“Time Slows Down Whenever You Are Around” for Women but Not for Men

Completed in nine days, massive hospital opens in London — Thanks to a herculean collaborative effort carried out by the National Health Service (NHS), the British Armed Forces, the Royal Engineers, the facilities management team at ExCeL London, private contractors, and international architecture firm BDP, the 1-million-square-foot convention center in the docklands of East London has been transformed in just over a week into what’s not only the largest hospital in the United Kingdom but, per CNBC, the largest critical care unit in the world. [Thanks Tim]

Children now playing ‘huge role’ in spread of COVID-19 variant — “We’re not going to have nearly enough (vaccine doses) in the next 6 to 8 weeks to get through this surge”

B.1.1.7 is about 60 percent more contagious and 67 percent more deadly than the original form of the virus. Infected people seem to carry more of the B.1.1.7 virus and for longer […] “The best way to think about B.1.1.7 and other variants is to treat them as separate epidemics” [NY Times]

In their efforts to rein in illicit massage businesses across the country, police sometimes rely on sting operations in which undercover officers engage in sex acts with spa workers

Here we demonstrate that environmental DNA can be collected from air and used to identify mammals

Known as the “torpedo,” the remotely controlled submarine would use magnets to attach to the bottom of cargo ships. The operator could later detach the drone, which would send a GPS signal with its location. Then, prosecutors allege, the trafficking ring would send a fishing boat to meet the submarine about 100 miles off the coast of Europe and collect the cocaine.

Fugu can be lethally poisonous due to its tetrodotoxin, meaning it must be carefully prepared to remove toxic parts and to avoid contaminating the meat. The restaurant preparation of fugu is strictly controlled by law in Japan and several other countries, and only chefs who have qualified after three or more years of rigorous training are allowed to prepare the fish. […] Researchers have determined that a fugu’s tetrodotoxin comes from eating other animals infested with tetrodotoxin-laden bacteria, to which the fish develops insensitivity over time. As such, efforts have been made in research and aquaculture to allow farmers to produce safe fugu. Farmers now produce poison-free fugu by keeping the fish away from the bacteria; Usuki, a town in Ōita Prefecture, has become known for selling non-poisonous fugu.

Some of the World’s Top Artists Are Trying Their Hand at NFTs. The World’s Top Galleries Are a Bit More Skeptical.

In 1930, engineers accomplished something remarkable: they rotated an 8-story, 11,000 ton building a full 90 degrees

How long would it take to walk around the moon?

MARCH (PARKING) MADNESS: Welcome to the Finals — the 114th vs. the 34th

Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald J. Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500.

It was a big sum for a 63-year-old battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help.

What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.

the Trump campaign and the for-profit company that processed its online donations, WinRed, […] begun last September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors, for every week until the election.

Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.

As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language. […]

Several bank representatives who fielded fraud claims directly from consumers estimated that WinRed cases, at their peak, represented as much as 1 to 3 percent of their workload. [..]

All the banking officials said they recalled only a negligible number of complaints against ActBlue, the Democratic donation platform, although there are online review sites that feature heated complaints about unwanted charges and customer service. […]

Over all, the Trump operation refunded 10.7 percent of the money it raised on WinRed in 2020; the Biden operation’s refund rate on ActBlue, the parallel Democratic online donation-processing platform, was 2.2 percent, federal records show.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Swiss robots use UV light to zap viruses aboard passenger planes

Update on the 3 major variants

How America’s surveillance networks helped the FBI catch the Capitol mob — Installed on thousands of streetlights, speed cameras, toll booths, police cars and tow trucks across the United States, the scanners record every passing vehicle into databases run by contractors such as Vigilant Systems, which reports that it has recorded 5 billion license plate locations nationwide. In Maryland alone, government and police scanners captured more than 500 million plates last year, state data shows. […] Agents got a D.C. judge to issue a “ping order” for his cellphone, which had been registered with T-Mobile under the name of Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent, the affidavit said. That ping order allegedly pinpointed Alam’s location to Room 17 of the Penn Amish Motel in rural Pennsylvania. FBI agents arrested him there the next day.

“his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.”

New study detects lottery-like behavior in cryptocurrency markets

Now, all of those people who were tweeting and Clubhousing about NFTs are on to the next: DAOs. Launched on April 30, 2016, The DAO was an early Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) and venture capital fund.

Facebook shorted video creators thousands of dollars in ad revenue. Due to a ‘technical issue.’

Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

Mapping the World’s Key Maritime Choke Points

What happens to a tree when it dies?

into the woods to cut down trees via things magazine

My Bloody Valentine is working on two new albums

Every Noise at Once

Interesting wardrobe

My favorite line from this 9 page long paper (citing another study): “greater gender diversity in boards leads to excessive monitoring of executives.” P. 5.

Monitoring of executives is what boards are supposed to do. So the problem is that women directors do their jobs.

{ Richard W. Painter | Continue reading }

unrelated { “Females were less likely than males to approach a person in public to obtain drugs through cash and noncash transactions. […] Females were more likely than males to acquire drugs through sex.” | Gender Differences in Drug Market Activities | PDF }

Woman accused of hitting child with car claims she was trying to run over someone else

Man accused of assault and robbery outside a restaurant told detectives his DNA was planted at the crime scene by an airplane in order to frame him

New drug to regenerate lost teeth

We theorize that reconnaissance satellites have revolutionized the use of information gleaned from spying in ways that discourage states from engaging in serious conflicts with one another. We find that when either the potential aggressor or target in a dyad possess reconnaissance satellites, they are significantly less likely to become involved in serious militarized interstate disputes.

Venomous people could become a reality, scientists say

Scientists built a perfectly self-replicating synthetic cell

Scientists Get Closer To Redefining The Length Of A Second — The worldwide standard atomic clocks have for decades been based on cesium atoms — which tick about 9 billion times per second. But newer atomic clocks based on other elements tick much faster [and] are 100 times more accurate than the cesium clock.

Even before the pandemic, Americans were already flushing far too many wipes into the sewer system. After a year of staying at home, the pipe-clogging problem has gotten worse.

Nearly 500 bee species are thriving in a small patch of US desert — There are about 20,000 known species of bee on the planet, and nowhere else is this diversity more concentrated than in southern Arizona along the US-Mexico border. Hundreds of bee species can be found in a patch of desert there about the size of Heathrow airport, meaning it has the world’s densest aggregation of bee species yet measured.

We identified 110 shades from 73 products that contained the word “nude” in the name. […] Roughly 40% of beauty brands use a sequential numbering system to organize their foundation shades. Yet only 4 out of those 130 products ordered their shades from dark to light.

“There was no history of my ever purchasing it, or ever owning it,” said one confused NFT buyer. “Now there’s nothing. My money’s gone.” People’s Expensive NFTs Keep Vanishing.

Inside a viral website

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.

{ CamSoda | Continue reading }

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.

{ Vice | Continue reading }

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.

{ Reuters | Continue reading }

{ Excavator hiding 448 kilograms of MDMA leads to five arrests in Sydney and London | full story }

related { We went undercover in a Chinese MDMA factory }

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.

We found that the female chatbot is preferred over the male chatbot because it is perceived as more human

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]

The experiment aims to find out if large groups of people can come together safely during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

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

The Louvre Collections database

Museum of Everything Else

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!

So under your scenario you are in Maine vacationing, living, etc… and you lost your weed.  OH NO!  Who do you call? The INCREDIBLES.ME Psychic Service!  We have Psychics roaming all over Portland communicating with their deity, their spirit guides, and having religious moments of clarity. We can guarantee to find your LOST WEED!! (For a small, but very worth while fee!).

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.

{ Incredibles.me | Continue reading }

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

Poem (video)

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.

{ History Extra | Continue reading }

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)

The virus that causes the common cold can effectively boot the Covid virus out of the body’s cells, say researchers.

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)

Hennessy Youngman on Damien Hirst (2012)

{ 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

The ancient fabric that no one knows how to make

The McMansion Hell Yearbook: 1979

{ Ora-ïto, Gucci Villa, 1999 | Kleindienst, Floating Seahorse villa, 2015 }

{ Facebook Is Building An Instagram For Kids Under The Age Of 13 }

art { Installation views of Jake or Dinos Chapman, White Cube, 2011 }

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.

{ NY Post | Continue reading }

unrelated { Illegal Content and the Blockchain }