pipeline
Large reservoirs such as oil fields are typically split into exploratory blocks for different consortia
Anonymous, together with a group known as the Peoples Liberation Front, Tuesday announced the immediate availability of a new website for hacktivists to dump their stolen (”doxed”) data.
Dubbed AnonPaste, the website has been created as an alternative to Pastebin and other websites that allow people to anonymously upload large amounts of text, the two groups said in a joint press release. Shared content can be set to expire after 10 minutes, an hour, a day, a month, a year, or never. In addition, the site promises to remain advertising-free and unmoderated, maintain no connection logs, and store only encrypted data.
Suddenly they all died. The end.
The outbreak of a new livestock disease in western Europe last year, particularly harmful to offspring, could move further into areas surrounding the worst affected countries in the next cycle of new births, scientists say.
Schmallenberg virus - named after the German town where it was first detected in November - infected sheep and cows on at least 2,600 farms in eight EU countries last year, most likely between August and October.
Thought to have been spread for hundreds of miles across Europe by biting midges and warm late summer winds, the virus has since been confirmed in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Italy, Spain and Britain.
By bronze, by gold, in oceangreen of shadow
Federal authorities have arrested eight men accused of distributing more than $1 million worth of LSD, ecstasy, and other narcotics with an online storefront that used the TOR anonymity service to mask their Internet addresses.
“The Farmer’s Market,” as the online store was called, was like an Amazon for consumers of controlled substances, according to a 66-page indictment unsealed on Monday. It offered online forums, Web-based order forms, customer service, and at least four methods of payment, including PayPal and Western Union. From January 2007 to October 2009, it processed some 5,256 orders valued at $1.04 million. The site catered to about 3,000 customers in 35 countries, including the United States.
To elude law enforcement officers, the operators used software provided by the TOR Project that makes it virtually impossible to track the activities of users’ IP addresses.
Don’t know if this song is better than sex. I’m still a virgin.
The discovery [of the Higgs boson], if confirmed, will mark the culmination of a hunt that has taken years and cost billions of dollars, and will shape the field for years to come. (…) What fundamental discoveries in biology might inspire the same thrill? We put the question to experts in various fields. (…)
Is there life elsewhere? (…)
Is there foreign life on earth? (…) Some have postulated the existence of a ’shadow biosphere’ on Earth, teeming with life that has gone undiscovered because scientists simply don’t know where to look. It could contain life that relies on a fundamentally different biochemistry, using different forms of amino acids or even entirely novel ways of storing, replicating and executing inherited information that do not rely on DNA or proteins. (…)
How did life start…? (…) Joyce says that there will come a point at which researchers learn how to synthesize an evolving, replicating system from scratch. (…) Several labs have already made headway. (…) In 2009, a paper from Joyce’s lab reported the development of a system of RNA molecules that undergo self-sustaining Darwinian evolution5. But enzymes and a human hand were needed to create the RNA sequences to start off the reaction, Joyce says, and so far his lab has not found conditions that would allow the system to form spontaneously. “We’re still a bit challenged,” he says. “But the system is running more and more efficiently all the time.” (…)
… and can we delay its end? (…) Cynthia Kenyon and her colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, reported that mutations in a single gene allowed the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to live more than twice as long as usual. Three years later, a group led by Andrzej Bartke, who studies ageing at Southern Illinois University in Springfield, reported that mice bearing a single mutation that causes hormonal deficiencies live up to 68% longer than mice without the mutation. Both papers, and a slew of work since, have suggested that it might be possible to significantly slow human ageing and its associated diseases.
image { Trevor Brown }
Now however, in the cool air, when even all the tumult of your hearts have become still
Thriving colonies disappear overnight without leaving a trace, the bodies of the victims are never found. It’s what’s happening to fully a third of commercial beehives, over a million colonies every year. Seemingly healthy communities fly off never to return. The queen bee and mother of the hive is abandoned to starve and die.
Thousands of scientific sleuths have been on this case for the last 15 years trying to determine why our honey bees are disappearing in such alarming numbers. “This is the biggest general threat to our food supply,” according to Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s bee and pollination program.
Until recently, the evidence was inconclusive on the cause of the mysterious “colony collapse disorder” (CCD) that threatens the future of beekeeping worldwide. But three new studies point an accusing finger at a culprit that many have suspected all along, a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids. (…)
Their vanishing is nature’s way of telling us that conditions have deteriorated in the world around us. Bees won’t survive for long if we don’t change our commercial breeding practices and remove deadly toxins from their environment. (…)
Germany and France have already banned pesticides that have been implicated in the deaths of bees.
collage { Matthew Cusick }
They lifted. Tschink. Tschunk. Tip.
One of the great challenges in cosmology is understanding the nature of the universe’s so-called missing mass.
Astronomers have long known that galaxies are held together by gravity, a force that depends on the amount of mass a galaxy contains. Galaxies also spin, generating a force that tends to cause this mass to fly apart.
The galaxies astronomers can see are not being torn apart as they rotate, presumably because they are generating enough gravity to prevent this.
But that raises a conundrum. Astronomers can see how much visible mass there is in a galaxy and when they add it all up, there isn’t anywhere enough for the required amount of gravity. So something else must be generating this force.
One idea is that gravity is stronger on the galactic scale and so naturally provides the extra force to glue galaxies together.
Another is that the galaxies must be filled with matter that astronomers can’t see, the so-called dark matter.
photo { Bela Borsodi }
And we’ll steal a bunch of boysenberries and I’ll smear them on your face
A series of hacks perpetrated against so-called “smart meter” installations over the past several years may have cost a single U.S. electric utility hundreds of millions of dollars annually, the FBI said in a cyber intelligence bulletin obtained by KrebsOnSecurity. The law enforcement agency said this is the first known report of criminals compromising the hi-tech meters, and that it expects this type of fraud to spread across the country as more utilities deploy smart grid technology.
Smart meters are intended to improve efficiency, reliability, and allow the electric utility to charge different rates for electricity at different times of day. Smart grid technology also holds the promise of improving a utility’s ability to remotely read meters to determine electric usage.
███████, ██████, and so on
{ When the authorities send a subpoena to Facebook for your account information, what do they receive? }
related:
This paper reports a study which investigated adult social activity on Facebook. The data was drawn from an online survey (N = 758) and 18 in-depth research sessions (semistructured interviews and verbal protocols). The research explored the function of Facebook in making contact, maintaining contact and facilitating extended contact with online friends and the concept of ‘facestalking’. It also examined how the specific tools of Facebook (wall postings, status updates, events and photos) are used to communicate and socialise. The research concludes that Facebook strengthens existing friendships by supplementing traditional forms of communication (face to face, telephone). Also, participation in the Facebook community enables efficient and convenient contact to be maintained with a larger and more diverse group of acquaintances, thus extending potential social capital.
A Wall Street Journal examination of 100 of the most popular Facebook apps found that some seek the email addresses, current location and sexual preference, among other details, not only of app users but also of their Facebook friends. One Yahoo service powered by Facebook requests access to a person’s religious and political leanings as a condition for using it. The popular Skype service for making online phone calls seeks the Facebook photos and birthdays of its users and their friends. (…)
Facebook requires apps to ask permission before accessing a user’s personal details. However, a user’s friends aren’t notified if information about them is used by a friend’s app. An examination of the apps’ activities also suggests that Facebook occasionally isn’t enforcing its own rules on data privacy.
Already lost two fake nails, my drink, and my best friend
Homicidal sleepwalking, also known as homicidal somnambulism, is the act of killing someone during an episode of sleepwalking.
About 68 cases had been reported in the literature up to 2000.
photo { Anja Niemi }
Energy and motion made visible — memories arrested in space.
For decades in art circles it was either a rumor or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years. (…)
Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.
Go big or go home
In one high profile case, TerrorZone gang members used ticket machines at train stations to launder dye-stained banknotes obtained through cash-in-transit robberies. They purchased cheap fares, paid with high denomination stolen cash, and pocketed the “clean change.”
In another example, gang members bought their own music on iTunes and Amazon websites using stolen credit cards in order to profit from the royalties.
{ Crime and Delinquency | PDF | via MindHacks }
artwork { Jean-Micel Basquiat, Not Detected, 1982 }
If I played guitar I’d be Jimmy Page
{ Jay-Z, Ed Ruscha and Marilyn Minter to Design Water Tanks in New York }
previously in let’s deface new york { Jeff Koons is in talks with Friends of the High Line }
And then he starts with his jawbreakers about phenomenon and science and this phenomenon and the other phenomenon
Six studies demonstrate the “pot calling the kettle black” phenomenon whereby people are guilty of the very fault they identify in others. Recalling an undeniable ethical failure, people experience ethical dissonance between their moral values and their behavioral misconduct. Our findings indicate that to reduce ethical dissonance, individuals use a double-distancing mechanism. Using an overcompensating ethical code, they judge others more harshly and present themselves as more virtuous and ethical.
{ Journal of Experimental Psychology: General | PDF | via Overcoming Bias }
related { Psychological projection is a psychological defense mechanism where a person subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people. | Wikipedia }
I remember this one time on Facebook someone ‘poked me’ and I stabbed him
One quick story: I was a venture capitalist in 2001. A company, Oingo, which later became Applied Semantics, had a technique for how search engines could make money by having people bid for ads. My partner at the firm said, “we can probably pick up half this company for cheap. They are running out of money.” It was during the Internet bust.
“Are you kidding me, “ I said. “they are in the search engine business. That’s totally dead.” And I went back to playing the Defender machine that was in my office. That I would play all day long even while companies waited in the conference room.
A year later they were bought by Google for 1% of Google. Our half would’ve now been worth hundreds of millions if we had invested. I was the worst venture capitalist ever. They had changed their name from Oingo to Applied Semantics to what became within Google…AdWords and AdSense, which has been 97% of Google’s revenues since 2001. 97%. $67 billion dollars. (…)
Ken Lang buys his patents back from Lycos for almost nothing. He starts a company: I/P Engine. Two weeks ago he announced he was merging his company with a public company, Vringo (Nasdaq: VRNG). Because it’s Ken, I buy the stock although will buy more after this article is out and readers read this.
The company sues Google for a big percentage of those $67 billion in revenues plus future revenues. The claim: Google has willfully infringed on Vringo – I/P’s patents for sorting ads based on click-throughs.
My way is the highway
Computers dominate how we live, work and think. For some, the technology is a boon and promises even better things to come. But others warn that there could be bizarre consequences and that humans may be on the losing end of progress. (…)
“Economic progress ultimately signifies the ability to produce things at a lower financial cost and with less labor than in the past,” says Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. As a result, he says, increasing effectiveness goes hand in hand with rising unemployment, and the unemployed merely become “human waste.”
Likewise, (…) Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, both scholars at the MIT, argue that, for the first time in its history, technological progress is creating more jobs for computers than for people.
unrelated { Competition among memes in a world with limited attention }
