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upon reflection, the new shelton resurrects — sorry for the change of mind
Mondrian painting has been hanging upside down for 75 years — Despite the discovery, the work, titled New York City I, will continue to be displayed the wrong way up to avoid damaging it
Strangers smiled less to one another when they had their phones in a waiting room
Earlier this month, the European Union approved legislation aimed at regulating social media platforms: the Digital Services Act. The law will take effect in 2024 [a subset of obligations for VLOPs and VLOSEs (avery large online platforms and very large online search engines) will start to apply next year. […] The law, among other requirements, places substantial content moderation expectations on large social media firms—many based in the U.S.—which include limiting false information, hate speech, and extremism. It’s not clear how social media firms will adapt to the law, but the fines they will face for failing to comply will be massive. Firms can be fined up to six percent of their annual revenue—that’s $11 billion for Google and $7 billion for Meta. […] That means an American politician’s conspiracy-filled Facebook post will create legal liability for Meta. The company might then take it down to avoid huge fines in Europe.
Tech industry appeals the bad Texas social media law to the Supreme Court The law makes bans on hate speech — or any content moderation — impossible
As lawsuits continue piling up against social media platforms for allegedly causing harms to children, a Pennsylvania court has ruled that TikTok is not liable in one case where a 10-year-old named Nylah Anderson died after attempting to complete a “Blackout Challenge” she discovered on her “For You” page. The challenge recommends that users choke themselves until they pass out, and Nylah’s mother, Tawainna Anderson, initially claimed that TikTok’s defective algorithm was responsible for knowingly feeding the deadly video to her child. The mother hoped that Section 230 protections under the Communications Decency Act—which grant social platforms immunity for content published by third parties—would not apply in the case, but ultimately, the judge found that TikTok was immune. [Memorandum]
Mr. Musk already has about $13 billion in debt from lenders, while other investors, like the venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, chipped in about $7.1 billion in cash. Mr. Musk was personally responsible for the buyout’s remaining roughly $25 billion, and it remains unclear whether he gathered more investors to help lighten that load. […] If even cost cuts do not help, Mr. Musk may need to raise more money from outside investors within a year, Mr. Talley said. […] Mr. Bruner said the worst deals are typically struck at the peak of a market — as with Mr. Musk’s purchase of Twitter. He offered what he thought could be a worst-case scenario for the company. In that future, Mr. Musk would not be able to “get the expenses down to the level necessary to cover the debt burden.” That would “slowly erode the company’s equity, and he’s unable to find more equity investors.” The final outcome? “Slowly, Twitter implodes,” Mr. Bruner said.
Mr. Musk’s companies, and his fortune, were built with billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies for his electric-car company, Tesla, and billions more in NASA contracts to ferry American astronauts into space, launch satellites and provide high-speed internet services tethered to his fleet of some 3,000 satellites. he is not the self-made genius businessman he plays in the media. Instead, his success was prompted and paid for by taxpayer money and abetted by government officials who have allowed him and other billionaire businessmen to exercise more and more control over our economy and our politics.
There is no character in the entire canon of world literature and drama more useful for explaining markets than Wile E. Coyote. In the Roadrunner cartoons, he would run off the edge of a cliff, and continue running into midair. Only once he stopped, looked down, and realized that he was in midair, did he fall. He thus gave the market the invaluable concept of a Wile E. Coyote moment, when investors realize they’ve been running without support for a long time, and prices that should have long since been gradually coming down suddenly collapse.
As the company of Facebook grew, we faced a lot of challenges. One of them was explaining our company’s mission, history, and culture to new employees.: Facebook’s Little Red Book
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Fans waited four years for Frank Ocean’s second studio album, and on August 19, 2016 they got a 46-minute-long, high contrast black and white experimental visual album with an unmarked tracklist. Released exclusively as a video on Apple Music, Endless had no purchase option. It would be the next day when critics got what they were looking for but under the title Blond(e). Another album, this time sixty minutes long with eighteen tracks plus one unlisted, and widely available to stream and buy. The press would learn in the days to come that Endless marked the end of Ocean’s contractual obligations to Def Jam Records. Blond(e) was his first official release as an independent artist. […] Where Ocean imagined freedom from a future designed by UMG, Kara Keeling’s Queer Times, Black Futures (henceforth QTBF) looks, within the realm of the poetic, to expressions of what is beyond the future designed by racial capitalism. […] If capitalism therefore consigns futures only to that which is presently knowable and if it seeks to police the imagination by limiting the possible only to that which is presently available to “common sense,” QTBF alternatively considers how Afrofuturist and Black queer media reveal otherworldly and profoundly non-linear futures that exist here, now. “Here now” is a refrain that is echoed throughout Keeling’s engagements with her capacious archive of audio, visual, and literary media, which she reads as instances of the impossible, errant, opaque, utopic and dystopic—the Black and queer. Asking what these works may offer us in the present and in our material relations to futures that remain beyond view, Keeling’s theoretical and close reading practice is animated by a commitment to “the stubborn spatiotemporalities of our senses”—something that she again credits to Lorde’s writing—so as to “intervene in the smooth and seductive assertions of capitalism’s inevitability.”
The world is running out of helium. Here’s why doctors are worried. Liquid helium, the coldest element on Earth, is needed to keep the magnets in MRI machines running. Without it, doctors would lose a critical medical tool. […] With a boiling point of minus 452 degrees Fahrenheit, liquid helium is the coldest element on Earth. Pumped inside an MRI magnet, helium lets the current travel resistance-free. […] At any point, an MRI machine contains about 2,000 liters of liquid helium, though suppliers need to replenish any helium that boils off. Mahesh estimates that an MRI machine uses 10,000 liters of liquid helium over its life span. (According to GE Healthcare, a manufacturer of the machines, that life span is 12.8 years.) […] An enormous new facility in eastern Russia was supposed to supply nearly one-third of the world’s helium, but a fire last January derailed the timeline. Although the facility could resume operations any day, the war in Ukraine has, for the most part, stopped trade between the two countries. […] The forced innovation may preview what’s to come for MRIs. […] “There’s only a finite amount of helium in the Earth’s crust”
The idea that humans could be frozen and later brought back has survived for decades. The hope is still alive and even growing today— never mind that it’s still not possible. […] Today, around 500 people are preserved in liquid nitrogen globally, the vast majority in the United States. Around 4,000 people are on waiting lists of cryonics facilities around the world
Manhattan congressional candidate publishes a porn video to highlight his sex positive platform
Black men account for fewer than 2 percent of sperm donors at cryobanks. The severe shortage is forcing Black women who need donor sperm into a painful choice: Choose a donor of another race and raise a biracial child or try to buy sperm from unregulated apps and online groups.
how ultra-processed meals are unhealthier than you think […] a study in Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology found that people born after 1990 are more likely to develop cancer before they’re 50 than people born before 1970 […] “The ultra-processed nature of modern food generally means that the complex structure of the plant and animal cells is destroyed, turning it into a nutritionally empty mush that our body can process abnormally rapidly.”
Personal lubricant made from cow mucus may protect against HIV
Transparent wood could soon replace plastics
While the culture has always relied heavily on recycling, that impulse seems to have gone into overdrive in recent years; dance music’s most established genres (e.g. house, techno, jungle, electro, garage, dubstep, etc.) frequently sound as though they’re stuck in a neverending time loop, with sounds from the ’80s, ’90s and 2000s being constantly regurgitated for fresh crops of ravers. […] Dance music often swaddles itself in sci-fi imagery and utopian fantasy, but in many ways, it’s become a deeply nostalgic realm, with a healthy fetish for formats (e.g. vinyl and cassettes), gear (e.g. vintage synths and drum machines) and general modes of operation that were once cutting edge, but are now frequently impractical, wildly expensive or both. […] Dance music and DJ culture are no longer subversive, and arguably haven’t been for at least a decade; they’re now quite literally everywhere
Integrating Real-World Distractions into Virtual Reality [demo video]
Apple’s Sleeping Advertising Business
Mark Zuckerberg Is Going To Kill His Company
Man stole $122m from Facebook and Google by sending them random bills
How social media platforms respond to misinformation
More than just a hit, TikTok has blown up the model of what a social network can be. Silicon Valley taught the world a style of online connectivity built on hand-chosen interests and friendships. TikTok doesn’t care about those. Instead, it unravels for viewers an endless line of videos selected by its algorithm, then learns a viewer’s tastes with every second they watch, pause or scroll.
In this article I’ll explain what sound is, how it’s created and propagated. Throughout this presentation you will be hearing different sounds, which you will often play yourself.
