Church membership in US via Gallup poll:
2000: 70%
2005: 64%
2010: 61%
2015: 55%
Now: 47%
{ @ryanstruyk via ny mag }
Camsoda announced the launch of “Grubuzz,” a new technology that harnesses the power of Internet-connected sex toys - aka teledildonics - and sends clitoral vibrations to people as their takeout food from a national chain or local favorite is being prepared and ultimately delivered.
Stanford scientists saved drops of the COVID-19 vaccine destined for the garbage can, reverse engineered them, and have posted the mRNA sequence that powers the vaccine on GitHub for all to see.
The GitHub post is four pages long. The first two are an explanation by the team of scientists about the work, the second two pages are the entire mRNA sequence for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.
Nomura and Credit Suisse are facing billions of dollars in losses after a U.S. hedge fund, named by sources as Archegos Capital, defaulted on margin calls. […]
A margin call is when a bank asks a client to put up more collateral if a trade partly funded with borrowed money has fallen sharply in value. If the client cannot afford to do that, the lender will sell the securities to try to recoup what it is owed.
Margin calls on Archegos Capital prompted a massive unwinding of leveraged equity bets. Shares in ViacomCBS and Discovery each tumbled around 27% on Friday, while U.S.-listed shares of China-based Baidu and Tencent Music plunged during the week, dropping as much as 33.5% and 48.5%, respectively, from Tuesday’s closing levels. […]
Morgan Stanley sold $4 billion worth of shares early on Friday, followed by another $4 billion in the afternoon. […] Goldman liquidated more than $10 billion worth of stocks in the block trades [and] sold $6.6 billion worth of shares of Baidu Inc, Tencent Music Entertainment Group and Vipshop Holdings Ltd, before the U.S. market opened on Friday […] Following this, Goldman sold $3.9 billion worth of shares inViacomCBS Inc, Discovery Inc, Farfetch Ltd, iQIYI Inc and GSX Techedu Inc […]
Hwang, who founded Archegos and ran Tiger Asia from 2001 to 2012, renamed it Archegos Capital and made it a family office.
{ Reuters | Continue reading }
Archegos borrowed a mere five times its capital. Closely regulated Goldman Sachs is at nearly seven times on a risk-weighted basis. […]
Hwang himself was a walking risk factor. He admitted to wire fraud in 2012 and in 2014 was banned from trading in Hong Kong for four years.
A missing Florida woman was rescued after she was found naked in a storm drain. She told police officers she had been down there 20 days after she got lost swimming in the canal.
Parisien police seized a suspected shipment of ecstasy that turned out to be strawberry powder
Authorities in Romania have brought drug trafficking charges against a man who once posed as US actor Robert de Niro in order to take out fraudulent bank loans.
Testosterone administration in women increases the size of their peripersonal space
Drinking a strong coffee half an hour before exercising increases fat-burning, new study finds
The pandemic itself was already exposing vulnerabilities in world provide chains. Now it prices about $4,000 to ship a 40-ft container between east Asia and the US west coast, up from $1,500 initially of 2020. […] brash political speak about reshoring operations is naive. “Even the supply chain has a supply chain,” he says. A dose of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, for instance, requires 280 parts from a number of nations, in line with the corporate. [Financial Times | ungated]
Before Google bought YouTube in 2006 for just $1.65 billion, it alleged that the site was “a rogue enabler of content theft.” Google’s investment was protected thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Section 512, which granted a safe harbor from prosecution to tech companies whose users post copyrighted materials, as long as they institute a process of taking down infringing content when asked. […] Daniel Ek, co-founder and CEO of Spotify, promoted what he called an artist-friendly streaming solution. […] Spotify also pays out absurdly low per-stream rates, though not as bad as YouTube. […] “The platforms have driven the price of content to zero. This demonetized content is still generating a fortune. But the artists aren’t getting that money.”
Meet the experimental musicians who built their own streaming service
Amazon started disclosing AWS numbers five years ago, but in the last couple of years another big and highly profitable business has quietly emerged in the footnotes at the back of the 10k. Amazon’s ‘Other’ revenue line, which is ‘primarily’ advertising, was over $20bn in 2020.
Facebook’s problem is that, if given a choice, many people will choose not to allow tracking.
Artificial Intelligence will generate enough wealth to pay each adult $13,500 a year — if the government collects and redistributes the wealth that AI will generate
The conventional wisdom about how to spot a liar is all wrong. Previously: Former CIA Officer Will Teach You How to Spot a Lie
I tracked down my impostor — I found a video clip of him at a conference, reading out a chapter I’d written. He was dressed like me. He had even copied my tattoos
Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” Beta Is Just Laughably Bad and Potentially Dangerous
Cannabis Delivery Services are illegal in Maine. Gifting Cannabis is illegal in Maine. Don’t worry though! It is still legal for an Adult age 21/+ to carry 2.5oz of Cannabis Flower and up to 5 grams of concentrates!
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Just login to this site, and select the cannabis or cannabis products you lost, and give us your address. We will find YOUR weed and get it back to you ASAP. Fees vary based on the time it takes us to find your weed, the quantity of weed we have to locate, and the distance in which we have to travel to get YOUR LOST weed back to you.
Multiple Destroyers Were Swarmed By Mysterious ‘Drones’ Off California Over Numerous Nights
A $100,000 bonus for working 100-hour workweeks? Apollo analysts hit the jackpot, even if they don’t get to have a life.
The Coronavirus Variants Don’t Seem to Be Highly Variable So Far — SARS-CoV-2 may be settling into a limited set of mutations
Oral manifestations, such as taste loss, dry mouth and oral lesions, are evident in about half of COVID-19 cases. […] Saliva from asymptomatic individuals contains infectious virus
Fox News faces a second defamation suit over its election coverage. Dominion is seeking at least $1.6 billion in damages. The lawsuit comes less than two months after Smartmatic, another election tech company, filed a $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox.
One useful perspective shift here is to reframe the situation so that learning to tolerate the discomfort of doing things imperfectly becomes a kind of self-improvement project in itself.
You may stumble, but that’s OK. In fact, it’s the only way you’ll learn.
The Solution of the Zodiac Killer’s 340-Character Cipher
hand-painted “self-portrait” by world-famous robot sold at auction for over $688,000
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) is the only complete novel written by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. […] The story starts out as a fairly conventional adventure at sea, but it becomes increasingly strange and hard to classify. […]
Peters, Pym, and Augustus hatch a plan to seize control of the ship […] soon the three men are masters of the Grampus: all the mutineers are killed or thrown overboard except one, Richard Parker, whom they spare to help them run the vessel. […] As time passes, with no sign of land or other ships, Parker suggests that one of them should be killed as food for the others. They draw straws, following the custom of the sea, and Parker is sacrificed.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }
On 19 May 1884 four men set sail from Southampton in a small yacht. They were professional sailors tasked with taking their vessel, the Mignonette, to its new owner in Australia. […] The Mignonette’s captain, Tom Dudley, was 31 years old and a proven yachtsman. Of his crew, Ned Brooks and mate Edwin Stephens were likewise seasoned sailors. The final crew-member, cabin boy Richard Parker, was just 17 years old and making his first voyage on the open sea. […]
On 5 July, sailing from Madeira to Cape Town, the Mignonette was sunk by a giant wave. […] Adrift in an open boat in the South Atlantic, hundreds of miles from land, they had little in the way of provisions. They had no water, and for food, only two 1lb tins of turnips grabbed during the Mignonette’s final moments.
Over the next 12 days, these turnips were scrupulously rationed out […] For water […] they resorted to drinking their own urine, although this too was a diminishing resource as their bodies became increasingly dehydrated.
By 17 July all supplies on board the little dinghy had been exhausted. After a further three days, the inexperienced Richard Parker could not resist gulping down sea water in an attempt to allay his thirst. It is now known that small quantities of sea water can help to sustain life in survival situations, but in that period it was widely believed to be fatal. Parker also drank far in excess of modern recommendations and he was soon violently unwell, collapsing in the bottom of the boat with diarrhea.
Even before Parker fell ill, Tom Dudley had broached the fearful topic of the “custom of the sea,” the practice of drawing lots to select a sacrificial victim who could be consumed by his crew-mates. […] According to their subsequent depositions, however, no lots were drawn. Instead, Dudley told Stephens to hold Parker’s legs should he struggle, before kneeling and thrusting his penknife into the boy’s jugular. […] Parker’s body was then stripped and butchered. The heart and liver were eaten immediately; strips of flesh were cut from his limbs and set aside as future rations. What remained of the young man was heaved overboard.
How I heat my home by mining crypto currencies — and cutting my electricity bill in half in the process
Studies show that swearing makes up around 0.5 % of the daily spoken content
the average length of an erect penis is between 5.1 and 5.5 inches (12.95-13.97 cm)
A New Generation of Vaccines Is Coming, Some With No Needles
More than 1.4 trillion euros ($1.7 trillion) of banknotes were circulating at the end of 2020, up 11% from a year earlier. Yet the evidence suggests that only about a fifth of that is used for transactions within the currency area. Studies have shown that 30-50% by value is held outside the bloc, such as in developing economies with underdeveloped payment infrastructure and a lack of credible savings options. The rest, maybe as much as 50% by value, is physically stored by households, companies and banks. [Bloomberg]
In Europe, the [big tetch] companies are spending more than ever, hiring former government officials, well-connected law firms and consulting firms. They funded dozens of think tanks and trade associations, endowed academic positions at top universities across the continent and helped publish industry-friendly research by other firms. In the first half of 2020, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft declared spending a combined 19 million euros, or about $23 million, equal to what they had declared for all of 2019 and up from €6.8 million in 2014. Despite the lobbying, the industry has had few major successes. [NY Times]
A tool for publishing newsletters, Substack grew in prominence over the past year as several well-known opinion journalists abandoned their longtime employers to start their own subscription-based, bespoke punditry shops on the platform. […] Former Vox columnist Matt Yglesias, for example, is reportedly poised to rake in $860,000 in subscription revenue this year. Unless he’s paying $50,000 a month for his internet connection, his newsletter’s rate of profit dwarfs that of most any major media outlet. […] But this was not the focus of last week’s Substack discourse.
Nike and Boeing Are Paying Sci-Fi Writers to Predict Their Futures (2018)
Facebook Algorithmic Factory (2016)
{ Suez Canal blocked after giant container ship gets stuck, more than 100 ships stuck at each end of the canal Ships now stuck in the canal will find it difficult to turn around and pursue other routes given the narrowness of the channel. | CNN |full story | Suez, Egypt Tide Chart }
update 3.25: Rescuers say container ship stuck in Suez could take weeks to unblock and Owner and insurers face millions in claims
Dealers are using Fortnite treats to groom children as drug mules
Study confirms that some people age more slowly — The slowest ager gained only 0.4 “biological years” for each chronological year in age; in contrast, the fastest-aging participant gained nearly 2.5 biological years for every chronological year.
Training Working Memory for Two Years – No Evidence of Latent Transfer to Intelligence
What makes It Difficult to keep an Intimate Relationship: Evidence From Greece and China
Dogs and cats can become infected by B.1.1.7, the “UK variant”
The wannabe food influencer who’s wanted by the FBI
Travelers sitting on billions of dollars in unused flight vouchers
Junior investment bankers at Goldman Sachs are suffering burnout from 100-hour work weeks and demanding bosses during a SPAC-fueled boom in deals, according to an internal survey
Fake Insider Trading Is Illegal Too
By all accounts, Len was on track to be one of the most important cryptographers of his time. But on July 3rd, 2011, he tragically took his own life at 31, following a long battle with depression and functional neurological disorders. His death coincided with the disappearance of the world’s most famous cypherpunk: Satoshi Nakamoto.
Man Loses $560,000 in Bitcoin Scam From Fake Elon Musk Account — One of the most common scam consists of creating Twitter accounts posing as personalities like Elon Musk. In some cases, criminals use accounts stolen from prominent individuals that already have the “verified blue check mark,” thus they appear legitimate and trustworthy. Although Twitter is the favorite platform for “gift scams,” they also swarm other networks such as YouTube, Facebook , Instagram and even WhatsApp.
Facial Recognition: What Happens When We’re Tracked Everywhere We Go? [NY Times]
Distribution systems within the U.S. electrical grid are increasingly vulnerable to cyberattack Related: U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid [NY Times] and Hacking the Russian Power Grid
Mission to clean up space junk with magnets set for launch
Can Transgender Women Get Uterus Transplants?
Why Women Should Not Vote (1917)
A vampire can be considered “amphibious”
How to Build a Life: Stop Keeping Score
NYC man sells fart for $85, cashing in on NFT craze […] Ramírez-Mallis and his fellow farters compiled the recordings into a 52-minute “Master Collection” audio file. Now, the top bid for the file is currently $183. Individual fart recordings are also available for 0.05 Ethereum, or about $85 a pop.
unrelated { Illegal Content and the Blockchain }
Dozens of people in Taiwan have changed their names to “salmon” to take advantage of a restaurant’s sushi promotion deal. Officials have issued a plea asking people to stop visiting government offices to request the name change.
Angry Customer Demands Refund After Ordering A Dozen Masks, Receiving “Only 12″
Scientists grew tiny tear glands in a dish — then made them cry
About 330 billion cells are replaced daily, equivalent to about 1 percent of all our cells. In 80 to 100 days, 30 trillion will have replenished—the equivalent of a new you.
Erin Brockovich: Plummeting sperm counts, shrinking penises: toxic chemicals threaten humanity
Microbes Unknown to Science Discovered on The International Space Station
Facebook is making a bracelet that lets you control computers with your brain — The device would let you interact with Facebook’s upcoming augmented-reality glasses just by thinking.
Invisibility of Social Privilege to Those Who Have It
Unpacking a Decade of Appellate Decisions on Qualified Immunity — a judicial doctrine that shields government officials, including those in law enforcement, from being held personally responsible for constitutional violations
“Narco Submarine” Discovered in Spain
The Spanish Electrician Who Sabotaged the Nazis
Using newly digitised logbooks detailing the hunting of sperm whales in the north Pacific, the authors discovered that within just a few years, the strike rate of the whalers’ harpoons fell by 58%. This simple fact leads to an astonishing conclusion: that information about what was happening to them was being collectively shared among the whales
researchers in Switzerland can get electricity from wood
Uber is reclassifying its UK-based drivers as “workers”
It may look like an art show but these ‘dancing lights’ reduce pesticide use by 50%
Discovery identifies non-DNA molecules in the sperm involved in transmitting paternal experience to offspring
The psychological risks of meditation
The term nervous breakdown first appeared in a 1901 medical treatise for physicians. “It is a disease of the whole civilized world,” its author wrote.
The fast-growing social network SafeChat has a “Star Wars” barlike atmosphere in which white nationalists mingle with Chinese dissidents. And there’s plenty of conspiracy theories, too.
how the New York Times tests multiple headlines for a single article
To make up for lack of interaction under Covid-19 restrictions, apes at Czech zoos 150km apart can now watch each others’ daily lives on big screens
Pa. woman created ‘deepfake’ videos to force rivals off daughter’s cheerleading squad
A Hacker Got All My Texts for $16
Hedge Funds Are Training 16-Year-Old Interns in Singapore
Two companies are selling diamonds made in a laboratory from CO2 — Each carat removes 20 tons of greenhouse gas from the sky, entrepreneurs say
Google must face $5B lawsuit over tracking private internet use, judge rules — Judge finds tech giant didn’t notify users their data could still be collected in incognito mode
NFTs have already given rise to new types of copyright infringement, frustrating artists
Cracking of encrypted messaging service dealt major blow to organised crime — Sky ECC promised a 5 million USD (€4.2 million) prize on its website, which is currently down, to anyone who could crack its encryption. It is not yet clear if Belgian authorities plan to claim the reward.
how to operate an airport in Antarctica
Wooden Replica of Mies’ Farnsworth House
Degaussing + Manually deguassing a CRT monitor using neodymium magnet
Russian Lawmakers Approve Initial Reading Of Bill Allowing ‘Accidental’ Corruption
We consider whether Orgasmic Meditation, a structured, partnered, largely non-verbal practice that includes genital touch, also increases relationship closeness.
When it came to definitions of rough sex, the most commonly endorsed items were: choking (77%), hair pulling (75%), spanking (69%), being pinned down (66%), being tied up (65%)…
AI Identifies Pain Levels From Patient Data
Body Mass Index and Risk for COVID-19
How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world
Inside Jeff Bezos’s failed attempt to make Amazon “cool” like Apple and Nike
