Every day, the same, again
Spanish engineers extract drinking water from thin air
Police arrested a man thinking he was someone else. For 2 years, he was held against his will at the Hawaii State Hospital, deemed insane and forcibly injected with drugs. The courts still have no record of this mishap in an apparent attempt to cover it up. [More]
The human ear detects half a millisecond delay in sound
Psychopaths make up 4.5% of the general population
A humanized version of Foxp2 affects ultrasonic vocalization in adult female and male mice
Miami Launches MiamiCoin to “eliminate homelessness” and “increase the police force.”
Every day, the same, again
Five parrots separated at UK zoo after encouraging each other to swear at guests
Dollar Stores Make Up Nearly Half of All New Store Openings This Year
Amazon will pay you $10 in credit for your palm print biometrics
Post-viral effects of COVID-19 in the olfactory system and their implications
28 ancient viruses unknown to science found in a Tibetan glacier
We study the mental maps of spectators during a large naturally occurring extreme ritual
It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription
The original black-and-white photo has been “colorized” with a criss-cross pattern of colored lines
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it’d be funny if someone paid the government a lot of money for this one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang album and then Wu-Tang just put it on Spotify. You’d still have the certificate of authenticity, though; no one else has that. Obviously the thing that Martin Shkreli bought from the Wu-Tang Clan was a non-fungible token?
Trial begins for B.C. man accused of breaking quarantine to go to Flat Earth conference
How Google quietly funds Europe’s leading tech policy institutes
Hundreds of AI predictive tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped. — and some were potentially harmful.
In about a dozen years, ransomware has emerged as a major cyberproblem of our time. […] the problem will not be solved with patches, antivirus software or two-factor authentication […] Russia, according to the experts, is where the majority of attacks originate. Three other countries — China, Iran and North Korea — are also serious players, and the obvious commonality is that all are autocracies whose security apparatuses doubtlessly know full well who the hackers are and could shut them down in a minute. So the presumption is that the criminals are protected, either through bribes — which, given their apparent profits, they can distribute lavishly — or by doing pro bono work for the government or both. […] By no coincidence, there were few ransomware attacks before Bitcoin came into being a dozen years ago. [NY Times]
Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010) Here in the West, a lifestyle of unnecessary spending has been deliberately cultivated and nurtured in the public by big business […] a marketing psychologist discussed one of the methods she used to increase sales. Her staff carried out a study on what effect the nagging of children had on their parents’ likelihood of buying a toy for them. They found out that 20% to 40% of the purchases of their toys would not have occurred if the child didn’t nag its parents. One in four visits to theme parks would not have taken place. They used these studies to market their products directly to children, encouraging them to nag their parents to buy.
English spelling is ridiculous. Sew and new don’t rhyme. Kernel and colonel do. When you see an ough, you might need to read it out as ‘aw’ (thought), ‘ow’ (drought), ‘uff’ (tough), ‘off’ (cough), ‘oo’ (through), or ‘oh’ (though). The ea vowel is usually pronounced ‘ee’ (weak, please, seal, beam) but can also be ‘eh’ (bread, head, wealth, feather). Those two options cover most of it – except for a handful of cases, where it’s ‘ay’ (break, steak, great). Oh wait, one more… there’s earth.
“No six-foot social distancing rule unless you have a 6-foot dick.”
Every day, the same, again
38% of American remote workers work from bed, 45% from a couch
Virtual contact worse than no contact for over-60s in lockdown, study
People eat more when eating with friends and family, relative to when eating alone
Three Americans create enough carbon emissions to kill one person, study finds
Germany Found a Way to Reduce Polarization. The country’s robust investment in public media has helped it reduce political divisions.
The weird world of Australian sea snakes
Where has all the productivity gone? 1. All the productivity we gained has been frittered away on equal-and-opposite distractions like social media, games, etc […] 3. The productivity is here, it’s just only harnessed by the indistractable few.
Every day, the same, again
Google to Help Insurers Measure Slip-and-Fall Risks in Buildings — Google is using sensors to listen for mobile phones as part of a partnership to help insurers more accurately measure occupancy of buildings where they are on the hook for accidents and other risks
DNA is everywhere, even in the air. That’s no surprise to anyone who suffers allergies from pollen or cat dander. But two research groups have now independently shown the atmosphere can contain detectable amounts of DNA from many kinds of animals. Sampling air may enable a faster, cheaper way to survey creatures in ecosystems.
Wildfires in Canada are creating their own weather systems
Recent literature suggests the existence of a G-spot but specifies that, since it is not a spot, neither anatomically nor functionally, it cannot be called G, nor spot, anymore. It is indeed a functional, dynamic, and hormone-dependent area (called clitorourethrovaginal, CUV, complex), extremely individual in its development and action due to the combined influence of biological and psychological aspects, which may trigger vaginally induced orgasm, and in some particular cases also female ejaculation.
The analysis shows negative returns on investment for more than 80% of brands, implying over-investment in advertising by most firms. Further, the overall ROI of the observed advertising schedule is only positive for one third of all brands.
my brain refuses to believe there are four ppl in this picture
‘you had a OnlyFans page for 4 months and only made $26??? get dressed… hope that wasnt your OnlyPlan’ —@flept
As a newborn mammal opens its eyes for the first time, it can already make visual sense of the world around it. But how does this happen before they have experienced sight?
A new Yale study suggests that, in a sense, mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are even born. […]
waves of activity emanate from the neonatal retina in mice before their eyes ever open […]
This activity disappears soon after birth and is replaced by a more mature network of neural transmissions of visual stimuli to the brain, where information is further encoded and stored.
Hocus pocus double focus
In the late 1940s, the British magician David Berglas started refining a trick that came to be known as “the holy grail of card magic.” […] The trick is a version of a classic plot of magic, called Any Card at Any Number. These tricks are called ACAAN in the business.
ACAAN has been around since the 1700s, and every iteration unfolds in roughly the same way: A spectator is asked to name any card in a deck — let’s say the nine of clubs. Another is asked to name any number between one and 52 — let’s say 31.
The cards are dealt face up, one by one. The 31st card revealed is, of course, the nine of clubs. Cue the gasps.
There are hundreds of ACAAN variations, and you’d be hard pressed to find a professional card magician without at least one in his or her repertoire. (A Buddha-like maestro in Spain, Dani DaOrtiz, knows about 60.) There are ACAANs in which the card-choosing spectator writes down the named card in secrecy; ACAANs in which the spectator shuffles the deck; ACAANs in which every other card turns out to be blank.
For all their differences, every ACAAN has one feature in common: At some point, the magician touches the cards. The touch might be imperceptible, it might appear entirely innocent. But the cards are always touched.
With one exception: David Berglas’s ACAAN. He would place the cards on a table and he didn’t handle them again until after the revelation and during the applause.
synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas { Andy Warhol, Are You “Different?” (Positive), 1985 }
Every day, the same, again
It arrived at the height of the pandemic, in a brown envelope with no return address and too many stamps, none of which had been marked by the post office. It was addressed to me at my parents’ New York City apartment, where I haven’t lived in more than a decade. Inside the envelope was a small, stapled book—a pamphlet, really—titled “Foodie or The Capitalist Monsoon that is Mississippi,” by a writer named Stokes Prickett. On the cover, there was a photograph of a burrito truck and a notice that read “Advance Promotional Copy: Do Not Read.”
Horrifying robot plays basketball at Olympics
Covid-19 Immunity Wanes, but Third Shot Still Rarely Needed, BioNTech CEO Says
In May, several French and German social media influencers received a strange proposal. A London-based public relations agency wanted to pay them to promote messages on behalf of a client. A polished three-page document detailed what to say and on which platforms to say it. It asked the influencers to push not beauty products or vacation packages, as is typical, but falsehoods tarring Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine. Stranger still, the agency, Fazze, claimed a London address where there is no evidence any such company exists. [Disinformation for Hire, a Shadow Industry, Is Quietly Booming]
a single object alone can feel heavier than a group of objects that includes the single object
There is a harrowing story in The New Yorker that everyone should grit their teeth and read. Written by Rachel Aviv, it tells the story of how a respected German psychologist named Helmut Kentler decided to foster neglected children with pedophiles, how he ran this experiment with government support for decades after the 1960s, and how it created exactly the kind of hells you would expect. [NY Times]
3 Rules for Middle-Age Happiness — Gather friends and feed them, laugh in the face of calamity, and cut out all the things––people, jobs, body parts––that no longer serve you.
Every day, the same, again
Our everyday experience informs us that a human observer is capable of observing one set of physical circumstances at a time. Evidence from psychology, though, indicates that people may have the capacity to make observations of mutually exclusive physical phenomena
All cancers fall into just two categories, according to new research
Viral load is roughly 1,000 times higher in people infected with the Delta variant than those infected with the original coronavirus strain … the researchers report that virus was first detectable in people with the Delta variant four days after exposure,compared with an average of six days among people with the original strain
A longer gap between first and second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine makes the body’s immune system produce more infection-fighting antibodies, UK researchers have found. An eight-week gap seems to be the sweet spot for tackling the Delta variant.
orgasm consistency through sexual intercourse had a stronger influence on orgasm satisfaction and sexual satisfaction than orgasm consistency through oral sex, stimulation by the partner’s hand, or self-stimulation
How many parents regret having children and how it is linked to their personality and health
How a baby-faced CEO turned a Farmville clone into a massive Ponzi scheme
First lethal attacks by chimpanzees on gorillas observed
Vasya has 2 sisters more than he has brothers. How many daughters more than sons do Vasya’s parents have? — 77 problems
Every day, the same, again
How children are spoofing Covid-19 tests with soft drinks
20% of Americans believe the conspiracy theory that microchips are inside the COVID-19 vaccines
18% had Hallux valgus (deformed big-toes) caused, very probably, by wearing overly pointy shoes
6-7% of the general population hear voices that don’t exist
In the six studies we conducted, we consistently reported that clone images elicited higher eeriness than individuals with different faces; we named this new phenomenon the clone devaluation effect.
Every day, the same, again
Inside the PAC operation that raised millions by impersonating Donald Trump — billions of robocalls […] almost all of which feature recorded soundbites of public statements from Trump
Outdoor Wedding: 6 Fully Vaccinated Infected With Covid-19 Delta Variant and 8 fully vaccinated healthcare workers caught COVID-19 at a Vegas pool party
Facebook is ditching plans to make an interface that reads the brain — Some scientists said it was never possible anyway.
Facebook fired 52 people from 2014 to August 2015 over abusing access to user data, a new book says. One person used data to find a woman he was traveling with who had left him after a fight, the book says.
Gabriela Buendia tries to take every precaution when it comes to information about her patients. The therapist uses encrypted video apps for virtual sessions, stores charts in HIPAA-compliant applications and doesn’t reach out to her clients on social media. She said she never saves her patients’ phone numbers on her smartphone either. So it came as a shock when Buendia found out recently that Venmo, a digital payment app that patients increasingly use to pay their therapists, was displaying her entire contact list publicly.
Dogecoin creator likens cryptocurrencies to a scam run by “powerful cartel” to benefit the rich
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Amazon.com Inc. has won U.S. permission to use radar to monitor consumers’ sleep habits.
Elon Musk’s testimony in Tesla lawsuit paused as lawyer vomits in jury box
Tel Aviv dog owners must now register their dog’s DNA with municipality. This will then allow municipal inspectors to collect samples from dog feces left uncollected in the streets, and a fine will be sent by mail to the owner who did not clean up.
Mother kills husband with boiling water after learning he allegedly sexually abused children for years — Smith killed her husband Michael in such a painful and cruel way. To throw boiling water over someone when they are asleep is absolutely horrific,” said Detective Chief Inspector Paul Hughes. “The sugar placed into the water makes it vicious. It becomes thicker and stickier and sinks into the skin better. It left Michael in agony.
Training Ferrets to Recognize Virus Odor in Duck Droppings
A wet-bulb temperature of 35 °C, or around 95 °F, is pretty much the absolute limit of human tolerance, says Zach Schlader, a physiologist at Indiana University Bloomington. Above that, your body won’t be able to lose heat to the environment efficiently enough to maintain its core temperature. That doesn’t mean the heat will kill you right away, but if you can’t cool down quickly, brain and organ damage will start.
The profile of the alleged abuser, by itself, was unusual: not a priest, but rather a teenage altar boy, who was said to have coerced a peer to engage in various sex acts night after night over six years, inside the Vatican’s own walls. Then powerful church figures helped him become a priest.
The People’s Bank of China aims to become the first major central bank to issue a central bank digital currency. The benefits of an e-currency are immense. As more and more transactions are made using a digital currency controlled centrally, the government gains more and more ability to monitor the economy and its people. […] The rollout is also seen as part of Beijing’s push to weaken the power of the US dollar […] But another crucial motivation is the increasing alarm in Beijing at the size of the crypto industry in China, where a huge amount of cryptocurrency was being “mined” until the recent crackdown. The threat of an unregulated alternative monetary system emerging from blockchain technology is a clear and present danger to the Communist party, according to observers.
Agatha Christie is probably one of the first British ‘stand-up surfers’
The story goes that Tazartès went into the woods, dug a hole, and then sang so loudly that the ducks on the lake began to shake. […] His second album, Tazartès Transports (1980), took this sound further. He collaborated with Jean-Pierre Lentin, editor of the counter-cultural magazine Actuel, who wrote a series of fake ethnographic texts describing the music of invented regions.
‘It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of Renaissance or of any past culture.’ –Jackson Pollock
It was June 2020, and Mr. Hamamoto, a former Goldman Sachs executive who invested in real estate, was searching for a business to take public through a merger with his shell company. He had raised $250 million from big Wall Street investors including BlackRock, and spent more than a year looking at over 100 potential targets. If he couldn’t close a deal soon, he would have to return the money.
Then, around nine months before his deadline, bankers from Goldman gave Mr. Hamamoto an enticing pitch: Lordstown Motors, the fledgling electric truck maker that President Donald J. Trump had hailed as a savior of jobs. What followed was a swift merger, then a debacle that put two of the biggest forces shaping the financial world on a collision course.
Lordstown went public in October via a merger with Mr. Hamamoto’s special purpose acquisition company, DiamondPeak Holdings. A Wall Street innovation, SPACs are all the rage, having raised more than $190 billion from investors since the start of 2020, according to SPACInsider. At the same time, small investors have become a potent force in the markets, driving up the stock prices of companies like GameStop and lapping up shares of SPACs, which are highly speculative and can pose financial risks.
In Lordstown, those forces eventually collided, highlighting the uneven playing field between Wall Street and Main Street. Small investors began piling into Lordstown shares after the merger closed, attracted to the hype around electric vehicles. That’s exactly when BlackRock and other early Wall Street investors — as well as top company executives, who all got their shares cheaply before the merger — began to sell some of their holdings.
Now Lordstown is flailing. Regulators are investigating whether its founder, Steve Burns, who resigned as chief executive in June, overstated claims about truck orders. The heat is on Mr. Hamamoto. The company has burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in cash. Its stock price has plunged to $9, from around $31. Investors are suing, including 70-year-old George Troicky, who lost $864,201 on his investment, according to a pending class-action lawsuit.
And Lordstown has yet to begin producing its first truck.
image { Jackson Pollock at work in his studio in 1950 photographed by Hans Namuth }
Every day, the same, again
Cigarette maker Philip Morris to buy UK producer of respiratory treatments
In this article, we argue that humans are biased toward pro-relationship decisions—decisions that favor the initiation, advancement, and maintenance of romantic relationships. We next consider possible theoretical underpinnings—both evolutionary and cultural—that may explain why getting into a relationship is often easier than getting out of one, and why being in a less desirable relationship is often preferred over being in no relationship at all.
People open to new food are rated as more desirable and more sexually unrestricted
As climates change, prepare for more mosquitoes in winter
How counting neutrons explains nuclear waste
The Fed controls the flow of money, and it flows to the wealthy [NY Times]
Just like snakes, a lizard sticks out its tongue to catch scent particles in the air and then pulls back its tongue and places those particles on the roof of its mouth, where there are special sensory cells. The lizard can use these scent “clues” to find food or a mate or to detect enemies.
How many artists overshadow their band after going solo?
I think the Voynich manuscript hasn’t been decoded because it cannot be decoded. My belief is that it’s written by someone suffering not from migraines but rather from schizophrenia. — Amateur armchair theories about the Voynich manuscript
Every day, the same, again
Man and woman fight over who should pick up dog vomit, woman cited as aggressor
South Korean toilet turns excrement into power and digital currency
Four-day week ‘an overwhelming success’ in Iceland — The trials, in which workers were paid the same amount for shorter hours, took place between 2015 and 2019. Productivity remained the same or improved in the majority of workplaces, researchers said.
NYC’s new biometrics privacy law takes effect — businesses that collect biometric information — most commonly in the form of facial recognition and fingerprints — are required to conspicuously post notices and signs to customers at their doors explaining how their data will be collected
NYPD beekeeper removes 25,000 bees from Times Square
Bitcoin power plant making part of glacial lake ‘feel like a hot tub,’ residents say
Taking Academic Corruption to a New Level — The e-cigarette company Juul bought an entire issue of a scholarly journal, with all the articles written by authors on its payroll, to ‘prove’ that its product has a public benefit.
Who Hates Magic? Exploring the Loathing of Legerdemain
Why Do People Watch Porn? An Evolutionary Perspective on the Reasons for Pornography Consumption
We Find It Hard To Identify The Emotions Of Intense Screams And Moans
Lilliputian hallucinations concern hallucinated human, animal or fantasy entities of minute size. Having been famously described by the French psychiatrist Raoul Leroy in 1909, who wrote from personal experience, to date they are mentioned almost routinely in textbooks of psychiatry, albeit with little in-depth knowledge. I therefore systematically reviewed 145 case reports and case series comprising 226 case descriptions.
We newly created a drinking habit score (DHS) according to regular drinking (frequency of alcohol intake ≥3 times/wk) and whether consuming alcohol with meals (yes). […] During a median follow-up of 8.9 years, we documented 8652 incident cases of all-cause death, including 1702 cases of cardiovascular disease death, 4960 cases of cancer death, and 1990 cases of other-cause death. Higher DHS was significantly associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease mortality, cancer mortality, or other-cause mortality
Degradable plastic polymer breaks down in sunlight and air
The first time I had sex on camera, getting fucked was easier.
the exiles that tended this garden under siege before you sought this refuge
a genius & his collaborator snuck into this raided sanctuary in the clearing
propped up a pulpit dug a moat in
call it the undercommons peddle snake oil from this perch
they promise flight , dreams of salvation to come
w/o nightmares w/o the rupture of night terror’sso long as u pledge yourself to refusal
they call it living other/wise,
Sisyphus was punished for cheating death twice by being forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll down every time it neared the top, repeating this action for eternity
French researchers tested how well antibodies produced by natural infection and by coronavirus vaccines neutralize the Alpha, Beta and Delta variants, as well as a reference variant similar to the original version of the virus.
The researchers looked at blood samples from 103 people who had been infected with the coronavirus. Delta was much less sensitive than Alpha to samples from unvaccinated people in this group, the study found.
One dose of vaccine significantly boosted the sensitivity, suggesting that people who have recovered from Covid-19 still need to be vaccinated to fend off some variants.
The team also analyzed samples from 59 people after they had received the first and second doses of the AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.
Blood samples from just 10 percent of people immunized with one dose of the AstraZeneca or the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were able to neutralize the Delta and Beta variants in laboratory experiments. But a second dose boosted that number to 95 percent. There was no major difference in the levels of antibodies elicited by the two vaccines.
“A single dose of Pfizer or AstraZeneca was either poorly or not at all efficient against Beta and Delta variants,” the researchers concluded. Data from Israel and Britain broadly support this finding, although those studies suggest that one dose of vaccine is still enough to prevent hospitalization or death from the virus.
Smartphone is now ‘the place where we live’
Nimrod, the builder of cities from Babel to Calah, was the first “mighty man” on earth, and a “mighty hunter before the Lord.” So were other African, Asian, European, and New World kings. They hunted everything from lions to guanacos, on four of the six continents, from the beginning of recorded time. But why?
Hunting provided meat, and it may have also provided military exercises; but most kings subsisted on domesticated animals and plants and delegated their wars to specialists. […]
Hunting was extremely expensive. Kings lost time with their ministers and with their families; they spent enormous resources on elephants and horses, hounds, hawks, manpower, and fodder. In addition to the obvious time and money costs, there were huge risks. Hunting kings and their sons were often wounded. And more than a few died. […]
Some were felled by stray arrows, whereas others were felled by their own arrows; some caught cold in the forest, and others fell off their horses. It is impossible to quantify the time and money costs or the morbidity and mortality risks. However, a list of anecdotes is impressive: Plenty of kings were wounded or killed chasing game in the woods. […]
The benefits seem to have been outweighed by the costs. […]
Evolutionary psychology is predicated on the assumption that humans are collections of vestiges; that Pleistocene ecologies shaped our mental and physical traits, which are often at odds with modern environments, and maladaptive behaviors resulted. Hunting was the human adaptation on the savannah for hundreds of thousands of years. Good hunters won mates by providing meat; or they attracted them by showing off the talents involved in killing game. Human bodies and minds should have been shaped to reflect those facts.
image { Horse Laughs (1891) }
