The simplest form of investment scam is that you promise people some attractive return on their investment […] There are two basic approaches, which are:

A reasonable return, or
An insane return.

The first approach was made famous by Bernie Madoff […] The advantage of this approach is that it can attract sophisticated investors: Madoff was able to raise money from rich people and funds-of-funds because, in their obviously flawed due diligence, they concluded that the returns he promised were plausible. […]

The second approach […] you mostly don’t want sophisticated investors. It is plausibly harder to trick sophisticated investors than it is to trick unsophisticated ones. This is like why advance-fee scam emails have lots of typos: “By sending an initial email that’s obvious in its shortcomings, the scammers are isolating the most gullible targets.” Promising a 1,000,000% return ensures that you never end up talking to anyone but the most gullible possible marks. […] Here’s a good Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement action against an alleged vaguely crypto-ish fraud: […]

According to the SEC’s complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, Chandran, Davidson, Glaspie, Knott, and Mossel falsely claimed that investors could generate extravagant returns by investing in a blockchain technology called CoinDeal that would be sold for trillions of dollars to a group of prominent and wealthy buyers. […]

Chandran, a recidivist securities law violator and convicted felon, claimed to own a unique blockchain technology that was on the verge of being sold for trillions of dollars to a group of reputable billionaire buyers (“CoinDeal”). Chandran further claimed his business required interim financial support until the sale transaction closed. Together with and through other named Defendants, Chandran targeted mostly unsophisticated investors with false and misleading promises and representations that investments in CoinDeal would soon yield extremely high returns from the imminent sale of his business. Ultimately, there was no sale, and no distribution of proceeds, because CoinDeal was a sham. […]

Chandran typically provided status updates on the supposed deal, including but not limited to: the involvement of foreign central banks and the United States Department of Homeland Security; the latest board meetings of the consortium of wealthy buyers; the role of certain political figures; and the causes of “temporary” delays to the sale closing. These updates were designed to lull investors and induce them to continue investing in CoinDeal. […]

Then of course the “deal” would not close and there would be excuses, which included “the engineer … called in sick yesterday” and “the bank wants a new set of documents.” […] My favorite part, though, might be the section about Linda Knott. According to the SEC complaint, she didn’t know these people, and wasn’t in any real sense a part of their alleged scam. She just used their alleged scam as a substrate to run her own alleged scam:

In February 2021, Knott learned of CoinDeal through one of Glaspie’s teleconferences […] Knott started collecting funds for CoinDeal through an investor group called Together We Profit. Together We Profit was a loose arrangement of individuals interested in participating in CoinDeal. … Knott facilitated investment by lowering the barrier to entry for CoinDeal by allowing prospective investors to participate for as little as $27, which was lower than the amounts permitted by Glaspie. […] While Knott assured investors she would transmit all of their funds to CoinDeal, that was false. She enriched herself by misappropriating approximately $79,000 or more for personal use and purposes unrelated to CoinDeal.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

New York has become the latest US state to allow so-called human composting. A person can now have their body turned into soil after their death - which is seen as an environmentally friendly alternative to a burial or cremation. In 2019, Washington was the first US state to legalise it. Colorado, Oregon, Vermont and California followed suit.

OnlyFans mum embarrassed about wetting herself for years now sells wet pants

A fundamental question in the study of consciousness is “To what extent are sensory experiences equivalent between individuals?” Is my “red” your “red”?

GAN faces [realistic-looking faces of non-existing people] are more likely to be perceived as real faces than real faces

In a world first, AI lawyer will help defend a real case in the US

College student built an app called GPTZero that can “quickly and efficiently” label whether an essay was written by a person or ChatGPT.

Study Finds That Buttons in Cars Are Safer and Quicker to Use Than Touchscreens

Malone understood a few things about the cable industry that many outsiders didn’t. First, he understood that cable was like real estate: incredibly high fixed costs up front as you built or bought the systems, and then highly predictable, monopoly cash flows for a long time afterwards. He understood that if he used debt to finance acquisitions, he could keep growing the company, and use the depreciation on acquired systems (plus the write-offs from the loans itself) to delay paying taxes on that cash flow. […] The problem was that Wall Street in the 70s and 80s didn’t get any of this. […] To make his point, Malone created a new accounting metric, something he called ‘earnings before interest, depreciation, and taxes’, or EBITDA.

There are an estimated 25 million safe deposit boxes in America, and few protections for customers. No federal laws govern the boxes; no rules require banks to compensate customers if their property is stolen or destroyed.

At 93, the world’s best-selling living female artist is still painting daily at the psychiatric hospital she voluntarily checked into and has lived in since the 1970s.

PLAYBOY: Your salary is shooting up into the multimillions per movie–reportedly $4 million to $ 7 million. Do those numbers make you chuckle? NICOLAS CAGE: I don’t chuckle. I have respect for the dollar.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has expanded to three generations and more than 1,300 descendants of the original subjects; it is, according to the researchers, the longest-running in-depth study on human happiness in the world. From all the data, one very clear finding has emerged: Strong relationships are what make for a happy life. More than wealth, I.Q. or social class, it’s the robustness of our bonds that most determines whether we feel fulfilled.

Optimal wings for flying fruits — Appendages of seeds, fruits, and other diaspores (dispersal units) are essential for their wind dispersal, as they act as wings and enable them to fly. […] The link of the fruit’s sepal shape to flight performance, however, is as yet unknown.

“You’re going to have black snakes from time to time. It’s just a fact of life,” he advised me. “You’re going to have field mice. You’re in the country.” And if one of those black snakes pursues one of those field mice into my bedroom? He suggests I put a wet towel on the floor, wait for the snake to wrap itself in the towel and then remove it.

Map of Italy in 1796

“Hey Jared! POTUS wants to trademark/own rights to below, I don’t know who to see – or ask…I don’t know who to take to,” the email from Scavino reads, according to a transcript of Kushner’s testimony to the committee, which was released by the panel on Friday.

Two phrases were bolded in the email: “Save America PAC!” and “Rigged Election!”

Kushner forwarded the request and discussed it on an email chain that included Eric Trump, the president’s son; Alex Cannon, a Trump campaign lawyer; Sean Dollman, the chief financial officer of Trump’s 2020 campaign; and Justin Clark, a Trump campaign lawyer.

“Guys - can we do ASAP please?” Kushner wrote.

Eric Trump responded, saying: “Both web URLs are already registered. Save America PAC was registered October 23 of this year. Was that done by the campaign?”

Dollman responded: “‘Save America PAC’ is already taken/registered, just confirming that. But we can still file for ‘Save America.’”

Kushner’s response, according to the transcript, was: “Go.”

{ CNN | Continue reading }

Another source of discomfort was our neighbors’ cats. Now, we are eminently social in our disposition, and enjoy our neighbors’ company very much. We like to spend a social evening with them and have them do the same by us. But not so their cats. We never interchanged civilities with them, their visits were too ill timed and frequent. Our ducklings were carried off in large numbers, and in pure self-defense we shot the cats. Of course, this made trouble in our neighbors’ families, especially the female portion, by whom it was promptly resented. The principle of “touch my dog, touch me,” was illustrated here in all its force. No amount of provocation ever justified us in their eyes in killing their cats. With pater familias it was different. His affections were not engaged. He recognized the necessity of the thing, laughed it off, and said it was all right. [Natural and Artificial Duck Culture, 1906]

The former nun also claimed Rupnik had asked her and another nun to have a threesome with him, saying they would replicate the three-way relationship among God the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

Why do some people seem to be drawn to situations that are not good for them? […] hypotheses: people make dysfunctional choices 1) to process or master previous trauma, 2) out of habit and because of preferences for what is familiar, 3) to maintain a coherent view of themselves and the world, and 4) to avoid difficult emotions.

Schooling substantially improves intelligence, but neither lessens nor widens the impacts of socioeconomics and genetics

Two groups including 26 women and 25 men […] We found that the brains of women and men reacted differently to infants’ faces, and these differential areas are in facial processing, attention, and empathetic networks.

In the mid-1800s a German physician, Carl Wunderlich, measured axillary (armpit) temperatures from about 25,000 people and found that the average was 98.6˚ F (37˚ C). And so, we’ve believed that ever since. […] An analysis of 20 studies between 1935 and 1999 found that the average oral temperature was 97.5˚ F. Time to redefine normal body temperature?

Bitcoin has a maximum supply of 21 million. Current data shows that 19.1 million bitcoins have been mined to date. However, of that amount, it is estimated that between 3-4 million bitcoins have been lost forever. […] Others such as Satoshi Nakomoto, the creator of bitcoin, are believed to hold as much as 1 million bitcoin. This anonymous person has not published any communication since 2010 and many presume the famed character has passed away. […] a mining firm in China mines 3% of all bitcoin. It mines 650 bitcoins monthly with an estimated electric bill of almost $1.2 million.

as of September 19, 2022, MicroStrategy and its subsidiaries held approximately 130,000 Bitcoins, acquired at an aggregate purchase price of $3.98 billion, at an average purchase price of $30,639 per bitcoin.

Who Owns the Most Bitcoin?

Pink Sauce went viral on TikTok. But then it exploded

Cheerful Chatbots Don’t Necessarily Improve Customer Service

The chief executive of one of Europe’s biggest insurance companies has warned that cyber attacks, rather than natural catastrophes, will become “uninsurable” as the disruption from hacks continues to grow. “What will become uninsurable is going to be cyber”

A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate — Make Sunsets is already attempting to earn revenue for geoengineering, a move likely to provoke widespread criticism.

People suffering from depression have lower connectivity in brain regions linked to reward processing, study finds

Cassidy and Dylan Scott, a married couple from Huntsville, Alabama, just happen to have the same birthday. This week, they welcomed their first baby – on their birthday. — Their baby girl arrived on Dec. 18 […] While this phenomenon is rare, in 2017, another couple who shared a birthday also welcomed a baby on the same day – and it happened to be Dec. 18, just like the Scotts. […] The family’s birthday, Dec. 18, is actually a common one – ranking No. 56 out of all days […] Out of all the calendar days, including leap day on Feb. 29, the two least common birthdays are Jan. 1, ranking at No. 365, and Dec. 25, ranking at No. 366, according to Stiles. Leap day, which only occurs every four years, is also uncommon, ranking at No. 347.

Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (Stanford University): Gender-based language includes a range of words and phrases that are not helpful, and, in many cases, are exclusionary. […] Instead of “balls to the wall” consider using “accelerate efforts.” balls to the walls (Wiktionary): First attested in the 1960s in the context of aviation, in reference to ball-shaped grips on an aircraft’s joystick and throttle. Pushing the “balls to the wall” would put the engine at maximum power. Not related to the vulgar sense of balls (“testicles”).

All four tests classified ChatGPT’s answers to their questions as left-leaning.

“Google has a business model issue. If Google gives you the perfect answer to each query, you won’t click on any ads.” […] Google has been reluctant to share its technology broadly because, like ChatGPT and similar systems, it can generate false, toxic and biased information. LaMDA is available to only a limited number of people through an experimental app, AI Test Kitchen.

Bitcoin hashrate drops nearly 40% as deadly U.S. storm unplugs miners

Loni Goddard works at Kerala Ayurveda, a wellness company, and rents an apartment in Reno. In 2020, her one-bedroom apartment cost $950 with internet and cable. When she re-signed her lease in April, the rent rose to $1,490 — not including internet and cable.

How a Vermont farmer proved no snowflakes are alike

Why do bees die when they sting you?

Aliens haven’t contacted Earth because there’s no sign of intelligence here, new answer to the Fermi paradox suggests […] If life has evolved on many planets in the galaxy, then aliens are probably more interested in the ones where there are signs not just of biology but technology […] experts have offered other explanations for the missing aliens: Perhaps they visited Earth in the past, before humans evolved or were capable of recording the visit. Or maybe long-distance space travel is more difficult than believed. Perhaps aliens evolved advanced civilization too recently to make it to Earth. Or they’ve deliberately decided not to explore the cosmos. It’s even possible that they’ve killed themselves off.

New research indicates the most common reasons for lying are altruistic (i.e., to protect others from harm).

Google can now read your doctor’s bad handwriting

The results of GPT-3 are often unexpected and surprising. But are they creative? GPT-3 was not trained to look at meaning. It does not understand its training data. When asked the simple multiplication question “1111*2=?”, GPT-3 responded “22”.

Study finds AI assistants help developers produce code that’s more likely to be buggy

People have A.I. bots running that use ChatGPT to automatically reply to people’s tweets and breaking up by letting ChatGPT write their break up letter

the images are fed into a “pre-trained machine learning (ML) model” to generate “a collection of 1,000 new, non-existing shapes” derived from the initial sex toy dataset

Previous studies have shown that comic book bodies are supernormal stimuli, exaggerated in dimensions that are attractive to primarily male comic book consumers. We predicted that comic book women would have longer legs than comic book men and would have longer than average legs [and] that comic book women would be depicted as wearing heels or walking on tiptoe more often, as this further elongates the legs. […] 86%–88% of female characters were drawn as either wearing high heels or walking or standing on tiptoe.

Adults are buying toys for themselves, and it’s the biggest source of growth for the industry […] one-fourth of all toy sales annually […] toy makers such as Mattel have created lines just for these consumers.

DEA seized enough fentanyl to kill every person in the U.S. in 2022

With a flat fee of $70 for trips into Manhattan and a guaranteed stream of passengers, a ride to and from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport is one of the more lucrative journeys for the city’s cab drivers. But federal prosecutors say two 48-year-old Queens men found another way to profit from the crowd of taxis waiting long hours for passengers at the airport, conspiring with Russians to hack the dispatch system and allow drivers to cut ahead in line for a $10 payment.

The Genesis of East Village Drag: An oral history of the Pyramid Club

This case started off as a missing person investigation, in which the victim disappeared in Taiwan on November 29, 2019. I was hired in mid-December 2019 and filed a petition for conservatorship of her estate, according to law.

The Phantom of Heilbronn, often alternatively referred to as the “Woman Without a Face”, was a hypothesized unknown female serial killer whose existence was inferred from DNA evidence found at numerous crime scenes in Austria, France and Germany from 1993 to 2009. The only connection between the crimes was the presence of DNA from a single female, which had been recovered from 40 crime scenes, ranging from murders to burglaries.[…] in March 2009, the case took a new turn when, while trying to identify a corpse, investigators found the Phantom’s female DNA in fingerprints on a male asylum seeker’s application. They subsequently came to the conclusion that there was no mysterious criminal and the laboratory results were due to contamination of the cotton swabs used for DNA probing. The cotton swabs used by many state police departments were found to have been contaminated before shipping. They all came from the same factory. The DNA belonged to a woman who worked at the factory where they were made. [more]

Data Visualization of How Apple Names Things

Lessons from watching every single Hallmark holiday movies

Cruise self-driving taxi being investigated after braking, clogging traffic in SF

Elon Musk asks Twitter investors for more money

A SpaceX flight attendant said Elon Musk exposed himself and propositioned her for sex, documents show. The company paid $250,000 for her silence.

KoGuan Leo, an Indonesian billionaire and the third-largest individual shareholder of Tesla, is calling for the electric carmaker’s CEO, Elon Musk, to step down as much of his attention is focused on Twitter lately.

Elon Musk sells $3.6bn of shares in electric car maker Tesla. It brings the total of Tesla stocks sold by Musk over the past year to almost $40bn. Musk remains Tesla’s biggest shareholder with a 13.4% stake.

Musk’s $5.7 Billion Mystery Gift Went to His Own Charity

Snakes have clitorises

I Asked ChatGPT To Explain Some Jokes to Me

DoNotPay, the company that bills itself as “the world’s first robot lawyer,” is launching a new AI-powered chatbot that can help you negotiate bills and cancel subscriptions without having to deal with customer service.

In order to protest AI image generators stealing artists work to train AI models, artists are deliberately generating AI art based on the IP of corporations (Disney, Nintendo, DC, and Marvel)

Stability AI plans to let artists opt out of Stable Diffusion 3 image training

AI search engines: You.com [about You.com], Metaphor, Talk to Books

Reducing the particles generated by flushing institutional toilets A previous study reported that institutional flush-O-meter (FOM) toilets can generate 3–12 times as many droplets as other toilets by splashing (large droplets) and bubble bursting (fine droplets). In this study, an aerosol suppression lid was evaluated to measure the reduction of particles by size using three metrics

Memories are stored in all different areas across the brain as networks of neurons called engrams. In addition to collecting information about incoming stimuli, these engrams capture emotional information. In a new study, Steve Ramirez, a neuroscientist at Boston University, found evidence that good and bad memories are stored in different regions of the hippocampus, a cashew-shaped structure that holds sensory and emotional information necessary for forming and retrieving memories. […] His team also found that they could manipulate memories by activating these regions. When he and his team activated the top area of the hippocampus, bad memories were less traumatic. Conversely, when they activated the bottom part, mice exhibited signs of long-last lasting anxiety-related behavioral changes.

Facial expressions may be an unreliable way to read emotions

Schizophrenia has been an evolutionary paradox: it has high heritability, but it is associated with decreased reproductive success. […] The etiology of schizophrenia has not been understood and there have been no major breakthroughs in the treatment of schizophrenia for 60 years. […] The new etiological synthesis of schizophrenia indicates that an interaction between host genotype, microbe infection, and chronic stress causes schizophrenia, with neuroinflammation and gut dysbiosis mediating this etiological pathway.

in a phase 2 clinical trial, a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, when combined with immunotherapy drug Keytruda, reduced the risk of recurrence by 44%.

The world has been trying to master this limitless clean energy source since the 1930s. We’re now closer than ever

The Sovereign Military Order of Malta, commonly known as the Order of Malta or Knights of Malta — Though it possesses no territory, the order is often considered a sovereign entity of international law, as it maintains diplomatic relations with many countries

Saudi Arabia ‘linear city’ More: The 100-mile-long metropolis promises to accommodate nine million residents + Flying taxis, robotic avatars and holograms + satellite images show that Saudi Arabia’s sci-fi megacity is well underway

A new artificial intelligence (AI) system called AlphaCode outperforms many human programmers in tricky software challenges

Dramatron is a so-called “co-writing” tool that can generate character descriptions, plot points, location descriptions and dialogue. The idea is that human writers will be able to compile, edit and rewrite what Dramatron comes up with into a proper script. Think of it like ChatGPT, but with output that you can edit into a blockbuster movie script.

This summer, scientists grew an embryo in a lab without the use of sperm, or eggs, or a womb. It happened to be that of a mouse. But the species is of secondary importance. What matters is that using only stem cells, a team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel forged something in a lab that budded a tail on day six, grew a beating heart by day eight, and even evinced the beginnings of a brain. — Breakthroughs of the Year

A new therapy that makes the immune system kill bone marrow cancer cells was successful in as many as 73 percent of patients in two clinical trials

The researchers found that longer genes are linked to longer lifespans, and shorter genes are linked to shorter lifespans. The researchers uncovered this pattern across several animals, including humans, and across many tissues (blood, muscle, bone and organs, including liver, heart, intestines, brain and lungs) analyzed in the study.

Tiny spurts of exercise throughout the day are associated with significant reductions in disease risk. Those who engaged in one or two-minute bursts of exercise roughly three times a day, like speed-walking while commuting to work or rapidly climbing stairs, showed a nearly 50 percent reduction in cardiovascular mortality risk and a roughly 40 percent reduction in the risk of dying from cancer as well as all causes of mortality, compared with those who did no vigorous spurts of fitness.

South Koreans are about to get a year or two younger, thanks to a new law — At present it’s common for South Koreans to have not just one age, but three – an “international age,” a “Korean age” and a “calendar age.” But to end confusion, the country’s parliament has decreed that from June 2023 all official documents must use the standard “international age.” […] when asked their age in informal settings, most South Koreans will answer with their “Korean age,” which could be one or even two years older than their “international age.” Under this system, babies are considered a year old on the day they’re born, with a year added every January 1.

Founded in 2014 with a goal to reintroduce oysters — a billion of them — into the New York Harbor by 2035, the Billion Oyster Project is about giving spent oyster shells a second life. — “Oysters are just so much more than for your consumption. They clean the water, they provide habitat for other marine species, they are lessening that wave energy so that hopefully the storm that’s coming isn’t going to flood your basement” […] Sixty restaurants in Manhattan and Brooklyn participate in the Billion Oyster Project’s shell collection program, including Lighthouse BK in Williamsburg. Saving the leftover shells from the oysters that diners slurp provides the literal foundation for the oysters.

Khloe Kardashian and Kendall Jenner sit in a luxe doctor’s office with white walls. Behind them, a window opens onto another room containing a futuristic blue brain scanner. The sisters are gazing at the doctor, an energetic middle-aged balding man wearing a white coat. This is Dr. Daniel Amen, 68, a psychiatrist to stars who has also treated Justin Bieber, Bella Hadid, and Meghan Trainor. Amen offers “bespoke” mental health treatment informed by scans of the physical brain. […] “Kendall’s got a beautiful brain on the outside,” Amen says, gesturing at a computer screen showing four brightly colored images. “But if we look at her emotional brain, which is right here, it’s way too busy. Which is why she can struggle with anxiety.”

Insiders made millions from Justin Bieber’s NFT project. His fans are down almost 90%.

ovies sorted by the color of the film posters from light to dark

Because people have a need to glue things to other things

Shingō village is the location of what is purported to be the resting place of Jesus, the “Tomb of Christ.” — Jesus Christ did not die on the cross at Golgotha. Instead, a man alleged to be his brother, Isukiri, took his place on the cross, while Jesus escaped across Siberia to Mutsu Province, in northern Japan. Once in Japan, Jesus changed his name to Torai Tora Daitenku and became a garlic farmer. In Japan, Jesus allegedly married a woman named Miyuko, with whom he fathered three children, all daughters. After his death at an age exceeding 100, Jesus was said to have been interred into one of two grave mounds in the village.

Scammers Are Scamming Other Scammers Out of Millions of Dollars — Frequently, there are “rip-and-run” scams, Wixey says, where the buyer doesn’t pay for what they’ve received or the seller gets the money but doesn’t send across what they sold. Other types of scams involve faked data or security exploits that don’t work.

What our studies showed is that perceptions of fashion-forwardness—of being in the know—can outweigh aesthetics when choosing a luxury brand item. Ugly has somehow become a signal of taste

Indonesia passes criminal code banning sex outside marriage — Sex outside marriage will carry a jail term of up to a year under the new laws, which take effect in three years. […] the new laws apply equally to locals and to foreigners living in Indonesia, or visiting holiday destinations such as Bali. […] unmarried couples are also banned from living together - an act for which people could be jailed for up to six months. Adultery will also be an offence for which people can be jailed.

Pentagon splits $9 billion cloud contract among Google, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon

BuzzFeed has only three quarters to go at current burn rates […] In December 2021, BuzzFeed went public via merger with a SPAC, and got, well, only $16 million in equity funding, of the $277 million that the SPAC itself raised during its IPO, as 94% of the SPAC shareholders chose to redeem their shares and get their money back, rather than watch BuzzFeed burn through their money […] At the time of SPAC merger, BuzzFeed’s implied valuation was a ridiculous $1.5 billion. Today, the market capitalization is down to $146 million.

Bitcoin Post-Mortem

this year 50% of firms across the world had tried to use ai in some way, up from 20% in 2017

The code that ChatGPT can’t write

To commemorate the centenary of Marcel Proust’s death, Christopher Prendergast celebrates his use of pink, how its tone shifts from innocence to themes of sexual need, before finally fading out to grey at the novel’s close.

On the evening of 8 December 1980 … The killer was Mark David Chapman, an American Beatles fan who was incensed by Lennon’s lavish lifestyle and his 1966 comment that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus”. Chapman said he was inspired by the fictional character Holden Caulfield from J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, a “phony-killer” who despises hypocrisy. […] Chapman fired five hollow-point bullets from a .38 special revolver, four of which hit Lennon in the back. Chapman remained at the scene reading The Catcher in the Rye until he was arrested by the police.

To prepare for the depths of winter when food is scarce, many animals slow down, sleep through the cold or migrate to warmer locales. Not the common shrew. To survive the colder months, the animal eats away at its own brain, reducing the organ by as much as a fourth, only to regrow much of brain matter in the spring

This paper outlines a procedure for tapping into your innermost self, and encountering a part of yourself that goes deeper than words

DNA showed a mother was also her daughter’s uncle — The answer to that medical mystery, sparked by a confusing paternity test result, is “When the genes of a vanished twin brother live on in the mother’s DNA.” — such human “chimeras” — people with DNA from more than one embryo — could be more common than we thought.

Walking backwards has a surprising number of health benefits

Singapore, population 5.45 million people, is home to around seven million trees – and manages around six million of them with LiDAR, AI and sensors.

Mutual Funds That Consistently Beat the Market? Not One of 2,132.

Computer Repair Technicians Are Stealing Your Data

Australia says law making Facebook and Google pay for news has worked

To build a great salad, start with lettuce or leafy greens. It may surprise you to learn that the type of greens you choose doesn’t really matter that much. Compared to other greens, iceberg lettuce probably has the fewest nutrients, but pretty much all lettuces are low in vitamins and minerals. Dark leafy greens like spinach have more micronutrients, but the type of iron in spinach is poorly absorbed, and there’s plenty of oxalate, so be careful if you’re prone to kidney stones.

To cope with the uncertainties of life, hobos developed a system of symbols they’d write with chalk or coal to provide fellow “Knights of the Road” with directions, help, and warnings.

“I sent in my manuscript, and the map along with it, to Messrs. Cassell. The proofs came, they were corrected, but I heard nothing of the map. I wrote and asked; was told it had never been received, and sat aghast. It is one thing to draw a map at random, set a scale in one corner of it at a venture, and write up a story to the measurements. It is quite another to have to examine a whole book, make an inventory of all the allusions contained in it, and with a pair of compasses, painfully design a map to suit the data. I did it; and the map was drawn again in my father’s office, with embellishments of blowing whales and sailing ships, and my father himself brought into service a knack he had of various writing, and elaborately FORGED the signature of Captain Flint, and the sailing directions of Billy Bones. But somehow it was never Treasure Island to me.”(Robert Louis Stevenson, My First Book: “Treasure Island,” 1894.)

Just asked ChatGPT to write a short story about AI taking over the world

asking the gptchat thingy how to plot a communist revolution

You’re a Senior Data Engineer at Twitter. Elon asks what you’ve done this week. You’ve done nothing.You open ChatGPT.

Building A Virtual Machine inside ChatGPT

ChatGPT.

Browse passages from books using experimental AI

TLDR This (paraphraser, summuraizer)

Lex is a new word processor that has all the features you expect from a Google docs-style editing experience. But—it also has an AI thought partner built-in to help unlock your best writing. […] If you ever get stuck, just hit command+enter or type +++ and GPT-3 will fill in what it thinks should come next. […] Also, if you want to generate title ideas based on your document, just click the button to the right of the title of the doc. It’ll ask the AI to come up with some options.

SEO-optimized and plagiarism-free content for blogs, Facebook ads, Google ads, emails…

Richard Hughes Gibson argues that large-language-model technology “is a sophist, at least on Plato’s understanding—an ‘imitator of appearances,’ creating a ‘shadow-play of words’ and presenting only the illusion of sensible argument.

Our observations show that visual sexual stimulus can trigger masturbation in capuchin monkeys. We observed a multi-male multi-female captive colony of 17 bearded capuchins between January and October 2014. Over this period, we registered 11 copulation events, 68 attempt copulations, and five masturbation events. The same low-ranking male (named Fu) performed all masturbation events.

UK to criminalize deepfake porn — Other abusive behaviors that will become explicitly illegal include “downblousing” (where photographs are taken down a women’s top without consent); and the installation of equipment, such as hidden cameras, to take or record images of someone without their consent.

Why would a multi-million-dollar fashion company like Balenciaga run ads for their “Object Line” using children holding teddy bears in bondage costumes? Why would they place a copy of a court document on child pornography in the ad? More: Balenciaga files $25M suit against production company for the inclusion in one of the ads of legal documents from a US Supreme Court decision on child porn laws. The two-page court summons doesn’t mention the BDSM teddy bears.

Doctors believe Bruce Lee may have died from drinking too much water

Changes to [Stable Diffusion’s] AI text-to-image model make it harder for users to mimic specific artists’ styles or generate NSFW output

OpenAI has built the best Minecraft-playing bot yet by making it watch 70,000 hours of video of people playing the popular computer game. It showcases a powerful new technique that could be used to train machines to carry out a wide range of tasks by binging on sites like YouTube, a vast and untapped source of training data. The Minecraft AI learned to perform complicated sequences of keyboard and mouse clicks to complete tasks in the game, such as chopping down trees and crafting tools. It’s the first bot that can craft so-called diamond tools, a task that typically takes good human players 20 minutes of high-speed clicking—or around 24,000 actions.

Slow Drinking of Beer Attenuates Sedative Feeling

Genetically modified tobacco plant produces cocaine in its leaves — Researchers have reproduced the entire biochemical pathway for how coca plants make cocaine in another plant, which could help people manufacture the drug for scientific study

Nearly half of all psychiatric patients get a different diagnose within 10 years. […] “Mental disorders are dynamic. They change over the course of a life.” […] The study shows which development is probable and which is improbable for the 20 most common mental diagnoses.

Within the European Union, airlines will be able to install the latest 5G technology on their aircraft, allowing passengers to use their smartphones and other connected devices just as they do on the ground.

Google: 60% Of The Internet Is Duplicate

the first house 3D-printed from bio-based materials (wood fibers and bio-resins) — The entire structure was printed in four modules and assembled on-site in a few hours. Electricity was installed just two hours after the assembly, and the house was essentially usable within a day after being brought on-site.

The Al Naslaa rock formation is Earth’s most bizarre geological feature

“Severed Spots,”, by the Brooklyn collective known as MSCHF, is based on a spot print by Damien Hirst, whose spots MSCHF excised and sold as their own works. It’s in their first art-world show, at Gallery Perrotin in New York. Related: Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953)

British Airways Flight 5390, June 10, 1990 [photos] While the aircraft was flying over Didcot, Oxfordshire, an improperly installed windscreen panel separated from its frame causing the captain to be sucked out of the aircraft. The captain was held in place through the window frame for twenty minutes until the first officer landed at Southampton Airport.

In late June, Microsoft released a new kind of artificial intelligence technology that could generate its own computer code. Called Copilot, the tool was designed to speed the work of professional programmers. As they typed away on their laptops, it would suggest ready-made blocks of computer code they could instantly add to their own. […] Matthew Butterick, a programmer, designer, writer and lawyer in Los Angeles […] and a team of other lawyers filed a lawsuit that is seeking class-action status against Microsoft and the other high-profile companies that designed and deployed Copilot. Like many cutting-edge A.I. technologies, Copilot developed its skills by analyzing vast amounts of data. In this case, it relied on billions of lines of computer code posted to the internet. Mr. Butterick, 52, equates this process to piracy, because the system does not acknowledge its debt to existing work. His lawsuit claims that Microsoft and its collaborators violated the legal rights of millions of programmers who spent years writing the original code.

When AI Stole and Finished Your Drawing Then Calls You a Thief

24.6 million addresses of the total 47.9 million, are below purchase price on their investments. About 45% are in the money, which means they are boasting unrealized gains, while the rest are roughly at break-even[…]Previous bear markets ended with the majority of addresses being out of-the money. […] Past data, however, is no guarantee of future results

Expert Proposes a Method For Telling if We All Live in a Computer Program

Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year

Vladimir Nabokov’s opinions on various writers

{ Alice Mann }

According to legend, in 1040 Lady Godiva was upset that her husband, the Lord of Coventry, had imposed ruinously high taxes on his subjects. He responded that he would revoke the taxes if she would ride through the town naked. She took the challenge, and out of respect the townsfolk stayed inside during her ride, all save one tailor named Thomas, who peeked from his window and was promptly struck blind. This incident is said to be the origin of “peeping Tom” as a synonym for “voyeur.”

Cryptocurrency exchange FTX owes creditors $3.1 billion, according to court documents […] Creditors’ names were not listed on the court filing, but the largest is owed $226,280,579. The second largest entity is owed $203,292,504. FTX owes nearly $3.1 billion to top 50 creditors […] about $1.45 billion to its top ten creditors

Why some feces float and others sink […] the bacteria in the gut — some produce more gas than others.

Firing people. Talking of bankruptcy. Telling workers to be “hard core.” Mr. Musk has repeatedly used those tactics at many of his companies. […] As Mr. Musk and his advisers look for ways to generate more revenue at the company, they are said to have discussed adding paid direct messages, which would let users send private messages to high-profile users.[…] for Mr. Musk, remaking Twitter is only a part-time job. He remains chief executive of Tesla, which he said in court he continued to lead, and SpaceX, where, he said, he focuses on designing rockets rather than management. […] Mr. Musk also leads the Boring Company, a tunneling start-up, and Neuralink, a brain-computer interface technology firm. He has said his long-term goal is to save humanity by developing technology for space travel, or, in his words, by “making life multiplanetary in order to ensure the long-term survival of consciousness.” The multitasking has become an issue in a lawsuit filed by Tesla shareholders who objected to the pay package that made Mr. Musk the world’s richest person. Last week in Delaware, under questioning by a lawyer representing shareholders who have accused Mr. Musk of neglecting his duties at Tesla, the billionaire said his intense involvement in Twitter was temporary.

For the female to male transsexual, surgical options include creation of a neophallus (phalloplasty) using a vascularized free-flap or pedicle flap. […] Additional procedures are also performed: glansplasty (to give the end of the phallus a natural glans-like appearance), transposition of the denuded clitoris to the neophallus base (to consolidate erogenous sensation to the neophallus), and vaginectomy. Placement of testicular and penile prostheses, for cosmesis and erectile function, respectively, are performed at second or third stage surgery. […] Previous groups have reported that the majority of patients retain the ability to achieve orgasm following phalloplasty.

The brain learns continuously, and typically learns best when new training is interleaved with periods of sleep for memory consolidation. […] Artificial neural networks (computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains) overwrite previously learned tasks when trained sequentially, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. […] Interleaving new task training with periods of off-line reactivation, mimicking biological sleep, mitigated catastrophic forgetting

Phantom Phone Signals (PPS) and other hallucinatory-like experiences (HLEs) are perceptual anomalies that are commonly reported in the general population. Both phenomena concern the same sensory modality, but PPS are restricted to smartphone use. The current study aimed to assess similarities and differences between these types of anomalies […] Smartphone dependency proved to be a stronger predictor of PPS than other measured variables, whereas for HLEs, general psychopathology was the strongest predictor.

Eye contact marks the rise and fall of shared attention in conversation

decoding fMRI-based brain activities and reconstructing images Previously: The Science of Mind Reading

A traveler at JFK Airport was arrested after $450,000 worth of cocaine was discovered hidden in the wheels of her wheelchair. Officers noticed the wheels on her wheelchair were not turning and X-rayed the wheelchair.

The Atacama desert, which stretches for approximately 1,600 km along the western coast of the cone of South America, is the driest place on Earth. Some weather stations there have never recorded rainfall throughout their existence. But it‘s far from barren: many species live here that occur nowhere else, adapted to its extreme conditions. And approximately every five to 10 years, from September to mid-November, the Atacama hosts one of the most spectacular sights of the natural world: the ‘desierto florido’ (literally ‘blooming desert’).

the whole idea was that electronic tokens whose validity was established with techniques borrowed from cryptography would make it possible for people to bypass financial institutions. […] It has never been clear exactly why anyone other than criminals would want to do this. […] cryptocurrencies are largely purchased through exchanges like Coinbase and, yes, FTX, which take your money and hold crypto tokens in your name.These exchanges are — wait for it — financial institutions, whose ability to attract investors depends on — wait for it again — those investors’ trust. In other words, the crypto ecosystem has basically evolved into exactly what it was supposed to replace: a system of financial intermediaries whose ability to operate depends on their perceived trustworthiness. Why should an industry that at best has simply reinvented conventional banking have any fundamental value? […] But if the government finally moves in to regulate crypto firms, which would, among other things, prevent them from promising impossible-to-deliver returns, it’s hard to see what advantage these firms would have over ordinary banks. Even if the value of Bitcoin doesn’t go to zero (which it still might), there’s a strong case that the crypto industry, which loomed so large just a few months ago, is headed for oblivion.

The iconic brand’s latest venture is a metaverse play called .Swoosh, a Web3-enabled platform where people will be able to buy its virtual products. […] Swoosh exists on a domain named “.nike” and will be an experimental digital space for registered members. […] the platform will use cash (USD), not cryptocurrency […] the NFT studio RTFKT (pronounced “artifact”) was bought by Nike in December 2021, so the porting of “codesigned” virtual clothing to that platform is hardly surprising. Nike acquired RTFKT last year and made $3.1 million selling 600 pairs of “Cryptokicks” NFT sneakers in April 2022

TikTok creators have gotten into the habit of coming up with substitutes for words that they worry might either affect how their videos get promoted on the site or run afoul of moderation rules. […] a fear that sexual topics would trigger problems prompted some creators to use “leg booty” for L.G.B.T.Q. and “cornucopia” instead of “homophobia.” Sex became “seggs.”

Almost everything with the truffle label that is available in stores or served in restaurants is a lie and a fraud. If you think you know what truffles taste like because you had them at restaurants, or you may have prepared something with the products you bought at specialty food stores, you almost certainly still don’t know the authentic truffle flavor. The flavor you are familiar with is the added aroma found in all the products labeled as containing “truffles.” […] There are more than 60 classified truffle species, around 25 species are edible, and four of those are most commonly used.

Florida house of Ron Rice, creator of Hawaiian Tropic lotion, is on sale

in the middle of the ballroom at Trump’s address, somebody had placed on one of the tables a manila envelope with handwritten letters: ‘Top Secret Nuclear Codes.’ [photo left]

The firm that bought my car for more than I paid new has lost 98 percent of its value — Carvana, the used car dealer that trusts robotic algorithms to buy your car practically sight unseen, was the third-fastest company to ever make it onto the Fortune 500 — only Amazon and Google did it faster. But for the third day in a row, its stock is trading for just around $7 a share, plummeting 98 percent from its all-time high of over $360 last August.

Some types of artificial intelligence could start to hallucinate if they don’t get enough rest, just as humans do

U.S. intelligence officials have compiled a classified report detailing extensive efforts to manipulate the American political system by the United Arab Emirates, […]The UAE has spent more than $154 million on lobbyists since 2016, according to Justice Department records. It has spent hundreds of millions of dollars more on donations to American universities and think tanks, many that produce policy papers with findings favorable to UAE interests. There is no prohibition in the United States on lobbyists donating money to political campaigns. […] it illustrates how American democracy is being distorted by foreign money […] One of the more brazen exploits involved the hiring of three former U.S. intelligence and military officials to help the UAE surveil dissidents, politicians, journalists and U.S. companies. In public legal filings, U.S. prosecutors said the men helped the UAE break into computers in the United States and other countries. Last year, all three admitted in court to providing sophisticated hacking technology to the UAE, agreeing to surrender their security clearances and pay about $1.7 million to resolve criminal charges. […] Thomas Barrack, a longtime adviser to former president Donald Trump, who was acquitted this month of charges alleging he worked as an agent of the UAE and lied to federal investigators about it. […] the UAE’s extensive courtship of retired high-ranking U.S. military personnel. The investigation showed that over the past seven years, 280 retired U.S. service members have worked as military contractors and consultants for the UAE, more than for any other country, and that the advisory jobs pay handsomely.

Apple is tracking you even when its own privacy settings say it’s not — The researchers said that the Health and Wallet apps, for example, didn’t transmit any analytics data at all, whereas Apple Music, Apple TV, Books, the iTunes Store, and Stocks all did. […] For example, the Stocks app sent Apple your list of watched stocks, the names stocks you viewed or searched for and time stamps for when you did it, as well as a record of any news articles you see in the app.

Apple Sued for Allegedly Deceiving Users With Privacy Settings After Gizmodo Story

People have always craved post-death contact with their loved ones. Efforts to remain in touch with the dead have existed for eons, such as photographing deceased children, holding seances and even keeping a corpse in the house for posterity. But artificial intelligence and virtual reality, along with other technological advances, have taken us a huge step closer to bringing the dead back to life. […] a platform called Augmented Eternity, which allows someone to create a digital persona from a dead person’s photos, texts, emails, social media posts, public statements and blog entries that will be able to interact with relatives and others. […] In June, Amazon unveiled a new feature it’s developing for Alexa, in which the virtual assistant can read aloud stories in a deceased loved one’s voice after just hearing a minute of that person’s speech. “While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last,” said Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist for Amazon Alexa. […] HereAfter’s app takes users through an interview process before they’ve died, prompting them to recollect stories and memories that are then recorded. After they’ve passed, family members can ask questions, and the app responds in the deceased’s voice using the accumulated interview information, almost like it’s engaging in a conversation. [Washington Post]

Around 20% of people who survive cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) after cardiac arrest may describe lucid experiences of death that occurred while they were seemingly unconscious and on the brink of death.

“At the beginning, I think, I heard the nurse say ‘dial 444 cardiac arrest’. I felt scared. I was on the ceiling looking down.”[Veridical Near-Death-Experiences]

Previously: All features of a classic Near-Death-Experiences can be reproduced by the intravenous administration of 50 - 100 mg of ketamine.

Four experiments demonstrate that walking boosts creative ideation in real time and shortly after [PDF]

Zolgensma is a one time shot that cures spinal muscular atrophy in infants by injecting a new DNA to correct the faulty gene. Novartis set the price at $2.125 million but offers insurers the ability to pay $425,000 a year for five years. This price tag makes Zolgensma the most expensive drug ever approved. [2019]

Zolgensma associated with two deaths — The deaths, which resulted from acute liver failure, occurred in Russia and Kazakhstan.

The Search of Shame — everyone you follow, who’s also paid Elon $8 for a dodgy tick

those who subscribed to Blue Verified were often accounts promoting right-wing politics, cryptocurrency speculation or adult content such as pornography

Web search hasn’t changed in 20 years. We’re building a new search engine from scratch, using the same ideas behind DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. Metaphor is a language model that’s trained to predict links instead of text. You feed the model a “prompt” (similar to a GPT-3 prompt), and it tries to predict what link is most likely to come after.

It might be hard to remember that the index,the handy list of subjects at the back of a book, with the corresponding page numbers on which each subject is discussed, was invented in the early 13th century. […] “it’s invented twice at the same time […] once in Paris, and at the same time in Oxford.”

Honey bee life spans are 50% shorter today than they were 50 years ago

This sand-filled condom from Long Island was choked down in the 1750s by the likes of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, George Washington at Mount Vernon, and Benjamin Franklin as he declared it his favorite apple. Perhaps the Newtown Pippin was once a great apple whose quality has degraded over the centuries like the crumbling democracy the Founding Fathers established. Or perhaps, after decades of eating pigeon pie and squirrel meat, these wooden-toothed slave owners’ tastebuds are not to be trusted. Either way, in today’s world, aside from being excellent for apple cider production, the Newtown Pippin is a tasteless hunk of malformed donkey shit that should’ve been abolished during the reign of King George III. [Apple Rankings]

Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases

Positive and negative memories are stored in different parts of the brain. Additionally, positive and negative memory-formation is associated with vastly different gene expression profiles. This raises the distinct possibility of therapeutic memory manipulation.

Here we distinguished between 27 different types of love

Consumption of ultraprocessed foods containing little or no whole foods in their ingredients contributed to 57,000 premature deaths in Brazil in 2019

Lab-grown blood given to people in world-first clinical trial

An informal, unofficial guide for non-technical people who want to use Mastodon and the wider Fediverse.

Interiew with the founder of Stability AI [audio]

How to run a small social network site for your friends [2019]

Stories are now available on Signal

Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus VR, created a VR headset that kills you if you die in the game: Oculus co-founder makes a VR headset that can literally kill you — the new VR headset uses three embedded explosive charges, planted above the forehead, that can “instantly destroy the brain of the user.” The lethal explosion is triggered via “a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency.”

Operation Popeye was a military cloud-seeding project carried out by the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War in 1967–1972. The highly classified program attempted to extend the monsoon season over specific areas of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in order to disrupt North Vietnamese military supplies by softening road surfaces and causing landslides.

Submarines are valued primarily for their ability to hide. The assurance that submarines would likely survive the first missile strike in a nuclear war and thus be able to respond by launching missiles in a second strike is key to the strategy of deterrence known as mutually assured destruction. Any new technology that might render the oceans effectively transparent, making it trivial to spot lurking submarines, could thus undermine the peace of the world. For nearly a century, naval engineers have striven to develop ever-faster, ever-quieter submarines. But they have worked just as hard at advancing a wide array of radar, sonar, and other technologies designed to detect, target, and eliminate enemy submarines. […] Nuclear-powered submarines each cost roughly US $2.8 billion […] the game of submarine hide-and-seek may be approaching the point at which submarines can no longer elude detection and simply disappear. It may come as early as 2050

50 years ago, an artist convincingly exhibited a fake Iron Age civilization – with invented maps, music and artifacts

Glenn Gould - “How Mozart Became a Bad Composer”

Sticky Vicky’s magic show began with her undressing slowly to background music. She later pulled several objects from her vagina, including ping-pong balls, eggs, handkerchiefs, sausages, razor blades, and Machetes. The lights dimmed, and Vicky pulled out a lit lightbulb. She concluded her act by opening a bottle of beer with her vagina, pouring it on the stage.

An Analysis of Vulva Appearance in Video Pornography — It is evident that both websites are depicting mostly uniform vulvas—small, groomed, and tidy. Undeviating depictions could influence women’s genital ideals, pushing them to seek out extreme surgery and beauty measures in order to adhere to the standards presented. Much like clothing advertisements, which now present a range of body shapes and sizes, presenting a diverse set of images of vulvas could be beneficial to viewers.

The supposed association of penile length and shoe size has no scientific basis

In paintings depicting nude males, the size of the penis has gradually increased throughout the past 6 centuries, and especially after the 20th century.

US Banks Spent $1 Billion on Ransomware Payments in 2021, Treasury Says

Distinguishable Cash, Bosonic Bitcoin, and Fermionic Non-fungible Token

Kanye West can’t sell ‘White Lives Matter’ shirts because two Black men own the trademark They became the legal owners of the phrase’s trademark for its use on clothing late last month to prevent West from using it.

His new aim is clear: to unlock Twitter’s moneymaking potential once and for all […] $1 billion in annual interest payments alone

Estimates from Bot Sentinel suggest that more than 875,000 users deactivated their accounts between October 27 and November 1, while half a million more were suspended.

So when I got this tip that Elon Musk and his people were telling people, print out your last 30 to 60 days of code, I thought, well, that can’t be true. […] oh my god, he’s actually asking people to print out their code! […] This is a weird way to evaluate how good someone is as a software engineer. People are generally not evaluated by how much code they’ve written, right? If you show up with a printout of 100 pages of code, that’s not necessarily a good thing. You might have done better for the company by eliminating some code, right? […] Also, who prints code? […] two hours later, they get — all the Twitter folks get this new notification […] change of plans […] why don’t you just bring it in on your laptop, and if you have printed out any code, we’re going to need you to shred it. So all the Twitter engineers have to run to the paper shredder on the 10th floor, I believe, and just start shredding the code base. […] Elon Musk folks are obsessed with figuring out who is a good engineer at the company, right? […] Elon Musk considers himself an engineer. [NY Times]

How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model

AI Helps Design Baldness Treatment That Works Better Than Testosterone or Minoxidil

British govt is scanning all Internet devices hosted in UK

While disconnecting broad swaths of the population from the web remains a favored blunt instrument of Iranian state censorship, the government has far more precise, sophisticated tools available as well. Part of Iran’s data clampdown may be explained through the use of a system called “SIAM” […] The tools can slow their data connections to a crawl, break the encryption of phone calls, track the movements of individuals or large groups, and produce detailed metadata summaries of who spoke to whom, when, and where.

Fully enclosed in a 7m (23ft)-high steel container, the battery consists of 100 tonnes of low-quality sand, two district heating pipes and a fan.

Anonychia is the absence of fingernails or toenails

Bioluminescence is the name given to the light that living organisms emit. This light comes from a reaction between two groups of molecules — luciferins and luciferases. While the exact form of these molecules varies from animal to animal, they all work in essentially the same way through the catalyzed oxidation of luciferin by the luciferase enzyme. […] there are three broad areas of bioluminescence: defense, attack, and communication