D. B. Cooper is a media epithet popularly used to refer to an unidentified man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft in the airspace between Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, on November 24, 1971, extorted $200,000 in ransom (equivalent to $1,170,000 in 2015), and parachuted to an uncertain fate. Despite an extensive manhunt and protracted FBI investigation, the perpetrator has never been located or identified. […]
He dictated his demands: $200,000 in “negotiable American currency”; four parachutes (two primary and two reserve); and a fuel truck standing by in Seattle to refuel the aircraft upon arrival. […]
The FBI task force believes that Cooper was a careful and shrewd planner. He demanded four parachutes to force the assumption that he might compel one or more hostages to jump with him. […]
Agents theorize that he took his alias from a popular Belgian comic book series of the 1970s featuring the fictional hero Dan Cooper, a Royal Canadian Air Force test pilot who took part in numerous heroic adventures, including parachuting. […]
In February 1980 an eight-year-old boy named Brian Ingram, vacationing with his family on the Columbia River about 9 miles (14 km) downstream from Vancouver, Washington, and 20 miles (32 km) southwest of Ariel, uncovered three packets of the ransom cash, significantly disintegrated but still bundled in rubber bands, as he raked the sandy riverbank to build a campfire. FBI technicians confirmed that the money was indeed a portion of the ransom—two packets of 100 twenty-dollar bills each, and a third packet of 90, all arranged in the same order as when given to Cooper.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }
photo { Robert Mapplethorpe, Untitled (Candy Darling), 1972 | one more }
crime, flashback |
August 4th, 2016
‘Sister Clones’ Of Dolly The Sheep Are Alive [Healthy ageing of cloned sheep]
If you’re over 40, working more than 25 hours a week could be affecting your intelligence, new research suggests.
Is empathy the result of gut intuition or careful reasoning? Research suggests that, contrary to popular belief, the latter may be more the case.
Biggest factor in divorce is the husband’s employment status, study
Airborne chemicals in cinema air varied distinctively and reproducibly with time for a particular film, even in different screenings to different audiences.
Genes influence academic ability across all subjects, latest study shows
study identifies brain areas altered during hypnotic trances
Thousands of fMRI brain studies in doubt due to software flaws which routinely produced false positives, resulting in errors 50 per cent of the time or more.
Biology textbooks tell us that lichens are alliances between two organisms—a fungus and an alga. They are wrong.
7-Eleven Inc. and a tech startup called Flirtey have beaten Amazon to the punch in making the first drone delivery to a customer’s home in the U.S.
Norway is building the world’s first ‘floating’ underwater tunnels
3D-printed guns that evade metal detectors, lack serial numbers, are untraceable. Moreover, 3-D firearms makers would avoid background checking.
The big hack (A scenario that could happen based on what already has)
Photographer Files $1 Billion Suit Against Getty for Licensing Her Public Domain Images
New online literary magazine dedicated to poems and prose written by AI
The bloom of our Amorphophallus titanum, known to many as the corpse flower, is a horticultural jewel 10 years in the making. Corpse Flower Cam at NYBG
The Longest Word in the World (189,819 letters) [disputed whether it is a word]
Law Enforcement Guide To Satanic Cults, 1994 [video]
every day the same again |
July 29th, 2016
Pennsylvania woman pleads guilty in loud sex case, sentenced to jail
Hackers Can Use Smart Watch Movements To Reveal A Wearer’s ATM PIN More: Your Wearable Devices Reveal Your Personal PIN
Apple patent outlines a system which would allow venues to use an infrared emitter to remotely disable the camera function on smartphones.
Deutsche Bank is now worth just 17 billion euros ($18 billion). When the biggest bank in Europe’s biggest economy, with annual revenue of about 37 billion euros, is worth about the same as Snapchat — a messaging app that generated just $59 million of revenue last year — you know something’s wrong.
Psychologists have identified the length of eye contact that people find most comfortable (just over three seconds)
Benefits of drinking coffee outweigh risks, review suggests
Marketing Vegetables in Elementary School Cafeterias to Increase Uptake 90.5% more students took vegetables from the salad bar when exposed to the vinyl banner only, and 239.2% more students visited the salad bar when exposed to both the television segments and vinyl banners.
When the robot approached lone individuals, they helped it enter the building in 19 percent of trials. When approached by the cookie-delivery robot, 76 percent of the time.
The edible-insect industry has grown big enough to start lobbying Washington
Lionfish invading the Mediterranean Sea [ previously]
6.6 percent. That’s the amount the rent in San Francisco has gone up every year, on average, since 1956. It was true before rent control; it was true after rent control.
The 10,000-Hour Rule Was Wrong, According to the People Who Wrote the Original Study
Cattle Auctioneer
every day the same again |
July 7th, 2016
So, some asshole stole my snapshot, put it on reddit (which I didn’t know).
Last night, I posted my pic on reddit.
Now – I found out I got banned and accused of “stealing my own pic.”
Fuck the state of ‘creativity’ and ‘originality’ today. Fuck it.
Let the world implode inside of its own self-licking asshole.
Yes, these silly things mean something to people who actually CREATE anything. […]
No, it’s not yours to fucking ‘remix.’
No, it’s not ’shared’, to be owned by all – even if it’s free.
{ Tim Geoghegan on Facebook }
experience, social networks |
July 7th, 2016
Is our perceptual experience a veridical representation of the world or is it a product of our beliefs and past experiences? Cognitive penetration describes the influence of higher level cognitive factors on perceptual experience and has been a debated topic in philosophy of mind and cognitive science.
{ Consciousness and Cognition | Continue reading }
photo { Can you think a thought which isn’t yours? A remarkable new study suggests you can }
ideas, psychology |
June 24th, 2016
It has become common practice for retailers to personalize direct marketing efforts based on customer transaction histories as a tactic to increase sales.
Targeted email offers featuring products in the same category as a customer’s previous purchases generate higher purchase rates. However, a targeted offer emphasizing familiar products could result in curtailed search for unadvertised products, as a closely matched offer weakens a customer’s incentives to search beyond the targeted items.
In a field experiment using email offers sent by an online wine retailer, targeted offers resulted in decreased search activity on the retailer’s website. This effect is driven by a lower rate of search by customers who visit the site, rather than a lower incidence of search.
{ Management Science | Continue reading }
related { This research demonstrates that a marketing claim placed on a package is more believable than a marketing claim placed in an advertisement }
marketing |
June 24th, 2016
Two hedge fund “quants” have come up with an algorithm that diagnoses heart disease from MRI images, beating nearly 1,000 other teams in one of the most ambitious competitions in artificial intelligence.
{ Financial Times | Continue reading }
Qi Liu and Tencia Lee, hedge fund analysts and self-described “quants,” didn’t know each other before they won the competition, beating out more than 1,390 algorithms. They met each other in a forum on the Kaggle site, where the competition was hosted over a three-month period.
{ WSJ | Continue reading }
health, technology, traders |
June 24th, 2016
LG Electronics sells mosquito-repelling TV in India. The same technology, which was certified as effective by an independent laboratory near Chennai, India, has been used by LG in air conditioners and washing machines, the company said.
Researchers report that nepetalactone, the essential oil in catnip that gives the plant its characteristic odor, is about ten times more effective at repelling mosquitoes than DEET — the compound used in most commercial insect repellents.
Firm pays $950,000 penalty for using Wi-Fi signals to secretly track phone users
We clearly show that human communication has not reached a number of stars and planets adequate to expect an answer. These analyses both conclude that the Fermi paradox is not, in fact, unexpected.
Most insurance firms will probably argue as long as they can that there’s insufficient evidence that automated driving systems reduce accidents
The writer started watching movies and television in fast forward to make his life more efficient. But acceleration — the latest twist in the millennia-old tradition of technology changing storytelling — also made viewing more pleasurable. Now there is no turning back.
Story, a concept shop that completely changes theme every few months
Man creates smoothie made of McDonald’s burgers
every day the same again |
June 22nd, 2016
U.S., visual design |
June 16th, 2016
The shipping industry is struggling through its worst recession in half a century, and that icon of globalization — the mega-container ship — is a major part of the problem.
Between 1955 and 1975, the average volume of a container ship doubled — and then doubled again over each of the next two decades. The logic behind building such giants was once unimpeachable: Globalization seemed like an unstoppable force, and those who could exploit economies of scale could reap outsized profits.
But by 2008, that logic had begun to falter. Even as global trade volumes collapsed after the financial crisis, with disastrous effects on the cargo business, ship owners were still commissioning more and bigger boats. That had ruinous consequences: This year, 18 percent of the world’s container ships are anchored and idle. […]
Such boats make prime targets for cyberattacks and terrorism, suffer from a dearth of qualified personnel to operate them, and are subject to huge insurance premiums. […]
Yet the biggest costs associated with these floating behemoths are on land — at the ports that are scrambling to accommodate them. New cranes, taller bridges, environmentally perilous dredging, and even wholesale reconfiguration of container yards are just some of the costly disruptions that might be needed to receive a Benjamin Franklin and service it efficiently. Even when taxpayers foot the bill for such upgrades, the costs can be passed on to vessel operators in the form of higher port fees.
Under such circumstances, you’d think that ship owners would start to steer clear of big boats. But, fearful of falling behind the competition and hoping to put smaller operators out of business, they’re actually doing the opposite.
{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }
economics, transportation |
June 15th, 2016
We found that women experience more jealousy toward women with cosmetics, and view these women as more attractive to men and more promiscuous.
{ Perception | Continue reading }
photo { Bon Jane }
photogs, psychology, relationships |
June 13th, 2016
Cioffi endorses the Oxford comma, the one before and in a series of three or more. On the question of whether none is singular or plural, he is flexible: none can mean not a single one and take a singular verb, or it can mean not any and take a plural verb. His sample “None are boring” (from the New Yorker, where I work) was snipped from a review of a show of photographs by Richard Avedon. Cioffi would prefer the singular in this instance — “None is boring” — arguing that it “emphasizes how not a single, solitary one of these Avedon photographs is boring”. To me, putting so much emphasis on the photos’ not being boring suggests that the critic was hoping for something boring. I would let it stand. […]
“that usually precedes elements that are essential to your sentence’s meaning [restrictive], while which typically introduces ‘nonessential’ elements [non-restrictive], and usually refers to the material directly before it.” Americans sometimes substitute which for that, thinking it makes us sound more proper (i.e. British). On both sides of the Atlantic, the classic nonrestrictive which is preceded by a comma.
{ The Times Literary Supplement | Continue reading }
Linguistics |
June 13th, 2016
Mark Zuckerberg built a voice-controlled thermostat that doesn’t listen to his wife’s voice
I trained rats to trade on Wall Street. 
