McDonald’s Sued For $1.5M By Customer Who Wanted More Than 1 Napkin

Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States

Man accused of faking own kidnapping to get money from his family

About 56 percent of crypto startups that raise money through token sales die within four months of their initial coin offerings

Google decided to make Maps its next billion dollar business by raising prices 14 times and decreasing free usage limit almost 30 times

What Cyber-War Will Look Like The hacking campaigns I envision would be low-key, localized, and fairly low-tech.

This research explores the possibility that exaggerating in order to entertain the listener while sharing previous experiences can increase interpersonal closeness in new relationships

Do smart people have better intuitions?

Why do angry people overestimate their intelligence?

What Ever Happened to the “Cool” Kids? Early adolescent pseudomature behavior predicted long-term difficulties in close relationships, as well as significant problems with alcohol and substance use, and elevated levels of criminal behavior.

Verbal communication during sex did not predict sexual satisfaction

Fukushima’s nuclear signature found in California wine

How Postcards Solved The Problem Of Disappearing Rice

Maybe we can afford to suck CO2 out of the sky after all

A white female and baby giraffe were first spotted on a reserve in Kenya in early August. Leucism, which inhibits skin cells from producing pigment but allows other organs, like eyes, to be dark colored. Albinism, a congenital condition, inhibits the body from producing pigment in all organs, and animals with this condition often have pink eyes.

Suicide in parachuting

The 50-something man has been living alone in the Brazilian Amazon for 22 years, after the last members of his tribe were murdered.

Timeline of the far future

Scores of long-buried archaeological sites have been revealed once again as ‘cropmarks’, or patterns of growth in ripening crops and parched grasslands More: Europe’s scorching weather has revealed a mysterious henge

Hokusai relocated 93 times and changed his name 30 times

WernAcular

#drone

While we have come to expect bullshit from politicians, there is no shortage of judicial bullshit either. After discussing Harry Frankfurt’s famous description of bullshit, I illustrate possible instances of judicial bullshit in a wide range of bioethics cases, mostly at the Supreme Court. Along the way, we see judges bullshit for many reasons including the desire to keep precedents malleable, avoid line drawing, hide the arbitrariness of line drawing, sound important, be memorable, gloss over inconvenient facts, sound poetic, make it seem like their hands are tied, and appear to address profound questions without actually staking out provocative positions.

{ Arizona State Law Journal | Continue reading }

photo { Ramón Masats, Tomelloso, Ciudad Real, 1960 }

Every year, millions of tonnes of plastic debris ends up in the sea […] Where does all the plastic come from anyhow? And how does it get into the sea? […]

Researchers calculated that ten rivers (eight in Asia and two in Africa) are responsible for around 90 percent of the global input of plastic into the sea.

{ Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research | Continue reading }

The ATM-busting technique, known as jackpotting, has been around for almost a decade […] ATM jackpotting is both riskier and more complicated than card-skimming. For starters, scammers have to hack into the computer that governs the cash dispenser, which usually involves physically breaking into the machine itself; once they’re in, they install malware that tells the ATM to release all of its cash, just like a jackpot at a slot machine. These obstacles mean the process takes quite a bit longer than installing a card skimmer, which means more time in front of the ATM’s security cameras and jackpotters triggering an alarm in the bank’s control center at every step. But as chip-and-PIN becomes the standard in the U.S., would-be ATM thieves are running out of other options. […]

It was the Secret Service’s financial crimes division that spotted the series of attacks on multiple locations of the same bank in Florida in December and January, and put out a bulletin to financial institutions, law enforcement, and the public about the new style of ATM theft. The two major global ATM manufacturers, Diebold Nixdorfand NCR, also alerted the public and issued security patches within a few days. Banks started monitoring their ATMs around the clock. Less than 24 hours after the Secret Service’s public alert, Citizens Financial Group, a regional bank with branches all over the northeast, notified the local police that its security folks noticed one of its ATMs go off line. The police contacted the Secret Service, which made its first arrest on the scene.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

photo { Jerome Liebling, Union Square, New York City, 1948 }

Two theoretical frameworks have been proposed to account for the representation of truth and falsity in human memory: the Cartesian model and the Spinozan model. Both models presume that during information processing a mental representation of the information is stored along with a tag indicating its truth value. However, the two models disagree on the nature of these tags. According to the Cartesian model, true information receives a “true” tag and false information receives a “false” tag. In contrast, the Spinozan model claims that only false information receives a “false” tag, whereas untagged information is automatically accepted as true. […]

The results of both experiments clearly contradict the Spinozan model but can be explained in terms of the Cartesian model.

{ Memory & Cognition | PDF }

art { Richard Long, Dusty Boots Line, The Sahara, 1988 }

In 1985, Tony Schwartz, a writer for New York magazine, was sitting in Donald Trump’s office in Trump Tower interviewing him for a story. Trump told him he had agreed to write a book for Random House. “Well, if you’re going to write a book,” Schwartz said, recalling this interaction in a speech he gave last fall at the University of Michigan, “you ought to call it The Art of the Deal.”

“I like that,” Trump said. “Do you want to write it?”

These sorts of arrangements typically are not that generous for the writer. “Most writers for hire receive a flat fee, or a relatively modest percentage of any money the book earns,” Schwartz said in the speech. Schwartz, by contrast, got from Trump an almost unheard-of half of the $500,000 advance from Random House and also half of the royalties. And it didn’t even take a lot of haggling.

“He basically just agreed,” Schwartz told me in an email, meaning Schwartz ever since has brought in millions of dollars more of royalties and Trump has brought in millions of dollars less.

It’s a telling example, Harvard Business School negotiating professor Deepak Malhotra said in a recent interview. “What should have been a great deal on a book about negotiation actually is one of the most interesting pieces of evidence that he’s not a good negotiator.” Malhotra pointed out Schwartz even got his name on the cover, and in same-sized text. “I don’t think there’s a better ghostwriting deal out there.”

[…]

Trump made $50,000 an episode in the first season. In the second season? “He wanted a million dollars an episode,” Jeff Zucker, the current boss of CNN and former head of NBC, told the New Yorker’s David Remnick last year. And what did Zucker give him? “Sixty thousand dollars,” Zucker said.

“We ended up paying him what we wanted to pay him.”

{ Politico | Continue reading }

brush and india ink on paper { Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Duck, 1958 }

Man arrested after trying to pay for meal with credit card stolen from waitress

Credit card debt in China is $2t v. $815b in the United States.

Thousands of people in Sweden have inserted microchips, which can function as contactless credit cards, key cards and even rail cards, into their bodies.

Cocaine in rivers harming endangered eels, study finds

The blue lights are meant to discourage people from using drugs in store bathrooms by making it more difficult for them to see their veins

Pudding sent to the edge of space goes missing

More than 700 hives, valued at as much as a million dollars, went missing in a single night. How to Steal 50 Million Bees

Progress in artificial intelligence makes the technology increasingly relevant to military applications. In particular, autonomous weapons could be of great military use. And: U.S. military is actively developing deadly uncontrolled drone swarms. Previously: MICRO DRONES KILLER ARMS ROBOTS

Blind Snapshot Predictions vs. Actual Photos [Thanks Tim]

Many of these traditional stock- and bond-picking firms are now paying up to hire mathematical and computer experts. They want these recruits to dive into pools of data—and the machine-learning tools that harness that data and other information—in search of trading ideas and blind spots.

Instead of ‘finding your passion,’ try developing it, Stanford scholars say

Statements that were repeated were more likely to be considered true compared to new statements [PDF]

Education appears to be the most consistent, robust, and durable method yet to be identified for raising intelligence

Researchers have identified over 1,016 specific genes associated with intelligence, the vast majority of which are unknown to science

How To Get Kids To Pay Attention

I got Facebook removed from RBS’s online banking landing page because it could access the account pages (which it was not loaded on) Facebook JavaScript SDK is often illegal

We did not find any strong support for the hypothesis that exposure to images of half-naked women impact economic preferences

The first lawsuit was filed by asset management executive Steven Tananbaum, who alleged that Koons and the gallery failed to deliver three monumental sculptures, even after he paid millions of dollars for them.

Digital communication is undergoing exclamation-point inflation

The return to ‘inflatable tanks’ and the art of deception in the British Army

The “sudden death during recreational mummification bondage” happened Nov. 22, but was not reported until muckraking podcaster Ebner broke the story last week. S&M-loving Hollywood exec keeps job after man dies in his sex dungeon

St. Ignace Mystery Spot

Who up [Thanks Tim]

realsuperhuman.net [Thanks Tim]

Women differ greatly from one another in terms of their tendency and capacity to experience orgasms. The improvements in gender equality and sexual education since the 1970s have not helped women to become more orgasmic. Neither has the major increase in masturbation habits (among women in general).

One challenge for future studies is to understand why women value their partner’s orgasms more than their own.

{ Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology | Continue reading }

related { A majority of women experienced a more intense orgasm given intravaginal ejaculation + Female ejaculation has a positive impact on women’s and their partners’ sexual lives }

art { Zbigniew Dlubak, Desymbolisations, 1978 }

On Thursday, AT&T unveiled a service called WatchTV, a “skinny bundle” of 31 television channels, many of them under AT&T’s control after the Time Warner merger, as well as on-demand content from those channels. Subscribers to AT&T’s two new unlimited data plans get WatchTV for free, and the pricier plan includes HBO, the crown jewel of the Time Warner merger. Non-AT&T customers who want WatchTV can get it for $15 per month—but without access to John Oliver and Silicon Valley, which would cost another $15 through HBO Now. […]

Growth through acquisition is how Google and Facebook became so dominant in their respective markets. Facebook has a tool called Onavo that identifies the user bases of rival social networks so it can buy them up if they start to take off. Google bought its ad network by acquiring Doubleclick, AdMob, and other firms.

{ New Republic | Continue reading }

In 2014, stories appeared in national and international media claiming that the condition of “selfitis” (the obsessive taking of selfies) was to be classed as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association and that the condition could be borderline, acute, or chronic. However, the stories were a hoax but this did not stop empirical research being carried out into the concept. The present study empirically explored the concept and collected data on the existence of selfitis with respect to the three alleged levels (borderline, acute, and chronic) and developed the Selfitis Behavior Scale (SBS).

{ International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction | Continue reading }

photo { Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Rome, Italy, 1977–1978 }

the intensity of the emotional response people experience when they act dishonestly is reduced every time they lie

{ NBC | Continue reading }

Televangelist says Jesus asked him to buy a new private jet, asks his followers to buy him the $54 million jet

Mutually Nonconsensual Sex. Is it possible for two people to simultaneously sexually assault each other?

Walking faster could make you live longer: research

Human footsteps can provide a unique behavioural pattern for robust biometric systems

A New Tool Uses DNA to Predict Eye, Hair, Skin Color

Taking a photo of something impairs your memory of it, whether you expect to keep the photo or not

Without air conditioning, each 1°F increase in school year temperature reduces the amount learned that year by one percent.

Women who wore the obese body suit ate significantly more than women who wore the control clothing, but this effect was not observed in men

Study Identifies Processes In The Gut That Drive Fat Build-Up Around The Waist

we show that incidental exposure to fishy smells is sufficient to undermine cooperation in economic trust and public good games [PDF]

Human immune cells in blood can be converted directly into functional neurons in the laboratory in about three weeks with the addition of just four proteins

Scientists have categorized 6 types of disgust

If correlation doesn’t imply causation, then what does?

What Is It Like to Be a Dolphin?

NOT REAL NEWS: A look at what didn’t happen this week

AI Winter Is Well On Its Way

Alexa is recording mundane details of your life, and it’s creepy as hell

Early hackers used whistles from Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes. They played certain tones through their telephones to bypass AT&T’s analog system and get free long-distance phone calls.

AI, Blockchain, Anime: Crypko, the next generation cryptocollectible game

‘Diane Arbus: American Portraits’ at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne

English teacher corrects White House letter

How do we navigate a deeply structured world? Why are you reading this sentence first - and did you actually look at the fifth word?

{ Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews | Continue reading }

Mum changes her son’s name after tattoo artist spelled it wrong

A cancer researcher said she collected blood from 98 people. It was all her own.

In the 1950s, China established a regulation requiring that at least one room in each apartment receive a minimum of one hour of sunshine on the day of the winter solstice, December 21.

Researchers studied a range of fitness apps and found only one was effective, while others failed to spark improvements or made the problem worse

The more intelligent a person, the fewer connections there are between the neurons in his cerebral cortex. These findings sound paradoxical at first glance, but they do reconcile previously conflicting results.

Images of baby animals temporarily reduce women’s appetite for meat. In contrast, the evidence for men was less strong.

people display more red and black clothing when meeting a possible mate for the first time

Demographics doom more and more males to involuntary celibacy

Male Sexlessness is Rising, But Not for the Reasons Incels Claim

The Difference Between Reversible and Irreversible Decisions

As robots get good at mimicking human behavior, people can be deceived into thinking they have human intelligence

The social pressure to have an opinion and a lack of accountability are what lead to the mix of truth, half-truth and outright falsehood known as bullshit, study

the rise of the pointless job

distinctive eyebrows (e.g., thick, dense) reveal narcissists’ personality to others

Susceptibility to contagious diseases among improvisational artists

How much life does a sausage cost you?

Extra glass of wine a day ‘will shorten your life by 30 minutes’

researchers have shown that a synthetic “double Trojan horse” drug can fool bacteria into willingly accepting a toxic antibiotic

the eye movement record suggested that initial processing of the text was facilitated when periods were followed by two spaces

How could we build an invisibility cloak to hide Earth from an alien civilization?

What Is Dark Matter?

Dead zones are areas devoid of oxygen. In the ocean, these are also known as ‘oxygen minimum zones’ and they are naturally occurring between 200 and 800 meters deep in some parts of the world.

Why New York City Stopped Building Subways

“Law does not govern,” writes Dorothy Thompson, then a correspondent for several major U.S. publications, about conditions in 1934 Germany. “Force and the arbitrary and unchallengeable decisions of a small oligarchy, made from day to day, govern. Their decrees are the law.”

Things no one tells you before an Antarctic expedition

A first experiment in AI-enhanced AR

Communication and propaganda through the Wi-FI wireless standard

Two rubber band technique for finger ring removal

Seven Puzzles You Think You Must Not Have Heard Correctly (with solutions) [PDF]

Lying or spreading “false news” was treated as a crime in colonial Massachusetts

The longest straight-line route possible without hitting land

Once upon a time…

[L]ife may have been seeded here on Earth by life-bearing comets as soon as conditions on Earth allowed it to flourish (about or just before 4.1 Billion years ago). […]

Evidence of the role of extraterrestrial viruses in affecting terrestrial evolution has recently been plausibly implied in the gene and transcriptome sequencing of Cephalopods. The genome of the Octopus shows a staggering level of complexity with 33,000 protein-coding genes more than is present in Homo sapiens. Octopus belongs to the coleoid sub-class of molluscs (Cephalopods) that have an evolutionary history that stretches back over 500 million years, although Cephalopod phylogenetics is highly inconsistent and confusing. Cephalopods are also very diverse, with the behaviourally complex coleoids, (Squid, Cuttlefish and Octopus) presumably arising under a pure terrestrial evolutionary model from the more primitive nautiloids. However the genetic divergence of Octopus from its ancestral coleoid sub-class is very great, akin to the extreme features seen across many genera and species noted in Eldridge-Gould punctuated equilibria patterns (below). Its large brain and sophisticated nervous system, camera-like eyes, flexible bodies, instantaneous camouflage via the ability to switch colour and shape are just a few of the striking features that appear suddenly on the evolutionary scene. The transformative genes leading from the consensus ancestral Nautilus to the common Cuttlefish to Squid to the common Octopus are not easily to be found in any pre-existing life form — it is plausible then to suggest they seem to be borrowed from a far distant “future” in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large. Such an extraterrestrial origin as an explanation of emergence of course runs counter to the prevailing dominant paradigm. […]

One plausible explanation, in our view, is that the new genes are likely new extraterrestrial imports to Earth — most plausibly as an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilized Octopus eggs. […]

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe thus argued and predicted on the basis of the then available evidence that microorganisms and virus populations in the comets and related cosmic bolides appear to have regularly delivered living systems (organisms, viruses and seeds) to the Earth since its formation, and continue to do so. […]

Darwinian evolution and its various non-Darwinian terrestrial drivers are therefore most likely caused by the continuing supply of new virions and micro-organisms from space with their genetic impact events written all over our genomes. Indeed a strong case can be made for hominid evolution involving a long sequence of viral pandemics, each one of which was a close call to total extinction of an evolving line. The most crucial genes relevant to evolution of hominids, as indeed all species of plants and animals, seems likely in many instances to be of external origin, being transferred across the galaxy largely as information rich virions. In some cases it is possible to imagine multicellular life-forms that were established on an icy cometary or planetary body to be transferred as frozen eggs, embryos or seeds in large icy bolides that have been transported to the Earth in soft landings.

{ Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology | PDF }

photo { Ezra Stoller, Philip Morris headquarters, Richmond, 1972 }

In Study 2, we moved chairs together in Starbucks across the country so that they were partially blocking the aisle (n = 678).

People in northern China were more likely to move the chair out of the way, which is consistent with findings that people in individualistic cultures are more likely to try to control the environment. People in southern China were more likely to adjust the self to the environment by squeezing through the chairs. Even in China’s most modern cities, rice-wheat differences live on in everyday life.

{ Improbable | Continue reading }

{ Chris Burden, Being Photographed Looking Out Looking In, 1971 }

The Game is a mental game where the objective is to avoid thinking about The Game itself. Thinking about The Game constitutes a loss. 

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

art { Taryn Simon, Finance package for the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. Baku, Azerbaijan, February 3, 2004, Paperwork and the Will of Capital, 2015 | Ralph Gibson, Beautiful Parlor, 1968 }

framed text, glass jars, shelf, hair, fingernails, and skin { Adrian Piper, What Will Become of Me, 1985, ongoing }