of course there is no behind the scenes, no real self, no authenticity, etc. just a precession of simulacra; influencers sort of serve the same function Baudrillard thought Disneyland served: to make everyone else feel “authentic”
{ Rob Horning }
French company liable after employee dies during sex on business trip
Google Maps shows sunken car where missing man’s body was found
Guizhou ended up with 40 of the world’s 100 tallest bridges. Read that again. I didn’t say China had 40% of the world’s tallest, I said a poor, small province in the interior with only 2.5% of China’s population has 40 of the world’s 100 tallest bridges.
A host of innocent-seeming items are contraband: savoury spreads like Marmite contain yeast and can be used in illicit brewing; chewing gum can be used to make an imprint of a key or lock; baby oil can make an inmate’s arms slippery, rendering them impossible to restrain. Cash is treated as top-level contraband. How the prison economy works
What Happens When You Don’t Pay a Hospital Bill The debt typically comes from out-of-network doctors who people thought were in-network, hospital stays, or ambulance rides.
This study reveals large deficits in the supply of potential male spouses
Fat Relocation Research [PDF]
A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked
Racial Disparities in Voting Wait Times: Evidence from Smartphone Data
Why is movie theater popcorn so outrageously expensive?
Two Mathematicians Just Solved a Decades-Old Math Riddle (how do you solve x^3 + y^3 + z^3 = k, where k equals any whole number from 1 to 100?)
The Death of Alexander the Great: One of History’s Great Unsolved Mysteries
{ Overnight, Gem Spa was transformed into SchitiBank | more | ThanksTim }
…DARPA’s Red Balloon Challenge in 2008, in which the United States government scattered 10 red weather balloons across the continental U.S., and instructed teams of researchers to locate them as fast as possible. The winning MIT team found all 10 balloons in just under nine hours using the virality of social media and an incentive structure that motivated people to recruit their friends. This result was a resounding success for crowdsourcing and the Internet at large, demonstrating that a collective of individuals, connected through technology, could together solve large-scale problems that no individual could solve alone.
This same team, however, struggled with other Internet-based forms for mass cooperation. During the 2011 DARPA Shredder Challenge, which involved recruiting and coordinating individuals on the Internet to collectively recombine shredded documents, people took advantage of the trust necessary for large-scale collaboration. Adversarial participants from the other teams, who felt the crowdsourcing essentially amounted to “cheating,” posed as volunteers and sabotaged the crowdsourcing effort, rendering cooperation impossible. Fast-forward five years, to the 2016 presidential election, and we see how this antagonism can be a serious problem for genuine collective action. Bad actors proliferated misinformation at such a rate that the New York Times declared, “The Internet trolls have won. Sorry, there’s not much you can do.”
So when do networks enable cooperation to thrive? And when do they hinder it? […] We decided to examine a different, extreme environment known for its ability to foster cooperation at a large scale: Burning Man.
art { Diego Gravinese }
In the first study [2010] of its kind, officials scoured the city’s subway system to discover what accounts for the perennial presence of rodents, a scourge since the system opened more than a century ago. […] Rodents, it turns out, reside inside station walls, emerging occasionally from cracks in the tile to rummage for food. The legend of teeming rat cities tucked deep into subway tunnels is, in fact, a myth. The electrified tracks, scientists said, are far too dangerous. […]
“They can fall 40 feet onto a concrete slab and keep running,” said Solomon Peeples, 86, a former director of the city’s Bureau of Pest Control Services. “We’re no match for them, as far as I’m concerned. Man does not stand no chance.” […]
Nothing quite excites a rat like a station’s “refuse room,” a storage space for bags of garbage waiting to be hauled away. For rodents, the room is “a restaurant,” as Dr. Corrigan called it, and he recommended that the transportation authority install poison bait in the rooms for a more surgical strike. (Currently, the authority places poison only on the tracks.) […]
Dr. Corrigan told health officials that while rats were a problem in the subways, the rodents inhabited many other public spaces, particularly parks. “Virtually all of New York,” he said, “is vulnerable to this uncanny mammal.”
{ NY Times | Continue reading }
New York has always been forced to coexist with the four-legged vermin, but the infestation has expanded exponentially in recent years, spreading to just about every corner of the city. […] Rat sightings reported to the city’s 311 hotline have soared nearly 38 percent, to 17,353 last year from 12,617 in 2014. […]
One key reason rats seem to be everywhere? Gentrification. The city’s construction boom is digging up burrows, forcing more rats out into the open, scientists and pest control experts say.
Milder winters — the result of climate change — make it easier for rats to survive and reproduce. And New York’s growing population and thriving tourism have brought more trash for rats to feed on.
Rats once scurried in the shadows but now they frolic brazenly in broad daylight. […] Parents at an Upper West Side playground said rats jumped into the sandbox where their children played, though the vermin have been cleared for now.
{ NY Times | Continue reading }
Traps. Poison. Birth control. Dry ice. And now, what city officials are touting as a high-tech solution: drowning. […] a bucket that would lure the rodents and send them plunging to their deaths in a mysterious vinegary concoction. The toxic potion, according to its maker, Rat Trap Inc., prevents them from rotting too quickly and emitting a stink. […]
Mr. Adams said he wants to install the newfangled traps, which cost between $300 and $400, in several locations in Brooklyn. If successful, he said he would look to expand the methodology citywide.
The pilot program has already hit one snag. Mr. Adams’s office initially placed five boxes in and around Brooklyn Borough Hall, but one was disabled by a very large rat. “It was so big it broke the spring mechanism in the box so that it was no longer functioning,” said Jonah Allon, Mr. Adams’s spokesman.
We are connecting everything to everything.
[…]
In the network economy the winner-take-all behavior of Hollywood hit movies will become the norm for most products—even bulky manufactured items. Oil wells are financed this way now; a few big gushers pay for the many dry wells. You try a whole bunch of ideas with no foreknowledge of which ones will work. Your only certainty is that each idea will either soar or flop, with little in between. A few high-scoring hits have to pay for all the many flops. This lotterylike economic model is an anathema to industrialists, but that’s how network economies work. There is much to learn from long-term survivors in existing hits-oriented business (such as music and books). They know you need to keep trying lots of things and that you don’t try to predict the hits, because you can’t.
Two economists proved that hits—at least in show biz—were unpredictable. They plotted sales of first-run movies between May 1985 and January 1986 and discovered that “the only reliable predictor of a film’s box office was its performance the previous week. Nothing else seemed to matter—not the genre of the film, not its cast, not its budget.” The higher it was last week, the more likely it will be high this week— an increasing returns loop fed by word of mouth recommendations. The economists, Art De Vany and David Walls, claim these results mirror a heavy duty physics equation known as the Bose-Einstein distribution. The fact that the only variable that influenced the result was the result from the week before, means, they say, that “the film industry is a complex adaptive system poised between order and chaos.” In other words, it follows the logic of the net: increasing returns and persistent disequilibrium.
[…]
Because prices move inexorably toward the free, the best move in the network economy is to anticipate this cheapness.
{ Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy, 1998 | PDF | More: Wired }
Aging could potentially be reversed using human growth hormone, study suggests
Google Has My Dead Grandpa’s Data And He Never Used The Internet (Why is it okay that the internet is designed to be a surveillance machine?)
Alibaba designers used AI to shape New York Fashion Week looks
Artificial Intelligence, Human Capital, and Innovation [PDF]
How Apple’s Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls [NY Times]
Between 2010 and 2016 staff at the Shark Spotting Programme, established to warn swimmers when the three-ton predators approached beaches, reported an average of 205 sightings of the fish off the beaches of False Bay. In 2018 that fell to 50 and this year not one has been seen.
Jakarta has sunk by up to 4 meters, forcing Indonesia to build a new capital
Until 100 years ago, sturgeon were plentiful in the rivers and lakes throughout Europe and America, and caviar was an ordinary food for those who lived near these sturgeon-filled waterways — in some areas it was so common it was served as a free bar snack
Aphex Twin on the Rephlex years
The Dinner Party is an installation artwork by feminist artist Judy Chicago [Thanks Tim]
this “surprise” engagement was nothing of the sort; rather it was a staged marketing stunt + fashionambitionist proposal [Thanks Tim]
Paul Hildreth peered at a display of dozens of images from security cameras surveying his Atlanta school district and settled on one showing a woman in a bright yellow shirt walking a hallway.
A mouse click instructed the artificial-intelligence-equipped system to find other images of the woman, and it immediately stitched them into a video narrative of her immediate location, where she had been and where she was going.
There was no threat, but Hildreth’s demonstration showed what’s possible with AI-powered cameras. If a gunman were in one of his schools, the cameras could quickly identify the shooter’s location and movements, allowing police to end the threat as soon as possible, said Hildreth, emergency operations coordinator for Fulton County Schools.
AI is transforming surveillance cameras from passive sentries into active observers that can identify people, suspicious behavior and guns, amassing large amounts of data that help them learn over time to recognize mannerisms, gait and dress. If the cameras have a previously captured image of someone who is banned from a building, the system can immediately alert officials if the person returns.
installation sketch { ecstasy, 2018 }
— Persistence
— Talking too much
— Contradictions between words and actions or behaviors
— Triggering your intuition (this doesn’t feel right)
As a reliable general guideline, any time you are engaged in conversation with a stranger and you notice one or more of those characteristics in the conversation, you should expect that you are being scammed.
[S]ome languages—such as Japanese, Basque, and Italian—are spoken more quickly than others. […]
Linguists have spent more time studying not just speech rate, but the effort a speaker has to exert to get a message across to a listener. By calculating how much information every syllable in a language conveys, it’s possible to compare the “efficiency” of different languages. And a study published today in Science Advances found that more efficient languages tend to be spoken more slowly. In other words, no matter how quickly speakers chatter, the rate of information they’re transmitting is roughly the same across languages.
The basic problem of “efficiency,” in linguistics, starts with the trade-off between effort and communication. It takes a certain amount of coordination, and burns a certain number of calories, to make noises come out of your mouth in an intelligible way. And those noises can be more or less informative to a listener, based on how predictable they are. If you and I are discussing dinosaurs, you wouldn’t be surprised to hear me rattle off the names of my favorite species. But if a stranger walks up to you on the street and announces, “Diplodocus!” it’s unexpected. It narrows the scope of possible conversation topics greatly and is therefore highly informative.
image { Six soap bubbles inside one another, from The Windsor Magazine, 1902 }
More than a million customers signed up for Prime memberships in just the third week of December 2013. Sales hit a record high. But UPS couldn’t keep up.
Analysts and companies in the logistics industry think Amazon eventually will become a formidable competitor to UPS and to FedEx. […] The next spring, Amazon was testing contract couriers in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. And in 2015, Amazon introduced Flex, an app that allows people to sign up for delivery shifts using their own vehicles. (Amazon considers Flex drivers independent contractors, too.)
Amazon is only getting faster in delivering orders, and its competitors are racing to catch up. Last April, after reporting a record $3.6 billion quarterly profit, Amazon’s chief financial officer, Brian Olsavsky, told Wall Street analysts that the company was investing $800 million to make free overnight delivery the default for Prime members in the United States.
The next day, Walmart teased on Twitter: “One-day free shipping … without a membership fee. Now THAT would be groundbreaking. Stay tuned.” Walmart began offering free overnight delivery of 220,000 popular items in a few American cities, with a goal of expanding to 40 major metropolitan areas. […]
In its relentless push for e-commerce dominance, Amazon has built a huge logistics operation in recent years to get more goods to customers’ homes in less and less time. […] The retailer has created a network of contractors across the country that allows the company to expand and shrink the delivery force as needed, while avoiding the costs of taking on permanent employees. […]
Amazon requires that 999 out of 1,000 deliveries arrive on time, according to work orders obtained from contractors with drivers in eight states.
Amazon has repeatedly said in court that it is not responsible for the actions of its contractors, citing agreements that require them, as one puts it, to “defend, indemnify and hold harmless Amazon.” Just last week, an operations manager for Amazon testified in Chicago that it signs such agreements with all its “delivery service partners,” who assume the liability and the responsibility for legal costs. The agreements cover “all loss or damage to personal property or bodily harm including death.” […]
“I think anyone who thinks about Amazon has very conflicted feelings,” said Tim Hauck, whose sister, Stacey Hayes Curry, was killed last year by a driver delivering Amazon packages in a San Diego office park. “It’s sure nice to get something in two days for free. You’re always impressed with that side of it. But this idea that they’ve walled themselves off from responsibility is disturbing.”
studies have shown that America has been getting more narcissistic since the Seventies […] one study found narcissistic traits to be rising as quickly as obesity, while yet another showed that almost one-third of high school students in America in 2005 said that they expected to eventually become famous.
The team say that sextortion emails demanding cryptocurrency payment first appeared in 2018. The scammers send their emails via botnets, such as Necurs or Cutwail. These are global networks of computers infected with malware that send out spam on demand.
This is offered as a service on the dark net. Various researchers have shown that spammers pay botnet owners between $100 and $500 to send a million spam emails. They can even rent botnets at a cost of $10,000 per month, which allows them to send 100 million spam messages. […]
Back in 2008, one group of cyber-crime experts infiltrated a botnet for 26 days and monitored spammers sending 350 million emails for a pharmaceutical product. The result was 28 sales. This generated a revenue of $2,732, which corresponds to a conversion rate of just 0.00001%. Nevertheless, the experts concluded that by using additional botnets, spammers could generate around $9,500 per day which adds up to $3.5 million per year.
Sextortion has the potential to be much more profitable, say Paquet-Clouston and co. The reason is that it does not require the spammers to host any kind of e-commerce website, or to procure, store, and ship products of any kind. And cryptocurrency payments are simpler than bank payments and do not require the involvement of a friendly bank.
oil on canvas { Caleb Brown, Sports Explosion, 2009 }
Tesla is a car company whose stock trades like a tech company. Tesla might sell 400,000 cars this year. By contrast, Ford might sell 6 million, GM 8.5 million. Granted, the Tesla Model 3 looks and drives like a dream. But when you count salaries and overhead according to Tesla’s own quarterly statements, it costs more to make a Tesla than people are willing to pay for it. And that calculus includes the federal subsidies that will dry up on December 31 of this year. Ford is worth $35 billion and makes money on its cars. Tesla is worth $40 billion and doesn’t. How is this math possible?
Tesla’s stock trades at such a large multiple of its revenue because Musk has convinced shareholders that it’s not a car company, but an artificial-intelligence company that happens to use a fleet of 500,000 cars to collect and label data. It’s a clever sleight-of-hand, but it’s not fooling those who matter. As a fund manager on Wall Street once told me, “You’re not a hedge-fund manager until you’ve shorted Tesla at least once.” […]
We estimate that ninety percent of the startups in the autonomous-vehicle space today will not exist in five years. […] The big crunch is coming because, over the next year, all the major auto and trucking companies will decide on who will be the suppliers for their main production lines in 2022. This won’t be for full self-driving, but for something a little more modest if still vitally important: a car so safe it is incapable of crashing.
Faces in general and attractive faces, in particular, are frequently used in marketing, advertising, and packaging design. However, few studies have examined the effects of attractive faces on people’s choice behavior.
The present research examines whether attractive (vs. unattractive) faces increase individuals’ inclination to choose either healthy or unhealthy foods. […]
exposure to attractive (vs. unattractive) opposite‐sex faces increased choice likelihood of unhealthy foods.
offset lithograph / vinyl cover { Damien Hirst, Kate Moss — Use Money Cheat Death, 2009 | The record is a one-sided, white vinyl disc with a mainly monotonous beeping interrupted by what is purported to be Kate Moss’ voice in telephone call mode for about 30 seconds, then more beeping and finally Damien Hirst himself telling us that it’s okay for artists to earn money. }
Nasa said to be investigating first allegation of a crime committed in space (an astronaut accessed the bank account of her estranged spouse from the International Space Station)
Why is there a Braille message on my e-scooter? It’s not “how-to-ride” instructions. Blind people need to know whom to contact if they trip over them. [Washington Post]
Chinese murder suspect ‘caught by AI software that spotted dead person’s face’
YouTube removes videos of robots fighting for “animal cruelty”
Scientists Have Created a Vaccine for Cat Allergies, but You Can’t Have It Yet
The neurologist who hacked his brain — and almost lost his mind [Thanks Tim]
Life on alien worlds could be more diverse than on Earth
‘Plastic recycling is a myth’: what really happens to your rubbish?
She asked the doctor to locate a sperm donor. Scores of children born through artificial insemination have learned from DNA tests that their biological fathers were the doctors who performed the procedure.
US Escape Room Industry Report More: For around $30, you and a handful of friends/colleagues/strangers are “trapped” in some kind of space together and must collaboratively puzzle through a series of challenges to win your freedom.
Companies are increasingly insisting their ads do not appear near articles or videos that contain any of a long list of words. Top 15 Forbidden Words: Dead, Shooting, Murder, Gun, Rape, Bomb, Died, Attack, Killed, Suicide, Trump, Crash, Crime, Explosion, Accident.
JPEG XL includes several features that help transition from the legacy JPEG format
Cooping was an alleged form of electoral fraud in the United States cited in relation to the death of Edgar Allan Poe in October 1849, by which unwilling participants were forced to vote, often several times over, for a particular candidate in an election. According to several of Poe’s biographers, these innocent bystanders would be grabbed off the street by so-called ‘cooping gangs’ or ‘election gangs’ working on the payroll of a political candidate, and they would be kept in a room, called the “coop”, and given alcoholic beverages in order for them to comply. If they refused to cooperate, they would be beaten or even killed. Often their clothing would be changed to allow them to vote multiple times. Sometimes the victims would be forced to wear disguises such as wigs, fake beards or mustaches to prevent them from being recognized by voting officials at polling stations.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }
On October 3, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found delirious on the streets of Baltimore, “in great distress, and… in need of immediate assistance”, according to Joseph W. Walker who found him. He was taken to the Washington Medical College where he died on Sunday, October 7, 1849 at 5:00 in the morning. He was not coherent long enough to explain how he came to be in his dire condition and, oddly, was wearing clothes that were not his own.
He is said to have repeatedly called out the name “Reynolds” on the night before his death, though it is unclear to whom he was referring.
All medical records and documents, including Poe’s death certificate, have been lost, if they ever existed.
Newspapers at the time reported Poe’s death as “congestion of the brain” or “cerebral inflammation”, common euphemisms for death from disreputable causes such as alcoholism.
The actual cause of death remains a mystery. […] One theory dating from 1872 suggests that cooping was the cause of Poe’s death, a form of electoral fraud in which citizens were forced to vote for a particular candidate, sometimes leading to violence and even murder. […] Cooping had become the standard explanation for Poe’s death in most of his biographies for several decades, though his status in Baltimore may have made him too recognizable for this scam to have worked. […]
Immediately after Poe’s death, his literary rival Rufus Wilmot Griswold wrote a slanted high-profile obituary under a pseudonym, filled with falsehoods that cast him as a lunatic and a madman, and which described him as a person who “walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayers, (never for himself, for he felt, or professed to feel, that he was already damned)”.
The long obituary appeared in the New York Tribune signed “Ludwig” on the day that Poe was buried. It was soon further published throughout the country. The piece began, “Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it.” “Ludwig” was soon identified as Griswold, an editor, critic, and anthologist who had borne a grudge against Poe since 1842. Griswold somehow became Poe’s literary executor and attempted to destroy his enemy’s reputation after his death.
Man Hospitalized for 10+ Day Erection
Florida man reports handgun stolen during orgy at his home
91.4% of worries did not come true for those with generalized anxiety disorder
Self-Checkout Thievery“Anyone who pays for more than half of their stuff in self checkout is a total moron.”
When you go to a website and load a page, in the milliseconds that it takes for that page to load, there are real-time auctions running in the background that determine which ads to load on your page. Almost all online ads are delivered in this way. How Digital Advertising Markets Really Work
Dark matter may be older than the Big Bang
Dynamic Information Design with Diminishing Sensitivity Over News
Having mastered Space Invaders, chess, and Go, AI tackles video soccer
Most American books published before 1964 never extended their copyright, meaning they’re in the public domain today. Where to download these free Public domain eBooks
