare. Both brands are also generally among the most mentioned across all social platforms.

Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?

the level of data consumption needed for microphone surveillance would make the technique not only difficult to execute, but also virtually impossible to hide. “To make it happen, Facebook would need to record everything your phone hears while it’s on,” Garcia-Martinez explained in 2017. “This is functionally equivalent to an always-on phone call from you to Facebook. Your average voice-over-internet call takes something like 24 kbps one way, which amounts to about 3 kBs of data per second. Assume you’ve got your phone on half the day, that’s about 130 MBs per day, per user. There are around 150 million daily active users in the US […] So, your phone may not be listening in to your conversations, but it has the capacity to track you in so many other ways. And it’s through this massive trove of trackable data that companies like Facebook and Google are able to serve you targeted ads that occasionally seem frighteningly accurate. […] Facebook can find you on whatever device you’ve ever checked Facebook on. It can exploit everything that retailers know about you, and even sometimes track your in-store, cash-only purchases; that loyalty discount card is tied to a phone number or email for a reason.

Google users who accept our payment to try Bing for two weeks update positively about its relative quality, with 33 percent preferring to continue using it; and (iii) after changing the default from Google to Bing, many users do not switch back, consistent with persistent inattention

A study published last month on people with deep sleep and REM deficiencies found that the subjects’ brains showed signs of atrophy in M.R.I. scans 13 to 17 years after the deficiencies were observed; the atrophy looked similar to what you’d find in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.[NY Times]

A strange phrase (”vegetative electron microscopy”) keeps turning up in scientific papers. This phrase, which sounds technical but is actually nonsense, has become a “digital fossil” – an error preserved and reinforced in artificial intelligence (AI) systems that is nearly impossible to remove from our knowledge repositories. […] Vegetative electron microscopy appears to have originated through a remarkable coincidence of unrelated errors. First, two papers from the 1950s, published in the journal Bacteriological Reviews, were scanned and digitised. However, the digitising process erroneously combined “vegetative” from one column of text with “electron” from another. As a result, the phantom term was created.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s legal team accused of submitting inaccurate, AI-generated brief to Colorado court

I recently attended a scholarly talk on a rare illuminated manuscript. The speaker was as eminent as they come, but the talk was not easy to follow. Frustrated, I opened ChatGPT and started asking it questions about the subject. In the course of that disappointing lecture, I had a rich exchange with the system. I learned what was and wasn’t known about the document, who had done the foundational research, and how scholars had interpreted its iconography and transmission. Was the information perfect? Surely not, but neither is what we get from people. Was it better than the talk I was hearing? By a wide margin. […] And the astonishing part is this: the making of books such as those on my shelves, each the labor of years or decades, is quickly becoming a matter of well-designed prompts. The question is no longer whether we can write such books; they can be written endlessly, for us. The question is, do we want to read them?

Watching OpenAI’s o3 guess a photo’s location is surreal, dystopian and wildly entertaining

Am I a Lesbian? [2018]

Drug Regenerates Retina and Restores Vision in Blind Mice

About 45 years ago, psychiatrist Irvin Yalom estimated that a good 30-50% of all cases of depression might actually be a crisis of meaninglessness, an existential sickness […] We experience this lack of purpose as boredom, apathy, or emptiness. […] “The question of meaning in life is, as the Buddha taught, not edifying. One must immerse oneself in the river of life and let the question drift away.” […] According to Yalom, we’ve hit this crisis point in meaninglessness because we have the leisure to think

having sex one to two times per week may offer the greatest psychological benefits

if chocolate has any aphrodisiac qualities, they are probably psychological, not physiological. [2018]

Oysters are high in zinc, and a number of studies over the years have linked zinc deficiencies to impotence and delayed sexual development. But so far no major study has examined whether eating an oyster has any direct impact on arousal. [2005]

Our study showed that poultry consumption above 300 g/week is associated with a statistically significant increased mortality risk both from all causes and from GCs. The risk is higher for men than for women.

Scam call centers are metastasizing worldwide “like a cancer”

Top donors to Trump’s $239M inauguration fund include more than a dozen administration nominees

Science sleuths flag hundreds of papers that use AI without disclosing it

I never would have read Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s tell-all memoir about her years running global policy for Facebook, but then Meta’s lawyer tried to get the book suppressed and secured an injunction to prevent her from promoting it

When Kitty Litter Caused a Nuclear Catastrophe

Were dinosaurs headed for extinction even before massive asteroid strike? Scientists offer new clues

“The kids these days say, ‘No risk, no ‘rari,’” said Patrick Wieland, a content creator and day trader who has in recent weeks poured thousands of dollars into ProShares UltraPro QQQ. (“Rari” is slang for Ferrari.) Shares of the fund, a triple-leveraged ETF that aims to generate three times the daily performance of the Nasdaq-100 index, notched double-digit gains during a historic rally on April 9, but are still down more than 20% this month. […]

Kiel Elliott, a Los Angeles-based executive at an entertainment studio, spent roughly $40,000 scooping up GameStop call options in early April. Calls, which offer the right to buy a stock at a set price, typically represent a bet that a stock will gain.

Elliott calls himself a “degenerate gambler” and says the market’s twists and turns have made for the perfect trading environment. GameStop shares have gained 25% this month.

[…] “The whole economy is a meme stock now, so enjoy the ride” feels like a grim but useful explanation.

{ Matt Levine | Continue reading }

how long does it really take to create a new habit? According to Lally’s study, implementing meaningful change in our lives requires 2 to 8 months. The variation is due to the type of habit in question, the person developing it and his/her circumstances. On average it takes 66 days

In Plato’s dialogue Symposium, seven varied speeches are made on the meaning of love at an all-male drinking party set in ancient Athens in 416 BCE. One of the participants is the philosopher Socrates, and when it comes to his turn to speak, he is made to say something surprising: he proposes to ‘tell the truth’ about love. It’s surprising because in other Platonic dialogues, where Socrates address­es questions such as ‘What is knowledge?’, ‘What is excellence?’, and ‘What is courage?’, he has no positive answers to give about these central areas of human thought and experience: in fact, Socrates was well known for having laid no claim to know­ledge, and for asserting that ‘the only thing I know is that I do not know’. How is it, then, that Socrates can claim to know the truth about something as fundamental and potentially all-encomp­assing as love?

The answer is that, in the Symposium, Socrates claims to know the truth only because he learned it from someone else. […]

The doctrine Socrates attributes to Diotima in the Symposium is that love – or, more precisely, the divine spirit Eros – operates on various levels. At the lowest level, love engenders erotic feelings towards the body of someone to whom one is attracted. However, what attracts us about that body is, Diotima says, a quality that we call its ‘beauty’, which in turn leads to a recognition that many other bodies possess this quality and are equally capable of inspiring erotic feelings. By recognising the presence of beauty in many bodies, one comes to understand that what is attractive to us is not the bodies themselves, but the abstract quality of beauty of which the bodies partake. […]

according to Diotima, the commonplace erotic desire that we feel towards a person we consider to be beautiful can lead us up the ‘ladder’ of love, rung by rung, ascending from the particular object of desire to a general appreciation of the abstract quality of beauty and, beyond that, to moral goodness. What begins as physical lust is ennobled by the way it encourages the lover to mount upwards to the highest goodness imaginable, the abstract ‘form of the good’.

{ Aeon | Continue reading }

Motivations for using music for sleep: insights from YouTube comments

Films made with AI can win Oscars, Academy says

The end of disease? Demis Hassabis: I think that’s within reach. Maybe within the next decade or so, I don’t see why not. […] machine learning does not create any new knowledge […] how is AGI going to suddenly reveal what is now hidden? The sum total of all the medical information in the world right now is not enough.

Drawing from ethology, symbolic violence theory, game theory, and affective neuroscience, we trace the evolution of obedience from animal hierarchies to human systems of internalized authority. […] A simulation illustrates how varying degrees of affective alignment predict obedient behavior, ranging from mechanical compliance to genuine convergence […] Obedience, we argue, emerges not merely from power or rationality, but from affective structure.

In 1719, Parisian prisoners were offered freedom if they agreed to marry prostitutes and move to Louisiana […] Most of the 96 women on board had been labeled “prostitutes,” as if they had been legally convicted of engaging in the exchange of sexual acts for money. But the reality behind the Mutinous Women’s lives in France is far more complicated.

Emily Warren Roebling (1843 – 1903) was an engineer known for her contributions over a period of more than 10 years to the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge. More: How 5 Bridges Transformed New York City

‘World’s first sperm race’ to be held in Los Angeles

study asks people to define romantic chemistry in their own terms, leading to 9 unique elements

two women meeting for the first time can judge within minutes whether they have potential to be friends – guided as much by smell as any other sense, according to new Cornell psychology research

researchers discovered that using “a unique sound stimulation technology” — a device that stimulates the inner ear with a specific wavelength of sound — reduces motion sickness. Even a single minute of stimulation reduced the staggering and discomfort felt by people that read in a moving vehicle.

New ChatGPT Models Seem to Leave Watermarks on Text

This meta-analysis finds no empirical support suggesting that GenAI has surpassed humans in creative idea generation

Saying “Please” and “Thank You” to ChatGPT Is Wasting Millions of Dollars in Computing Power

OpenAI buys Windsurf for $3 billion […] a startup that’s been around for 2 years, with its current branding for about 5 months. […] Compared to Cursor, Windsurf has fewer users, has been around for less time, has less brand recognition, and has diminishing prospects for future growth. It’s not as tied to VSCode, which is a plus, I guess. But it all begs the question: why on earth is OpenAI paying so much? […] It’s true that OpenAI managed to get $40bn committed, and it’s also true that this is the largest amount of capital ever raised by a privately held company. But they’re going against Google […] In that light, the decision to spend 3 out of 40 of those billions is even harder to rationalize. Even worse, it’s not yet clear OpenAI actually has $40bn to spend — so far they’ve only got $10bn actually lined up.

Growth is Getting Harder to Find, Not Ideas

Movies are handmade, and just like any other art form, sometimes the seams that hold movies together become visible to the audience.

Pope Benedict IX (c. 1012 – c. 1056) was the bishop of Rome and ruler of the Papal States for three periods between October 1032 and July 1048. Aged about 20 when first elected, he is the youngest pope in history. He is the only person to have been Pope more than once and the only person ever accused of selling the papacy. […] “It seemed as if a demon from hell, in the disguise of a priest, occupied the chair of Peter” […] In October 1032, Benedict’s father obtained his election through bribery. However, his reputedly dissolute activities provoked a revolt on the part of the Romans. Benedict was driven out of Rome and Sylvester III elected to succeed him. Some months later, Benedict and his supporters managed to expel Sylvester. […] [W]ishing to marry his cousin, Benedict then decided to resign in May 1045. He offered to give up the papacy into the hands of his godfather if he would reimburse him for his election expenses. John Gratian paid him the money and was recognized as pope […] Benedict IX soon regretted his resignation and returned to Rome, taking the city and remaining on the throne until July 1046, although Gregory VI continued to be recognized as the true pope. […] A German, Clement II, was chosen to succeed Gregory VI. When Clement II died in October 1047, Benedict seized the Lateran Palace in November, again becoming pope, but was driven away by German troops in July 1048. To fill the power vacuum, the German-born Damasus II was elected pope and universally recognized as such.

List of sexually active popes

Increasingly large discs (usually circular, and made from clay or wood) are inserted into a pierced hole in either the upper or lower lip, or both, thereby stretching it. Archaeological evidence indicates that lip plates have been invented multiple times including in Africa (Sudan and Ethiopia; 5500–6000 BCE) Mesoamerica (1500 BCE), and coastal Ecuador (500 BCE).

The lip plate, or debhinya, is arguably the most recognizable feature of Mursi culture. Women of the tribe begin the process around the age of 15, when their lower lips are pierced and gradually stretched to accommodate a clay or wooden plate.

Mursi women are famous for the wooden and clay lip-plates with which they decorate their lower lips, yet, to the informed and uninformed observer, the specific layers of meanings and kinds of information that they communicate are poorly understood. Building from initial observations and conversations during my first phase of field research among the Mursi, between May and August 2004, I will begin by discussing why most Mursi women adorn themselves with lip-plates, and what it is about the objects themselves that appear to hold such significance for the Mursi.

Mursi rarely paint for aesthetic reasons. Aesthetic body painting is only practiced by older boys, seeking to attract the attention of the girls and of one another. Generally, the Mursi paint for pragmatic and medicinal reasons, rather than for purely aesthetic reasons.

The Surma people use razors or branches with thorns for body scarring, then rubbing ash on it so it becomes raised. On a female they are signs of beauty and identity. The Suri Tribe and Mursi Tribe think hair is dirty so both males and females keep their hair very short. They use razors to create patterns and shapes in their hair styles.

Sponges, drill bits and wires: Surgeons mistakenly left objects inside thousands of patients since 2015

Plants feel pain and might even see […] Like animals, plants produce substances that suppress pain. He doesn’t see why that would be necessary if there was no pain. […] The vine imitated the artificial leaves, just as it had imitated the leaves in nature. For Baluška this is clear proof that the vine can see.

Scientists claim to have found color no one has seen before, contested discovery achieved by experiment firing laser pulses into eyes, stimulating retina cells

Musician’s brain matter makies music three years after his death — In collaboration with American experimental composer Alvin Lucier, who passed away in 2021, scientists and artists created an art installation using cerebral organoids developed from the composer’s white blood cells.

OpenAI’s new reasoning AI models still hallucinate, or make things up — in fact, they hallucinate more than several of OpenAI’s older models […] more concerning, the ChatGPT maker doesn’t really know why it’s happening. […] “Our hypothesis is that the kind of reinforcement learning used for o-series models may amplify issues that are usually mitigated (but not fully erased) by standard post-training pipelines” […] Hallucinations may help models arrive at interesting ideas and be creative in their “thinking,” but they also make some models a tough sell for businesses in markets where accuracy is paramount.

Russia is automating the spread of false information to fool artificial intelligence chatbots on key topics […] Russia and, to a lesser extent, China have been exploiting that advantage by flooding the zone with fables. But anyone could do the same, burning up far fewer resources than previous troll farm operations.

Is $1,000 worth being the AI face of obvious scams? Actors who sold AI avatars stuck in Black Mirror-esque dystopia

Trump Team Eyes Politically Connected Startup to Overhaul $700 Billion Government Payments Program — Ramp sells corporate credit cards and artificial intelligence software for businesses to analyze spending. […] Ramp is backed by some of the most powerful figures in Silicon Valley. One is Peter Thiel […] Ramp’s other major financial backers include Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures; Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; and 8VC, a firm run by Musk allies.

For the first time, surgeons have successfully performed a heart transplant in which the donor organ never skips a beat in the process

A federal judge found today that Alphabet illegally monopolized some online advertising technology markets

For decades, the US tariff system has taxed women’s clothing more heavily than men’s. Tariffs on women’s clothing are currently about three percent higher than men’s, a policy that’s known as“pink tariffs”

Routine mortality figures from the United Kingdom and the United States suggests that musicians in these territories are a demonstrably at-risk group for suicide.

Dostoevsky’s characters are essentially case studies in existential dilemmas, and he uses their inner turmoil to dramatize themes like freedom, moral responsibility, and the fragmented self.

Scientists Can Use WiFi to See Through People’s Walls [2023]

Egg prices are so high that people are dyeing potatoes for Easter.

new imaging study showed that listening to favorite music affects the function of the brain’s opioid system, the brain’s opioid system is known to be involved in pleasurable experiences related to survival-critical behaviours, such as eating and sex.

AI-generated music accounts for 18% of all tracks uploaded to Deezer

OpenAI is building a social networkIs

Facebook “black market groups”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Facebook whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams

Silicon Valley crosswalk buttons hacked to imitate Musk, Zuckerberg voices [with audio]

An illusion of unfairness in random coin flips

Because it depends partly on the phase of the moon, the date of Easter Sunday can vary by as much as 35 days.

What Porn Taught a Generation of Women

Researchers Identify New Blood Group After 50 Year Mystery

Ripe oranges are usually oranger, so this bag makes the oranges look better than they may actually be. Maybe the secret is to never buy bagged fruit, since it’s harder to evaluate the quality of each orange. […] what if we had a picture of the orange with and without the bag under the same light and camera conditions, then checked the average pixel?

Shop this look: Buy cheap, faux gold dupes of Oval Office decor

{ How Government Spending Is Up Even as Musk Touts Savings | Wall Street Journal }

SIMON: We have free will in the sense that our resulting behavior will depend on who we are and the situation we are in. People respond differently when confronting the same situation.

BORGES: So, when faced with a situation in which there is a choice to be made between two possible behaviors, we can choose one of them?

SIMON: Your mental programming does the choosing.

It seems to me that Simon is here arguing for what philosophers call “compatibilism” — the idea that determinism can coexist with meaningful human choice and responsibility.

[…]

BORGES: Now, does this account for all of our actions? That is, if my right hand is resting on my left hand, is it because it has to be this way? I believe people do quite a lot of things without any thinking.

SIMON: That’s the doing of our subconscious mind. […] that’s because we are heavily programmed. […] when we study a person who is in the process of solving a problem, we start from the assumption that every little thing has a cause. We are not always able to identify those causes.

{ When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI | Continue reading }

oil and charcoal on linen { Chris Ofili, Iscariot Blues, 2006 }

Investigators determined the victim got on the R train about 8 p.m.. He lit up a cigarette given to him by another rider, filling the train car with smoke. The few people on the train moved to another car. The smoking man went on to quietly die of unknown causes. The train, which originated in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, came to the end of the line at Whitehall St., where R trains stop during overnight hours. About 11 p.m., a man stepped onto the train car, realized the victim was dead and went through his pockets, taking whatever the victim had on him. He then had sex with the corpse before finally leaving the train more than an hour later at 12:10 a.m. Then the body was robbed by a second man.

UK creating ‘murder prediction’ tool to identify people most likely to kill

we suggest that a trait-like randomness generator exists in the mind

People with ADHD symptoms report more involuntary memories in daily life

Data centres accounted for roughly 1.5% of global electricity consumption in 2024, will use twice as much energy by 2030

Directed by Gary Hustwit, Eno (2024) was made using generative software that randomly selects snippets of Hustwit’s interviews with Eno and archival footage every time the film is screened. As a result, no single viewing of the film is the same […] Hustwit and his friend Brendan Dawes, a digital artist and coder, called their generative software system Brain One (an anagram for “Brian Eno”). The software randomly draws from an archive of over 30 hours’ worth of interviews and 500 hours of archival film from Eno’s personal collection to project onto the screen. According to The New York Times, this mathematically means that there are approximately 52 quintillion (or 52 billion billion) possible permutations of this film, making it virtually impossible for someone to see the exact same cut twice.

Coffee Too Weak? Try This!

Netflix in 2012 […] had a simple but massive catalog of movies and shows, solid recommendations, and basic library management. Compared to my limited local media library it was great. You could actively tune your tastes and rate things with a 5-star system.

Netflix today is very different. It’s not a library—it’s an experience. Instead of reliably showing me what I “have” and recommending what I might like, it shuffles content on each interaction, sometimes changing the cover images of shows in real time, like some black-market charlatan. […]

Spotify in 2015 […] was like my iTunes library, but with millions more tracks. […] Spotify today is… basically Netflix. An inconsistent stream of ever-changing content, weak library tools, and an endless barrage of podcasts.

Overall, consistency, user control, and actual UX innovation are in decline. Everything is converging on TikTok—which is basically TV with infinite channels. You don’t control anything except the channel switch. It’s like Carcinisation, a form of convergent evolution where unrelated crustaceans all evolve into something vaguely crab-shaped.

{ Rakhim’s blog | Continue reading }

Cops investigating if Missouri foster mom traded a kid for a monkey to boost her exotic animal collection

number of US nonparents who never want children is growing

swimming sperm create swirling fluid vortices – shaped like rolling corkscrews – giving them an extra boost in the race to the egg

“Like, I had to be molested at the airport to go to Florida, right, just to get on an airplane, just because I’m not going to go through the ‘gay beam’ machine.“ […] the scanning process might somehow involve “virtual adrenochrome”

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an unprecedented effort was undertaken to investigate the credibility and plausibility of the aura, alongside other phenomena that confounded available naturalist explanations

Biggest brain map ever details huge number of neurons and their activity — The high-resolution 3D map contains more than 200,000 brain cells, around 82,000 of which are neurons. It also includes more than 500 million of the neuronal connection points called synapses and more than 4 kilometres of neuronal wiring, all found in a tiny block of tissue in a brain region involved in vision.

According to research, the stressful sensations caused by seeing others fidget are an incredibly common psychological phenomenon, affecting as many as one in three people

Elon Musk Rage Quits Livestream After Being Cyberbullied by Gamers

NJ cops claim their chief defecated in department offices, stuck a hypodermic needle into an officer’s penis, and spiked coffee with viagra

Fake job seekers are flooding U.S. companies that are hiring for remote positions, tech CEOs say. The rise of AI-generated profiles means that by 2028 globally 1 in 4 job candidates will be fake. Once hired, an impostor can install malware to demand a ransom from a company, or steal its customer data, trade secrets or funds. More: “I noticed they were using an AI filter to hide their real identity. So, I asked them to place a hand in front of their face as it would remove their AI cover. They didn’t do it and left the call a few seconds later”

Inflammation is a defense mechanism in which the blood flow increases to the site of tissue infection, playing a crucial role in the healing process by eliminating harmful cells. However, inflammation also leads to the destruction of cells, which is necessary for recovery. Mushrooms possess properties that allow them to act directly on inflammation. […] Edible mushroom are recognized as functional foods due to their remarkable potential for disease prevention and promotion of overall health and well-being. These varieties have antioxidants, anti-inflammatory, cytoprotective, cholesterol-lowering, antidiabetic, antimicrobial, and anticancer properties, as well as controlling blood pressure, being an immunity booster, and strengthening bone properties. In addition, they contain essential non-digestible oligosaccharides (NDOs) and ergothioneine, a potential substrate for gut microflora.

individuals conceived in colder months store fat differently from those conceived in warmer months […] those who were conceived in a cold season showed relatively higher brown adipose tissue activity. Brown adipose tissue is a type of fat that burns energy, keeps us warm, and helps regulate blood sugar. Along with increased brown fat activity, participants also showed increased energy expenditure, a lower body mass index (BMI), and less fat accumulation around their organs, which indicates better metabolic health overall. In those who are deemed overweight or obese, brown fat activity is often lacking.

the FBI then took over ElonmuskWHM’s money laundering operation and ran it themselves for nearly a year

Walter Matthau on Johnny Carson (1982)

Cashless society drives drop in children swallowing coins, researchers say — far fewer children are now needing hospital procedures to remove objects from throats, noses and airways

Welcome to the Worst Allergy Season Ever

Study shows women can hear better than men, women showing an average of two decibels more sensitive hearing than men across all the populations studied. Previously: results showed that among people in early and middle adulthood — aged between 24 and 65 — the men spoke on average 11,950 words per day, compared with 13,349 for the women.“This is consistent with the social stereotype that women talk more than men,”

Cyberattacks by AI agents are coming

How AI is creating a rift at McKinsey, Bain, and BCG

In more than 60 years of space activities, more than 6050 launches have resulted in some 56450 tracked objects in orbit, of which about 28160 remain in space. Only a small fraction - about 4000 - are intact, operational satellites today. […] More than 560 in-orbit fragmentation events have been recorded since 1961. Only 7 events were associated with collisions and the majority of the current events were explosions of spacecraft and upper stages. It is however expected that in the future collisions will become the dominant source of space debris. [video]