The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) is the only complete novel written by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. […] The story starts out as a fairly conventional adventure at sea, but it becomes increasingly strange and hard to classify. […]

Peters, Pym, and Augustus hatch a plan to seize control of the ship […] soon the three men are masters of the Grampus: all the mutineers are killed or thrown overboard except one, Richard Parker, whom they spare to help them run the vessel. […] As time passes, with no sign of land or other ships, Parker suggests that one of them should be killed as food for the others. They draw straws, following the custom of the sea, and Parker is sacrificed.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

On 19 May 1884 four men set sail from Southampton in a small yacht. They were professional sailors tasked with taking their vessel, the Mignonette, to its new owner in Australia. […] The Mignonette’s captain, Tom Dudley, was 31 years old and a proven yachtsman. Of his crew, Ned Brooks and mate Edwin Stephens were likewise seasoned sailors. The final crew-member, cabin boy Richard Parker, was just 17 years old and making his first voyage on the open sea. […]

On 5 July, sailing from Madeira to Cape Town, the Mignonette was sunk by a giant wave. […] Adrift in an open boat in the South Atlantic, hundreds of miles from land, they had little in the way of provisions. They had no water, and for food, only two 1lb tins of turnips grabbed during the Mignonette’s final moments.

Over the next 12 days, these turnips were scrupulously rationed out […] For water […] they resorted to drinking their own urine, although this too was a diminishing resource as their bodies became increasingly dehydrated.

By 17 July all supplies on board the little dinghy had been exhausted. After a further three days, the inexperienced Richard Parker could not resist gulping down sea water in an attempt to allay his thirst. It is now known that small quantities of sea water can help to sustain life in survival situations, but in that period it was widely believed to be fatal. Parker also drank far in excess of modern recommendations and he was soon violently unwell, collapsing in the bottom of the boat with diarrhea.

Even before Parker fell ill, Tom Dudley had broached the fearful topic of the “custom of the sea,” the practice of drawing lots to select a sacrificial victim who could be consumed by his crew-mates. […] According to their subsequent depositions, however, no lots were drawn. Instead, Dudley told Stephens to hold Parker’s legs should he struggle, before kneeling and thrusting his penknife into the boy’s jugular. […] Parker’s body was then stripped and butchered. The heart and liver were eaten immediately; strips of flesh were cut from his limbs and set aside as future rations. What remained of the young man was heaved overboard.

{ History Extra | Continue reading }

How I heat my home by mining crypto currencies — and cutting my electricity bill in half in the process

Studies show that swearing makes up around 0.5 % of the daily spoken content

the average length of an erect penis is between 5.1 and 5.5 inches (12.95-13.97 cm)

The virus that causes the common cold can effectively boot the Covid virus out of the body’s cells, say researchers.

A New Generation of Vaccines Is Coming, Some With No Needles

More than 1.4 trillion euros ($1.7 trillion) of banknotes were circulating at the end of 2020, up 11% from a year earlier. Yet the evidence suggests that only about a fifth of that is used for transactions within the currency area. Studies have shown that 30-50% by value is held outside the bloc, such as in developing economies with underdeveloped payment infrastructure and a lack of credible savings options. The rest, maybe as much as 50% by value, is physically stored by households, companies and banks. [Bloomberg]

In Europe, the [big tetch] companies are spending more than ever, hiring former government officials, well-connected law firms and consulting firms. They funded dozens of think tanks and trade associations, endowed academic positions at top universities across the continent and helped publish industry-friendly research by other firms. In the first half of 2020, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft declared spending a combined 19 million euros, or about $23 million, equal to what they had declared for all of 2019 and up from €6.8 million in 2014. Despite the lobbying, the industry has had few major successes. [NY Times]

A tool for publishing newsletters, Substack grew in prominence over the past year as several well-known opinion journalists abandoned their longtime employers to start their own subscription-based, bespoke punditry shops on the platform. […] Former Vox columnist Matt Yglesias, for example, is reportedly poised to rake in $860,000 in subscription revenue this year. Unless he’s paying $50,000 a month for his internet connection, his newsletter’s rate of profit dwarfs that of most any major media outlet. […] But this was not the focus of last week’s Substack discourse.

Nike and Boeing Are Paying Sci-Fi Writers to Predict Their Futures (2018)

Facebook Algorithmic Factory (2016)

Hennessy Youngman on Damien Hirst (2012)

{ Suez Canal blocked after giant container ship gets stuck, more than 100 ships stuck at each end of the canal Ships now stuck in the canal will find it difficult to turn around and pursue other routes given the narrowness of the channel. | CNN |full story | Suez, Egypt Tide Chart }

update 3.25: Rescuers say container ship stuck in Suez could take weeks to unblock and Owner and insurers face millions in claims

Dealers are using Fortnite treats to groom children as drug mules

Study confirms that some people age more slowly — The slowest ager gained only 0.4 “biological years” for each chronological year in age; in contrast, the fastest-aging participant gained nearly 2.5 biological years for every chronological year.

Training Working Memory for Two Years – No Evidence of Latent Transfer to Intelligence

What makes It Difficult to keep an Intimate Relationship: Evidence From Greece and China

Dogs and cats can become infected by B.1.1.7, the “UK variant”

The wannabe food influencer who’s wanted by the FBI

Travelers sitting on billions of dollars in unused flight vouchers

Junior investment bankers at Goldman Sachs are suffering burnout from 100-hour work weeks and demanding bosses during a SPAC-fueled boom in deals, according to an internal survey

Fake Insider Trading Is Illegal Too

By all accounts, Len was on track to be one of the most important cryptographers of his time. But on July 3rd, 2011, he tragically took his own life at 31, following a long battle with depression and functional neurological disorders. His death coincided with the disappearance of the world’s most famous cypherpunk: Satoshi Nakamoto.

Man Loses $560,000 in Bitcoin Scam From Fake Elon Musk Account — One of the most common scam consists of creating Twitter accounts posing as personalities like Elon Musk. In some cases, criminals use accounts stolen from prominent individuals that already have the “verified blue check mark,” thus they appear legitimate and trustworthy. Although Twitter is the favorite platform for “gift scams,” they also swarm other networks such as YouTube, Facebook , Instagram and even WhatsApp.

Facial Recognition: What Happens When We’re Tracked Everywhere We Go? [NY Times]

Distribution systems within the U.S. electrical grid are increasingly vulnerable to cyberattack Related: U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid [NY Times] and Hacking the Russian Power Grid

Mission to clean up space junk with magnets set for launch

Can Transgender Women Get Uterus Transplants?

Why Women Should Not Vote (1917)

A vampire can be considered “amphibious”

How to Build a Life: Stop Keeping Score

The ancient fabric that no one knows how to make

The McMansion Hell Yearbook: 1979

{ Ora-ïto, Gucci Villa, 1999 | Kleindienst, Floating Seahorse villa, 2015 }

{ Facebook Is Building An Instagram For Kids Under The Age Of 13 }

art { Installation views of Jake or Dinos Chapman, White Cube, 2011 }

NYC man sells fart for $85, cashing in on NFT craze […] Ramírez-Mallis and his fellow farters compiled the recordings into a 52-minute “Master Collection” audio file. Now, the top bid for the file is currently $183. Individual fart recordings are also available for 0.05 Ethereum, or about $85 a pop.

{ NY Post | Continue reading }

unrelated { Illegal Content and the Blockchain }

Dozens of people in Taiwan have changed their names to “salmon” to take advantage of a restaurant’s sushi promotion deal. Officials have issued a plea asking people to stop visiting government offices to request the name change.

Angry Customer Demands Refund After Ordering A Dozen Masks, Receiving “Only 12″

Scientists grew tiny tear glands in a dish — then made them cry

About 330 billion cells are replaced daily, equivalent to about 1 percent of all our cells. In 80 to 100 days, 30 trillion will have replenished—the equivalent of a new you.

Erin Brockovich: Plummeting sperm counts, shrinking penises: toxic chemicals threaten humanity

Lingering symptoms from the coronavirus may turn out to be one of the largest mass disabling events in modern history.

Microbes Unknown to Science Discovered on The International Space Station

Facebook is making a bracelet that lets you control computers with your brain — The device would let you interact with Facebook’s upcoming augmented-reality glasses just by thinking.

Invisibility of Social Privilege to Those Who Have It

Unpacking a Decade of Appellate Decisions on Qualified Immunity — a judicial doctrine that shields government officials, including those in law enforcement, from being held personally responsible for constitutional violations

“Narco Submarine” Discovered in Spain

The Spanish Electrician Who Sabotaged the Nazis

Using newly digitised logbooks detailing the hunting of sperm whales in the north Pacific, the authors discovered that within just a few years, the strike rate of the whalers’ harpoons fell by 58%. This simple fact leads to an astonishing conclusion: that information about what was happening to them was being collectively shared among the whales

It Takes Two Neurons To Ride a Bicycle [PDF]

{ Willem de Kooning Untitled XVI, 1976 | Sue Williams, Hemmit’s Vibrissae, 2000 }

researchers in Switzerland can get electricity from wood

Uber is reclassifying its UK-based drivers as “workers”

It may look like an art show but these ‘dancing lights’ reduce pesticide use by 50%

Discovery identifies non-DNA molecules in the sperm involved in transmitting paternal experience to offspring

50 new genes for eye colour

The psychological risks of meditation

The term nervous breakdown first appeared in a 1901 medical treatise for physicians. “It is a disease of the whole civilized world,” its author wrote.

The fast-growing social network SafeChat has a “Star Wars” barlike atmosphere in which white nationalists mingle with Chinese dissidents. And there’s plenty of conspiracy theories, too.

how the New York Times tests multiple headlines for a single article

To make up for lack of interaction under Covid-19 restrictions, apes at Czech zoos 150km apart can now watch each others’ daily lives on big screens

Two Historic Brassiere-to-Face-Mask Innovations

Pa. woman created ‘deepfake’ videos to force rivals off daughter’s cheerleading squad

A Hacker Got All My Texts for $16

Hedge Funds Are Training 16-Year-Old Interns in Singapore

Two companies are selling diamonds made in a laboratory from CO2 — Each carat removes 20 tons of greenhouse gas from the sky, entrepreneurs say

Google must face $5B lawsuit over tracking private internet use, judge rules — Judge finds tech giant didn’t notify users their data could still be collected in incognito mode

NFTs have already given rise to new types of copyright infringement, frustrating artists

Cracking of encrypted messaging service dealt major blow to organised crime — Sky ECC promised a 5 million USD (€4.2 million) prize on its website, which is currently down, to anyone who could crack its encryption. It is not yet clear if Belgian authorities plan to claim the reward.

how to operate an airport in Antarctica

Wooden Replica of Mies’ Farnsworth House

Farnworth House VR Tour

Degaussing + Manually deguassing a CRT monitor using neodymium magnet

Russian Lawmakers Approve Initial Reading Of Bill Allowing ‘Accidental’ Corruption

We consider whether Orgasmic Meditation, a structured, partnered, largely non-verbal practice that includes genital touch, also increases relationship closeness.

When it came to definitions of rough sex, the most commonly endorsed items were: choking (77%), hair pulling (75%), spanking (69%), being pinned down (66%), being tied up (65%)…

Research shows that high levels of media multitasking may be associated with a decreased cognitive function

Fourteen horses were used in a 4-phases mirror test (covered mirror, open mirror, invisible mark, visible colored mark).

AI Identifies Pain Levels From Patient Data

Body Mass Index and Risk for COVID-19

How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world

Inside Jeff Bezos’s failed attempt to make Amazon “cool” like Apple and Nike

What Problems Does Organic Cotton Solve?

scientists have developed a tool that automatically identifies deepfake photos by analyzing light reflections in the eyes.

Under U.S. law, as soon as a work of art in any medium is created, the creator owns the copyright in that work. […] When we talk about “copyright”, we’re really talking about multiple rights (sometimes called a “basket of rights”). These include the right to control who makes copies of the original work […]

Typically, when someone buys a work of physical art, they are only purchasing the physical object. They are not purchasing the copyright in the work. […]

So if you own an original oil painting, you can display it in your home or wherever you want, and you can sell or loan the painting to someone, but you can’t make copies of it, sell prints, or make new works based on the original. […]

if you buy an NFT, my presumption is that you are only buying ownership in the NFT itself. You are not buying the copyright, unless there is a written contract […]

if I buy an NFT, and then I post it to Instagram with the message “Check out this cool NFT that I just bought!”, that’s creating many more digital copies. But this is true for all kinds of visual art these days, and the artist is free to go to Instagram and file a copyright takedown notice, requesting that the post be removed.

{ David Lizerbram & Associates | Continue reading }

image + header { The meme economy }

Man sues Hertz over receipt that cleared him of murder

Hundreds of sewage leaks detected thanks to AI

Almost all men want to feel sexually desired, but few actually do

One in four men has faked a climax at least once

In seven studies (n = 1,133), adults tried to create funny ideas and then rated the funniness of their responses, which were also independently rated by judges. People were relatively modest and self-critical about their ideas.

Happiness comes from trying to make others feel good, rather than oneself

One commonly held idea is that greater cognitive ability does not matter or is actually harmful beyond a certain point (sometimes stated as > 100 or 120 IQ points). […] Greater cognitive ability is generally advantageous—and virtually never detrimental.

A COVID-19 patient died after experiencing a 3-hour erection that doctors struggled to treat

there are some meaningful signs that even these quite scary-seeming versions of the disease may not prove all that scary in the end. I’m very worried about the Brazilian variant, since there is some evidence that it has achieved “immune escape” and produced a wave of reinfections. But the course of the others contains some real contradictions which I don’t yet know how to resolve. They appear to be considerably more infectious, and perhaps more lethal, than the “classic” strains. And yet they are growing in prevalence precisely as cases are falling nearly everywhere in the world. How can that be? Seasonality is surely playing a role in that decline, but if a new variant is 50 percent more transmissible than the old, you would expect it would require quite dramatic new restrictions to produce a decline in cases. In other words, it would be really hard, and pretty rare, to engineer a decline in the presence of those variants. Instead, it seems to be happening everywhere. [NY mag]

Globally, hundreds of thousand of organizations running Exchange email servers from Microsoft just got mass-hacked, including at least 30,000 victims in the United States. Each hacked server has been retrofitted with a “web shell” backdoor that gives the bad guys total, remote control, the ability to read all email, and easy access to the victim’s other computers. Security experts are now trying to alert and assist these victims before malicious hackers launch what many refer to with a mix of dread and anticipation as “Stage 2,” when the bad guys revisit all these hacked servers and seed them with ransomware or else additional hacking tools for crawling even deeper into victim networks. [Krebs on Security]

A study out of Harvard in 2020 also found that although cryptocurrency mining isn’t “burning down the planet”, there is “a scenario where each $1 of cryptocurrency coin value created would be responsible for $0.66 in health and climate damages.”

Earth makes a tiny seismic rumble every 26 seconds. No one knows why.

How Instagram Celebrities Promote Dubai’s Underground Animal Trade

I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

The more we can google, the less we know

YInMn, the First New Blue Pigment in Two Centuries

Block 800 NY Times reporters for $0 — The app’s creator is unknown

{ Trump and his party used their legislative majorities to redistribute income up the income ladder. Biden and his party are using theirs to distribute it down. | NY mag | full sotry }

Suspected dog and cat meat factory in China raided after owner traces missing pet by GPS

Sidewalk robots get legal rights as “pedestrians”

UBER DRIVER COUGHED ON, ASSAULTED & PEPPER SPRAYED

Why Does the Pandemic Seem to Be Hitting Some Countries Harder Than Others?

Would you take a coronavirus risk? — We are stuck in the middle of a massive multiplayer coordination problem

Tens of millions of people around the globe consider themselves creators, and the creator economy represents the “fastest-growing type of small business” […] But as the market gets more and more competitive creators are devising new, hyper-specific revenue streams. […] For example, a creator can use NewNew to post a poll asking which sweater they should wear today, or who they should hang out with and where they should go. Fans purchase voting power on NewNew’s platform to participate in the polls, and with enough voting power, they get to watch their favorite influencer live out their wishes, like a real life choose-your-own-adventure game. […] “Have you ever wanted to control my life?” Lev Cameron, 15, a TikToker with 3.3 million followers, asked in a recent video posted to NewNew. “Now is your time. You can actually control things I do throughout the day and vote on it and then I will show you if I end up doing the stuff you voted for.” [NY Times]

One of the most active QAnon networks is in Japan, where followers believe the imperial family has been replaced by body doubles and suggest that World War II-era Emperor Hirohito was a CIA or British agent who owned the patent for the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [..] QAnon also has enormous support in Britain. A survey by civic group Hope Not Hate last year found that 26 percent of Britons believed prominent public figures are part of a pedophile child-trafficking network, while an additional 17 percent said that the pandemic is part of a “depopulation plan” — another favorite QAnon belief around the world. [Washington Post]

Bird migration forecasts in real-time — When, where, and how far will birds migrate?

The secret New York apartment behind my bathroom mirror

Floral Motifs Are Digitally Printed onto Blonde Hair

Preliminary Examination, 3B District Court, March 2, 2021

Back in the 1980s, when DNA forensic analysis was still in its infancy, crime labs needed a speck of bodily fluid—usually blood, semen, or spit—to generate a genetic profile.

That changed in 1997, when Australian forensic scientist Roland van Oorschot stunned the criminal justice world with a nine-paragraph paper titled “DNA Fingerprints from Fingerprints.” It revealed that DNA could be detected not just from bodily fluids but from traces left by a touch. Investigators across the globe began scouring crime scenes for anything—a doorknob, a countertop, a knife handle—that a perpetrator may have tainted with incriminating “touch” DNA.

But van Oorschot’s paper also contained a vital observation: Some people’s DNA appeared on things that they had never touched. […]

In one of his lab’s experiments, for instance, volunteers sat at a table and shared a jug of juice. After 20 minutes of chatting and sipping, swabs were deployed on their hands, the chairs, the table, the jug, and the juice glasses, then tested for genetic material. Although the volunteers never touched each other, 50 percent wound up with another’s DNA on their hand. A third of the glasses bore the DNA of volunteers who did not touch or drink from them.

Then there was the foreign DNA—profiles that didn’t match any of the juice drinkers. It turned up on about half of the chairs and glasses, and all over the participants’ hands and the table. The only explanation: The participants unwittingly brought with them alien genes, perhaps from the lover they kissed that morning, the stranger with whom they had shared a bus grip, or the barista who handed them an afternoon latte.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

related { The Hunt for the Golden State Killer and A New Way to Solve Murders }

The U.K.’s B.1.1.7 variant has spread to more than eighty countries and has been doubling every ten days in the U.S., where it is expected to soon become the dominant variant. […] new evidence also suggests that people infected with it have higher viral loads and remain infectious longer, which could have implications for quarantine guidelines. […]

“The fact that different variants have independently hit on the same mutations suggests we’re already seeing the limits of where the virus can go,” McLellan told me. “It has a finite number of options.”

Over time, SARS-CoV-2 is likely to become less lethal, not more. When people are exposed to a virus, they often develop “cross-reactive” immunity that protects them against future infection, not just for that virus, but also for related strains; with time, the virus also exhausts the mutational possibilities that might allow it to infect cells while eluding the immune system’s memory. “This is what we think happened to viruses that cause the common cold,” McLellan said. “It probably caused a major illness in the past. Then it evolved to a place where it’s less deadly. But, of course, it’s still with us.” It’s possible that a coronavirus that now causes the common cold, OC43, was responsible for the “Russian flu” of 1889, which killed a million people. But OC43, like other coronaviruses, became less dangerous with time. Today, most of us are exposed to OC43 and other endemic coronaviruses as children, and we experience only mild symptoms. For SARS-CoV-2, such a future could be years or decades away.

{ New Yorker | Continue reading }

Higher airborne pollen concentrations correlated with increased SARS-CoV-2 infection rates, as evidenced from 31 countries across the globe

[…]

We found that pollen, sometimes in synergy with humidity and temperature, explained, on average, 44% of the infection rate variability. Lockdown halved infection rates under similar pollen concentrations. […]

Pollen grains act on the very site of virus entry, the nasal epithelium, by inhibiting antiviral λ-IFN responses.

{ PNAS | Continue reading }

previously { We conclude that pollen is a predictor for the inverse seasonality of flu-like epidemics including COVID-19 }

wax crayon on paper { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dog Shit in the Head of the Pope, 1981 }

Queen Elizabeth … a public servant, and an annual recipient of the taxpayer-funded sovereign grant — valued at $107.1 million (£82.2 million) in 2019…

{ CNN | Continue reading }