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

The “Faithful and trustworthy” and the “Does well with my friends and family” factors, were associated with more years in a relationship.

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.

This paper in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis is a goldmine of wacky ideas. Just for starters, the author says his wife can cure autism.

“No six-foot social distancing rule unless you have a 6-foot dick.”

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.

Why does “Turn! Turn! Turn!” equal 241217.524881 on Google?

“I specialize in toilet play” — essentially, “shitting on dudes” — “and I can’t do it with people who are unvaccinated,” says Daddy An Li.

In order to assess the infection risk, 13 samples of holy water were cultured for bacteria and yeasts

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.

The Columbo character was based squarely on Porfiry Petrovich, the astute but meandering lead investigator in Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment

my brain refuses to believe there are four ppl in this picture

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. 

{ YaleNews | Continue reading }

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.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas { Andy Warhol, Are You “Different?” (Positive), 1985 }

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.

why our eyes are unable to focus on the color blue

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.

BBC investigation based on the experiences of dozens of women reveals concerns about how OnlyFans is structured, managed and moderated

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

A Wall Street Journal investigation found that TikTok only needs one important piece of information to figure out what you want

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

How many robots does it take to run a grocery store?

HAD TOO USE PARACHUTE LIKE BABY

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.

These kinds of “zero-click” attacks, as they are called within the surveillance industry, can work on even the newest generations of iPhones.

In 1995, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of cinema, the Vatican compiled a list of 45 “great films”

Dead Startup Toys

This beach does not exist

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

“Acrobat” - the initial M, which opens the word “martyr”, in a liturgical manuscript (11th century) from the Limoges monastery of St. Marcial.

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.

‘ethically sourced’ cocaine

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.

Northern Hawk-Cuckoo, Mount Fuji, Japan

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.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

image { Jackson Pollock at work in his studio in 1950 photographed by Hans Namuth }

Bill Cosby to sue the state of Pennsylvania to recoup ‘hundreds of thousands’ of taxpayer dollars as compensation for his wrongful incarceration

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

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.

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’s 


so long as u pledge yourself to refusal             

 they call it living other/wise,

{ dee(dee) c. ardan | Continue reading | via Tiana Reid }

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.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

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.

{ Cross-Cultural Research | PDF }

image { Horse Laughs (1891) }

Eye Contact Marks The Rise And Fall of Shared Attention in Conversation

Conversation is the platform where minds meet —the venue where information is shared, ideas co-created, cultural norms shaped, and social bonds forged. Its frequency and ease belie its complexity.

Every conversation weaves a unique shared narrative from the contributions of independent minds, requiring partners to flexibly move into and out of alignment as needed for conversation to both cohere and evolve. How two minds achieve this coordination is poorly understood.

Here we test whether eye contact, a common feature of conversation, predicts this coordination by measuring dyadic pupillary synchrony (a corollary of shared attention) during natural conversation.

We find that eye contact is positively correlated with synchrony as well as ratings of engagement by conversation partners.

However, rather than elicit synchrony, eye contact commences as synchrony peaks and predicts its immediate and subsequent decline until eye contact breaks. This relationship suggests that eye contact signals when shared attention is high.

Further, we speculate that eye contact may play a corrective role in disrupting shared attention (reducing synchrony) as needed to facilitate independent contributions to conversation.

{ PsyArXiv | Continue reading }

photo { Edward Weston, Flora Chandler Weston, 1909 }

Man bitten by neighbor’s escaped python while sitting on the toilet

suicide by self-waterboarding

Drones have been a key part of warfare for years, but they’ve generally been remotely controlled by humans. Now, by cobbling together readily available image-recognition and autopilot software, autonomous drones can be mass-produced on the cheap. […] “How can you control 90 small drones if they’re making decisions themselves?” Kayser said. Now imagine a swarm of millions of drones.

Under normal circumstances, automatic software deployment, especially in the context of software updates, is a good thing. But here this feature was turned on its head. Russian-based criminal gang REvil hacked into Kaseya’s management system and pushed REvil software to all of the systems under Kaseya’s management. From there, the ransomware promptly disabled those computers and demanded a cryptocurrency payment of about $45,000 per system to set the machines free

A classic Silicon Valley tactic — losing money to crush rivals — comes in for scrutiny — Facebook’s latest product, a newsletter platform called Bulletin, exemplifies a strategy that some critics think should be illegal

This is tax evasion, plain and simple. But multinational companies get away with it by spending billions of dollars on top-tier lawyers and former lawmakers.

Supermarkets are doing their own hoarding as they brace for price increases. Grocery chains are buying and storing everything from sugar to frozen meat

TikTok is taking the book industry by storm, and retailers are taking notice

He’s got 30 million TikTok fans and nobody knows exactly why

Paul de Man Was a Total Fraud

Of all the animals Clarence Birdseye devoured during his three years in Labrador, lynx was the most memorable — “soaked for a month in sherry, pan-stewed, and served in a brown gravy”

Average colors of the world

This is a full view of the board behind Michael Flynn and Mike Lindell.

Valentina Sampaio becomes Sports Illustrated’s first trans model

By locking fat people’s upper and lower jaws together with a tooth-to-tooth metal lock, a team of UK researchers intend to slim those fat people down.

Sam Altman Wants to Scan Your Eyeball in Exchange for Cryptocurrency — iris-scanning is an essential part of the plan because it can prevent people from trying to register multiple times to defraud the system. He’s also aware of the privacy implications of handing over biometric information to a tiny startup and said Worldcoin will make the process as transparent as possible so users can see how the data is used. He said the iris scan will produce a unique numerical code for each person and that the image is then deleted and never stored.

Gay men earned less than heterosexual men. Lesbian women earned more than heterosexual women. (A Meta-Analysis 2012-2020)

Most studies found decreases in the frequency of sexual intercourse during the pandemic and increases in solitary sexual behavior.

How governments and spies text each other — Matrix has become the messaging app of choice for top-secret communications

It’s a level of genius that has not been acknowledged in the press — the founder of FOIA (the Freedom of Information Act) is the guy who figured out how to render it almost totally worthless.

In one particularly large chamber of the cow stomach, known as the rumen, bacteria digest plant cellulose from the grass […]. As it turns out, cow rumen and its arsenal of bacteria are very good at breaking down plastic in a sustainable way. The researchers write that the “rumen samples were able to degrade all three tested polyesters” successfully.

One bee has cloned itself millions of times over the past three decades

Notes of an Urban Beekeeper

Can two potentially dishonest players play a fair game of poker using any cards — for example, over the phone? [PDF]

The hard truth about ransomware: we aren’t prepared, it’s a battle with new rules, and it hasn’t near reached peak impact.

Why Email Providers Scan Your Emails — Even if your messages aren’t scanned for ads, companies may scan, read, and even share them with third parties

A UK court has ruled in favor of a self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto over the copyright for the bitcoin white paper

Here’s how Mark Zuckerberg spent his Fourth of July

Whoa. I guess one dude quit: