Under U.S. law, as soon as a work of art in any medium is created, the creator owns the copyright in that work. […] When we talk about “copyright”, we’re really talking about multiple rights (sometimes called a “basket of rights”). These include the right to control who makes copies of the original work […]

Typically, when someone buys a work of physical art, they are only purchasing the physical object. They are not purchasing the copyright in the work. […]

So if you own an original oil painting, you can display it in your home or wherever you want, and you can sell or loan the painting to someone, but you can’t make copies of it, sell prints, or make new works based on the original. […]

if you buy an NFT, my presumption is that you are only buying ownership in the NFT itself. You are not buying the copyright, unless there is a written contract […]

if I buy an NFT, and then I post it to Instagram with the message “Check out this cool NFT that I just bought!”, that’s creating many more digital copies. But this is true for all kinds of visual art these days, and the artist is free to go to Instagram and file a copyright takedown notice, requesting that the post be removed.

{ David Lizerbram & Associates | Continue reading }

image + header { The meme economy }

Man sues Hertz over receipt that cleared him of murder

Hundreds of sewage leaks detected thanks to AI

Almost all men want to feel sexually desired, but few actually do

One in four men has faked a climax at least once

In seven studies (n = 1,133), adults tried to create funny ideas and then rated the funniness of their responses, which were also independently rated by judges. People were relatively modest and self-critical about their ideas.

Happiness comes from trying to make others feel good, rather than oneself

One commonly held idea is that greater cognitive ability does not matter or is actually harmful beyond a certain point (sometimes stated as > 100 or 120 IQ points). […] Greater cognitive ability is generally advantageous—and virtually never detrimental.

A COVID-19 patient died after experiencing a 3-hour erection that doctors struggled to treat

there are some meaningful signs that even these quite scary-seeming versions of the disease may not prove all that scary in the end. I’m very worried about the Brazilian variant, since there is some evidence that it has achieved “immune escape” and produced a wave of reinfections. But the course of the others contains some real contradictions which I don’t yet know how to resolve. They appear to be considerably more infectious, and perhaps more lethal, than the “classic” strains. And yet they are growing in prevalence precisely as cases are falling nearly everywhere in the world. How can that be? Seasonality is surely playing a role in that decline, but if a new variant is 50 percent more transmissible than the old, you would expect it would require quite dramatic new restrictions to produce a decline in cases. In other words, it would be really hard, and pretty rare, to engineer a decline in the presence of those variants. Instead, it seems to be happening everywhere. [NY mag]

Globally, hundreds of thousand of organizations running Exchange email servers from Microsoft just got mass-hacked, including at least 30,000 victims in the United States. Each hacked server has been retrofitted with a “web shell” backdoor that gives the bad guys total, remote control, the ability to read all email, and easy access to the victim’s other computers. Security experts are now trying to alert and assist these victims before malicious hackers launch what many refer to with a mix of dread and anticipation as “Stage 2,” when the bad guys revisit all these hacked servers and seed them with ransomware or else additional hacking tools for crawling even deeper into victim networks. [Krebs on Security]

A study out of Harvard in 2020 also found that although cryptocurrency mining isn’t “burning down the planet”, there is “a scenario where each $1 of cryptocurrency coin value created would be responsible for $0.66 in health and climate damages.”

Earth makes a tiny seismic rumble every 26 seconds. No one knows why.

How Instagram Celebrities Promote Dubai’s Underground Animal Trade

I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

The more we can google, the less we know

YInMn, the First New Blue Pigment in Two Centuries

Block 800 NY Times reporters for $0 — The app’s creator is unknown

{ Trump and his party used their legislative majorities to redistribute income up the income ladder. Biden and his party are using theirs to distribute it down. | NY mag | full sotry }

Suspected dog and cat meat factory in China raided after owner traces missing pet by GPS

Sidewalk robots get legal rights as “pedestrians”

UBER DRIVER COUGHED ON, ASSAULTED & PEPPER SPRAYED

Why Does the Pandemic Seem to Be Hitting Some Countries Harder Than Others?

Would you take a coronavirus risk? — We are stuck in the middle of a massive multiplayer coordination problem

Tens of millions of people around the globe consider themselves creators, and the creator economy represents the “fastest-growing type of small business” […] But as the market gets more and more competitive creators are devising new, hyper-specific revenue streams. […] For example, a creator can use NewNew to post a poll asking which sweater they should wear today, or who they should hang out with and where they should go. Fans purchase voting power on NewNew’s platform to participate in the polls, and with enough voting power, they get to watch their favorite influencer live out their wishes, like a real life choose-your-own-adventure game. […] “Have you ever wanted to control my life?” Lev Cameron, 15, a TikToker with 3.3 million followers, asked in a recent video posted to NewNew. “Now is your time. You can actually control things I do throughout the day and vote on it and then I will show you if I end up doing the stuff you voted for.” [NY Times]

One of the most active QAnon networks is in Japan, where followers believe the imperial family has been replaced by body doubles and suggest that World War II-era Emperor Hirohito was a CIA or British agent who owned the patent for the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [..] QAnon also has enormous support in Britain. A survey by civic group Hope Not Hate last year found that 26 percent of Britons believed prominent public figures are part of a pedophile child-trafficking network, while an additional 17 percent said that the pandemic is part of a “depopulation plan” — another favorite QAnon belief around the world. [Washington Post]

Bird migration forecasts in real-time — When, where, and how far will birds migrate?

The secret New York apartment behind my bathroom mirror

Floral Motifs Are Digitally Printed onto Blonde Hair

Preliminary Examination, 3B District Court, March 2, 2021

Back in the 1980s, when DNA forensic analysis was still in its infancy, crime labs needed a speck of bodily fluid—usually blood, semen, or spit—to generate a genetic profile.

That changed in 1997, when Australian forensic scientist Roland van Oorschot stunned the criminal justice world with a nine-paragraph paper titled “DNA Fingerprints from Fingerprints.” It revealed that DNA could be detected not just from bodily fluids but from traces left by a touch. Investigators across the globe began scouring crime scenes for anything—a doorknob, a countertop, a knife handle—that a perpetrator may have tainted with incriminating “touch” DNA.

But van Oorschot’s paper also contained a vital observation: Some people’s DNA appeared on things that they had never touched. […]

In one of his lab’s experiments, for instance, volunteers sat at a table and shared a jug of juice. After 20 minutes of chatting and sipping, swabs were deployed on their hands, the chairs, the table, the jug, and the juice glasses, then tested for genetic material. Although the volunteers never touched each other, 50 percent wound up with another’s DNA on their hand. A third of the glasses bore the DNA of volunteers who did not touch or drink from them.

Then there was the foreign DNA—profiles that didn’t match any of the juice drinkers. It turned up on about half of the chairs and glasses, and all over the participants’ hands and the table. The only explanation: The participants unwittingly brought with them alien genes, perhaps from the lover they kissed that morning, the stranger with whom they had shared a bus grip, or the barista who handed them an afternoon latte.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

related { The Hunt for the Golden State Killer and A New Way to Solve Murders }

The U.K.’s B.1.1.7 variant has spread to more than eighty countries and has been doubling every ten days in the U.S., where it is expected to soon become the dominant variant. […] new evidence also suggests that people infected with it have higher viral loads and remain infectious longer, which could have implications for quarantine guidelines. […]

“The fact that different variants have independently hit on the same mutations suggests we’re already seeing the limits of where the virus can go,” McLellan told me. “It has a finite number of options.”

Over time, SARS-CoV-2 is likely to become less lethal, not more. When people are exposed to a virus, they often develop “cross-reactive” immunity that protects them against future infection, not just for that virus, but also for related strains; with time, the virus also exhausts the mutational possibilities that might allow it to infect cells while eluding the immune system’s memory. “This is what we think happened to viruses that cause the common cold,” McLellan said. “It probably caused a major illness in the past. Then it evolved to a place where it’s less deadly. But, of course, it’s still with us.” It’s possible that a coronavirus that now causes the common cold, OC43, was responsible for the “Russian flu” of 1889, which killed a million people. But OC43, like other coronaviruses, became less dangerous with time. Today, most of us are exposed to OC43 and other endemic coronaviruses as children, and we experience only mild symptoms. For SARS-CoV-2, such a future could be years or decades away.

{ New Yorker | Continue reading }

Higher airborne pollen concentrations correlated with increased SARS-CoV-2 infection rates, as evidenced from 31 countries across the globe

[…]

We found that pollen, sometimes in synergy with humidity and temperature, explained, on average, 44% of the infection rate variability. Lockdown halved infection rates under similar pollen concentrations. […]

Pollen grains act on the very site of virus entry, the nasal epithelium, by inhibiting antiviral λ-IFN responses.

{ PNAS | Continue reading }

previously { We conclude that pollen is a predictor for the inverse seasonality of flu-like epidemics including COVID-19 }

wax crayon on paper { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dog Shit in the Head of the Pope, 1981 }

Queen Elizabeth … a public servant, and an annual recipient of the taxpayer-funded sovereign grant — valued at $107.1 million (£82.2 million) in 2019…

{ CNN | Continue reading }

Male nurse arrested after telling patients gynecological exam was necessary part of COVID-19 testing

The words ‘dopamine’ and ‘mindfulness’ have lost all meaning

fashionable outfits are those that are moderately matched, not those that are ultra-matched or zero-matched

While physical attractiveness was less important to blind men, blind women considered physical attractiveness as important as sighted women.

Children’s Use of Nonverbal Behavior to Detect Deception

Intranasal vaccines might stop the spread of the coronavirus more effectively than needles in arms

the vast majority of people who are vaccinated will be protected from Covid-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. However, vaccinated people may still be able to transmit the virus, even though they do not display any symptoms.

SARS-CoV-2 was present on the ocular surface in 52 of 91 patients with COVID-19

During Lockdown, Meaningful Activity Is More Fulfilling Than Simply Staying Busy

How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you

I think I know what intelligence is; I think I know how brains do it. And AI is not doing what brains do.

Deciphering Bitcoin Blockchain Data by Cohort Analysis

Why Do NFTs Matter for Music?

Kings of Leon Will Be the First Band to Release an Album as an NFT

This frog’s lungs act like noise cancelling headphones

This thesis addresses a neglected area of castles studies – the spiral stair. [full study | PDF]

Most life on Earth will be killed by lack of oxygen in a billion years

photo { Taryn Simon, The Central Intelligence Agency Main Entrance Hall, CIA Original Headquarters Building, Langley, Virginia, 2003/2007 }

Japan asks China to stop performing anal swab tests for COVID on its citizens

Rooster will appear in court after killing owner during illegal cockfight

People Literally Don’t Know When to Shut Up, or Keep Talking, Study

Google to Stop Selling Ads Based on Your Specific Web Browsing — Citing privacy concerns, Google says it won’t use technologies that track individuals across multiple websites

Humans correctly identified six emotions in three breeds of dogs

Female and Male Reflections on Their Initial Experience of Coitus — “If you could go back in time to your first sexual intercourse, would you want to change anything? If so, what would you change and why?” […] a majority of both males (66.95%) and females (54.00%) reporting they would not want to change anything about their first coital experience. Among respondents who reported a desired change the three primary desired change themes were partner (15.72%), age (8.18%), and location (5.03%)

Among young men, declines in drinking frequency, an increase in computer gaming, and the growing percentage who coreside with their parents all contribute significantly to the decline in casual sex.

There is a famous anecdote about an experiment once conducted on a group of unsuspecting diners who were served a meal of steak, chips, and peas under dim illumination. Partway through the meal, the lighting was returned to normal levels of illumination, revealing to the guests that the steak they were eating was, in fact, blue, the chips green, and the peas red.

Are Americans Defining Themselves More Politically Over Time? [PDF]

‘When will it end?’ — How a changing virus is reshaping scientists’ views on COVID-19

The Dangers of Brain Science Overdetermining Legal Outcomes

The guidance is for members of the office. It is meant to help them in their task of making it as easy as possible for readers to understand the Bills that we produce. [PDF]

How to Issue a Central Bank Digital Currency

{ First-of-its-kind trial finds psychedelic microdosing is equal to placebo | study | left | right }

Newest Las Vegas ’slot machine’ is 11 stories tall and dispenses used cars

as restaurants increasingly receive takeout orders online and through apps, they face a new challenge called “friendly fraud” or “chargebacks.” In the scam, a customer orders food, often through a delivery service, then receives their meal, but disputes the charge with their credit card company to get a refund.

To fight climate change, save the whales, some scientists say — In death, whales carry the tons of carbon stored in their massive bodies down to rest on the seafloor, where it can remain for centuries. Whale excrement fertilizes the ocean, producing large phytoplankton blooms that absorb enormous amounts of carbon dioxide.

Men more than women report regret passing up short-term sexual opportunities (inaction regret), while women regret having had sexual encounters (action regret). will men who regret passing up sex engage in more short-term sex following regret? Will women who regret short-term encounters either choose better quality partners, reduce number of one-night stands or shift their strategy to long-term relationships? There was no clear evidence for the proposed functional shifts in sexual behavior.

Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome

Stanford researchers identify four causes for ‘Zoom fatigue’ and their simple fixes (Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact is highly intense. Seeing yourself during video chats constantly in real-time is fatiguing. Video chats dramatically reduce our usual mobility. The cognitive load is much higher in video chats.)

Huge, Global Study of Plastic Toys Finds Over 100 Substances That May Harm Children

How to become a super memorizer – and what it does to your brain

Arnold came across something called the Paranormal Challenge, a contest offering $250,000 to anyone offering indisputable proof of supernatural abilities. Over the years it’s devised experiments to test people who claim they can read minds, dim lights with the power of their brains, and peer, X-ray-like, through people’s skin. So far none have passed the test or claimed the prize.

Researchers virtually open and read sealed historic letters

Scientists begin building highly accurate digital twin of our planet

How Andy Warhol Became the Most Important American Modern Artist

Banks in Germany Tell Customers to Take Deposits Elsewhere — Interest rates have been negative in Europe for years. But it took the flood of savings unleashed in the pandemic for banks finally to charge depositors in earnest.

The first AI-written play, “AI: When a robot writes a play,” tells the journey of a robot who goes out into the world to learn about society, human emotions, and even death. The script was created by a widely available artificial intelligence (AI) system called GPT-2. Created by Elon Musk’s company OpenAI, this “robot” is a computer model designed to generate text by drawing from the enormous repository of information available on the internet.

Goldman Sachs restarts cryptocurrency desk amid bitcoin boom

Bitcoin could in the future become the preferred currency for international trade or face a “speculative implosion”

Recently, a botnet that researchers have been following for about two years began using a new way to prevent command-and-control server takedowns: by camouflaging one of its IP addresses in the bitcoin blockchain.

The NFT frenzy

How a 10-second video clip sold for $6.6 million

Body Ballet by Nude Robot

NASA hid secret messages in the Perseverance parachute

Draw an iceberg and see how it will float.

Fisher-Price® My Home Office — Better grab a latte to go, that report is due this morning

{ if you or someone nearby are being brutalized by a police Spot robot and can get a hand or something underneath, grab this handle and yank it forward. This releases the battery, instantly disabling the robot. | sleep paralysis demon | Continue reading }

Veterinary techs distribute food every morning to more than 5,000 monkeys at the Tulane University National Primate Research Center outside New Orleans. […] Mr. Lewis, the chief executive of Bioqual, was responsible for providing lab monkeys to pharmaceutical companies like Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, which needed the animals to develop their Covid-19 vaccines.

Unable to furnish scientists with monkeys, which can cost more than $10,000 each, about a dozen companies were left scrambling for research animals at the height of the pandemic. […] The latest shortage has revived talk about creating a strategic monkey reserve in the United States, an emergency stockpile similar to those maintained by the government for oil and grain. […]

No country can make up for what China previously supplied. Before the pandemic, China provided over 60 percent of the 33,818 primates, mostly cynomolgus macaques, imported into the United States in 2019.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

related { Drunk monkey sentenced to life behind bars after attacking 250 humans }

dentists are able to tell if you’ve recently performed oral sex

Forty-three percent of Americans shopping online experienced package theft last year, up from 36 percent in 2019[NY Times]

Murderers benefits from expressing guilt and deontological beliefs — Even if participants judged a person who murdered their parents or many innocent people in a terrorist plane attack.

How Much Older Do You Get When a Wrinkle Appears on Your Face?

We are now discovering that telomeres are an unreliable ageing clock

We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April — Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

We tend to not perceive information about the world around us accurately. Instead, our brains interpret new information through a host of innate and learned mechanisms that can introduce bias and distortions One of the best studied mechanisms that guide – and distort – our perception is the psychophysical Weber-Fechner law. According to this empirically derived, mathematically formulated law we tend to put more emphasis on smaller deviations in size while underestimating larger changes. Here we investigate the hypothesis that our perception of data associated with the spread of COVID-19 and similar pandemics is governed by the same psychophysical laws. We demonstrate that the Weber-Fechner law can be shown to directly affect the decision-making of officials in response to this global crisis as well as the greater public at large.

deception is perceived to be ethical, and individuals want to be deceived, when deception is perceived to prevent unnecessary harm

In all three studies, coffee drinking was associated more strongly than any other dietary factor with a decreased long-term risk for heart failure. Drinking a cup a day or less had no effect, but two cups a day conferred a 31 percent reduced risk, and three cups or more reduced risk by 29 percent. There were not enough subjects who drank more than three cups daily to know if more coffee would decrease the risk further. [NY Times]

The Earth’s magnetic field protects us, acting as a shield against the solar wind (a stream of charged particles and radiation) that flows out from the sun. But the geomagnetic field is not stable in strength and direction, and it has the ability to flip or reverse itself. Some 42,000 years ago, the poles did just that for around 800 years, before swapping back. […] the flip, along with changing solar winds, could have triggered an array of dramatic climate shifts leading to environmental change and mass extinctions. […] experts say there is currently rapid movement of the north magnetic pole across the Northern Hemisphere — which could signal another reversal is on the cards.

“Can only have been painted by a madman” — Inscription on ‘The Scream’ That Baffled Experts for Decades Was Written by Edvard Munch Himself, New Research Shows

{ South Africa is back to its pre-B.1.351 baseline in covid cases. There’s no proof this variant is more infectious. Its immune evasion is enough to explain how it took off. And the descent occurred without vaccines. | Eric Topol }

Florida women wear ‘granny’ disguise to try to get Covid vaccine

Drone Swarms Are Getting Too Fast For Humans To Fight, U.S. General Warns — Previously: Autonomous killer drones

Citibank can’t get back $500 million it wired by mistake, judge rules

Air pollution is associated with poorer quality sperm, finds study

The coronavirus is here to stay — many scientists expect the virus that causes COVID-19 to become endemic, but it could pose less danger over time

Cinemas rent out their auditoriums to gamers to bring in a new revenue stream ($90 for two hours)

Women better at reading minds than men, study

Findings suggest that individuals are unable to accurately identify AI-generated artwork

The Most Powerful Artificial Intelligence Knows Nothing About Investing

we developed an experimental “stock market”’ task in which cohorts of 4 rats drove asset prices up and down by selecting and subsequently buying, selling, or holding “stocks” to earn sweet liquid reward. […] Rats’ choice of the sell option demonstrated a robust tendency toward realizing gains more quickly than losses, which is characteristic of the “disposition effect” in human stock markets. Our results indicate that rats exhibit behavioral biases similar to human investors

The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%

Fake Amazon reviews ‘being sold in bulk’ online

Silicon Valley-backed groups sue Maryland to kill country’s first-ever online advertising tax [Washington Post]

Free Trading Isn’t Free: How Robinhood Makes Money

List Of Fictional Cryptocurrencies Banned By The SEC

The 25 Greatest Art Heists of All Time

In a new study, scientists say they can explain dark matter by positing a particle that links to a fifth dimension

The essence of zero-knowledge proofs is that it is trivial to prove that one possesses knowledge of certain information by simply revealing it; the challenge is to prove such possession without revealing the information itself or any additional information

How do you access the contents of a safe without ever opening its lock or otherwise getting inside? This riddle may seem confounding, but its digital equivalent is now so solvable that it’s becoming a business plan. IBM is the latest innovator to tackle the well-studied cryptographic technique called fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), which allows for the processing of encrypted files without ever needing to decrypt them first.

Computer Scientists Achieve ‘Crown Jewel’ of Cryptography

Basic music theory guide for beginners

All the COVID virus in the world could fit in a can of coke, says mathematician

vagina-scented face masks + Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina-scented candle (“The candle exploded and emitted huge flames”)

Exhaled aerosol increases with degree of COVID-19 infection, age, and obesity

females are overall more aware of their smile and the impact it has on their public image

Traditional yoga encompasses a variety of practices, such as physical postures, breathing techniques, meditation practices, and ethical teachings. Numerous studies and meta-analyses have demonstrated yoga’s efficacy in promoting mental and physical health. Conversely, little is known about how the diverse components of yoga contribute to its overall effect. […] combined interventions incorporating multiple components consistently outperformed simpler interventions. Adding breathing and/or meditation practices to yoga interventions proved particularly beneficial in this regard

Cats show no avoidance of people who behave negatively to their owner

Researchers teach four pigs how to play a rudimentary joystick-enabled video game

Companies with no business plan, no profit, and no revenue are flooding Wall Street. They’re called SPACs, and investors are pouring money into them.

There are only 21 million bitcoins that can be mined in total, and 2.6 million Bitcoin left to be mined. 18.4 million Bitcoin were mined in 10 years, but it will take another 120 years to mine the remaining 2.6 million.

The statement there can never be more than 21 million bitcoins is 100% false.

The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way), a 1988 book better known as The KLF, is a step-by-step guide to achieving a No.1 single with no money or musical skills. [things magazine]

Serviette Sculptures: Mattia Giegher’s Treatise on Napkin Folding (1629)

Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin was prepared to plead guilty to third-degree murder in George Floyd’s death before then-U.S. Atty. Gen. William Barr personally blocked the plea deal last year, officials said.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }