[Tiste Simeon]

Aptorian, on 19 February 2021 - 05:22 AM, said:

This is one of those things where I expect the Scientists to accidentally punch a hole through reality and let dream cthulhu into our realm.

I for one welcome our new dream eldritch overlords.

[QuickTidal]

Tiste Simeon, on 19 February 2021 - 03:35 PM, said:

Aptorian, on 19 February 2021 - 05:22 AM, said:

This is one of those things where I expect the Scientists to accidentally punch a hole through reality and let dream cthulhu into our realm.

I for one welcome our new dream eldritch overlords.

Agreed. Here's a pint of Shoggoth's Old Peculiar.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'End of Neanderthals linked to flip of Earth's magnetic poles, study suggests

The flipping of the Earth's magnetic poles together with a drop in solar activity 42,000 years ago could have generated an apocalyptic environment that may have played a role in a major events ranging from the extinction of megafauna to the end of the Neanderthals[...]

The Earth's magnetic field acts as a protective shield against damaging cosmic radiation, but when the poles switch, as has occurred many times in the past, the protective shield weakens dramatically and leaves the planet exposed to high energy particles.

One temporary flip of the poles, known as the Laschamps excursion, happened 42,000 years ago and lasted for about 1,000 years[...]

Now scientists say the flip, together with a period of low solar activity, could have been behind a vast array of climatic and environmental phenomena with dramatic ramifications. "It probably would have seemed like the end of days,"[...]

The team have collectively termed this period "the Adams event", a nod to Douglas Adams, the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy[...]

The results reveal that the atmospheric changes could have resulted in huge shifts in the climate, electrical storms and widespread colourful aurora.

As well as the environmental changes potentially accelerating the growth of ice sheets and contributing to the extinction of Australian megafauna, the team suggest they could also be linked to the emergence of red ochre handprints, the suggestion being that humans may have used the pigment as a sunscreen against the increased levels of ultraviolet radiation hitting the Earth as a result of the depletion of ozone.

They also suggest the rise in the use of caves by our ancestors around this time, as well as the rise in cave art, might be down to the fact that underground spaces offered shelter from the harsh conditions. [...]

The Earth's magnetic field has weakened by about 9% over the past 170 years, and the researchers say another flip could be on the cards. Such a situation could have a dramatic effect, not least by devastating electricity grids and satellite networks.'

https://www.theguard...Y1sIOaV_opEslRs

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 19 February 2021 - 06:11 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Simulations indicate that quantum tunneling should randomly cause spontaneous mutations in human DNA at room temperature:

'[...] used state-of-the-art computer simulations and quantum mechanical methods to determine the role proton tunneling, a purely quantum phenomenon, plays in spontaneous mutations inside DNA.

Proton tunneling involves the spontaneous disappearance of a proton from one location and the same proton's re-appearance nearby.

[...] found that atoms of hydrogen, which are very light, provide the bonds that hold the two strands of the DNA's double helix together and can, under certain conditions, behave like spread-out waves that can exist in multiple locations at once, thanks to proton tunneling. This leads to these atoms occasionally being found on the wrong strand of DNA, leading to mutations.

Although these mutations' lifetime is short, [...] they can still survive the DNA replication mechanism inside cells and could potentially have health consequences.

[...] "Many have long suspected that the quantum world—which is weird, counter-intuitive and wonderful—plays a role in life as we know it. While the idea that something can be present in two places at the same time might be absurd to many of us, this happens all the time in the quantum world, and our study confirms that quantum tunneling also happens in DNA at room temperature."

[...] "There is still a long and exciting road ahead of us to understand how biological processes work on the subatomic level, but our study—and countless others over the recent years—have confirmed quantum mechanics are at play. In the future, we are hoping to investigate how tautomers produced by quantum tunneling can propagate and generate genetic mutations."'

https://phys.org/new...ations-dna.html

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 22 February 2021 - 05:37 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'US triple-murder suspect accused of cooking woman’s heart and serving it to other victims

Lawrence Paul Anderson allegedly slew his neighbour, removed the organ and took it to his uncle’s home, where he cooked it with potatoes

[...]

He cooked the heart with potatoes “to feed to his family to release the demons,” an OBSI agent wrote in a search warrant presented in court'

https://www.scmp.com...-cooking-womans

[Aptorian]

This is a year old article but it gave me a good laugh.

https://www.boredpan...ampaign=organic

Anti-LGTB preacher stands outside university with a sign saying "you deserve to be raped" and yelling at students. Then gets hit with a bat.

The ensuing comments are comedy gold.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'Three days ago, a TikTok account going by @deeptomcruise began posting video clips of the Hollywood actor Tom Cruise doing everything from golfing, to tripping and telling a joke in what appears to be a men's clothing store in Italy, to performing a magic trick with a coin. In each of the three videos, Cruise delivers his signature maniacal laugh—you know, the one he repeatedly unleashed in that batty Scientology recruitment video years back—before launching into some sort of bit, and in all of them, it looks just like Cruise. Only it's not Cruise.

[...] @deeptomcruise appears to be much younger than the 58-year-old Xenu disciple, and many inches taller (the real Cruise is 5'6" on a good day). Also, his voice is hollow and scratchy, a la that scene in Face/Off where John Travolta-as-Nicolas Cage is trying to adjust his vocals to that Cage-ian timbre. Still, the Cruise TikToks managed to bewilder and horrify a number of people. [...] "Deep fakes are getting scary good and taking over TikTok. Every public figure should just be on there with a verified account—even if they don't want to make content—to make it easier to identify their fakes."'

MIT Sloan provided the following description of how one creates a "deepfake":
To make a deepfake video, a creator swaps one person's face and replaces it with another, using a facial recognition algorithm and a deep learning computer network called a variational auto-encoder [VAE].'
https://www.thedaily...tiktok?ref=home





Next up... Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Bill Gates, and Hillary Clinton?... how hard would it be to do a deepfake of them eating babies and cackling?

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 26 February 2021 - 04:29 AM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'A rash of new start-ups are making it easier for digital creators to monetize every aspect of their life — down to what they eat, who they hang out with and who they respond to on TikTok.

Tens of millions of people around the globe consider themselves creators, and the creator economy represents the "fastest-growing type of small business," according to a 2020 report [...]

But as the market gets more and more competitive — and the platforms and their algorithms remain unreliable — creators are devising new, hyper-specific revenue streams.

One comes in the form of NewNew, a start-up in Los Angeles, that describes its product as creating a "human stock market." On the app, fans pay to vote in polls to control some of a creator's day-to-day decisions.

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. [...]

"Creators are burning out, but their fans want more and more," [...] "By monetizing each aspect of their life, they can extract value from everyday interactions."

[...] "Sure, it's fun to control a famous influencer or celebrity, but it's honestly just as entertaining to control someone you go to school with, or your boyfriend's ex-girlfriend, or an author planning their next sci-fi novel, or a beauty founder creating their next makeup palette," [...] "It doesn't matter how boring you think you are, there's someone out there who would find your life interesting to the point that they're willing to pay."'

https://www.nytimes....ing-selves.html

'Bacteria know how to exploit quantum mechanics, study finds

[...] "This is the first time we are seeing biology actively exploiting quantum effects."

The scientists studied a type of microorganism called green sulfur bacteria. These bacteria need light to survive, but even small amounts of oxygen can damage their delicate photosynthetic equipment. So they must develop ways to minimize the damage when the bacterium does encounter oxygen.

[...] the bacterium uses a quantum mechanical effect called vibronic mixing to move energy between two different pathways, depending on whether or not there's oxygen around. Vibronic mixing involves vibrational and electronic characteristics in molecules coupling to one another. In essence, the vibrations mix so completely with the electronic states that their identities become inseparable. This bacterium uses this phenomenon to guide energy where it needs it to go.

To achieve this effect, a pair of cysteine residues in the photosynthetic complex acts as a trigger: They each react with the oxygen in the environment by losing a proton, which disrupts the vibronic mixing. This means that energy now preferentially moves through the alternative pathway, where it can be safely quenched. This principle is a bit like blocking two lanes on a superhighway and diverting some traffic to local roads where there are many more exits.

These findings bring about an exciting new revelation about biology; using an explicitly quantum mechanism to protect the system shows an important adaptation and that quantum effects can be important to survival.

"What's interesting about this result is that we are seeing the protein turn the vibronic coupling on and off in response to environmental changes in the cell," [...] "The protein uses the quantum effect to protect the organism from oxidative damage."

This phenomenon is likely not limited to green sulfur bacteria, the scientists said. [...] "The simplicity of the mechanism suggests that it might be found in other photosynthetic organisms across the evolutionary landscape. If more organisms are able to dynamically modulate quantum mechanical couplings in their molecules to produce larger changes in physiology, there could be a whole new set of effects selected for by nature that we don't yet know about."'

https://phys.org/new...-mechanics.html

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 12 March 2021 - 04:16 AM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'“Self-satisfied pork butcher”: Shakespeare grave effigy believed to be definitive likeness

They say you should never meet your heroes, which has been just as well for literature fans who for centuries have been told they would never see an accurate likeness of William Shakespeare.

[...]

But now it seems the mystery has been solved. A groundbreaking discovery means we finally know at least how Shakespeare wanted to be seen.

The effigy above his grave in Holy Trinity church in Stratford-upon-Avon was thought to have been installed several years after his death in 1616 and, as a posthumous memorial, not an actual likeness. The 20th-century critic [...] once characterised it as that of a "self-satisfied pork butcher". But new research has found that the bust was in fact modelled from life by a sculptor who knew him.




['Hog Butcher for the Globes,
Word-Forger, Hoarder of Grains,' ....

'A butcher was cutting [...] for Lord Wenhui. [...] Lord Wenhui said, "Ah, excellent, that technique can reach such heights!"

The butcher sheathed his chopper and responded, "What [...] values is the Way, which goes beyond technique. When I first began cutting up oxen, I did not see anything but oxen. Three years later, I couldn't see the whole ox. And now, I encounter them with spirit and don't look with my eyes. Sensible knowledge stops and spiritual desires proceed. I rely on the Heavenly patterns, strike in the big gaps, am guided by the large fissures, and follow what is inherently so. I never touch a ligament or tendon, much less do any heavy wrenching! A good butcher changes his chopper every year because he chips it. An average butcher changes it every month because he breaks it. There are spaces between those joints, and the edge of the blade has no thickness. If you use what has no thickness to go where there is space -- oh! there's plenty of extra room to play about in. That's why after nineteen years the blade of my chopper is still as through fresh from the grindstone.

"Still, when I get to a hard place, I see the difficulty and take breathless care. My gaze settles! My movements slow! I move the chopper slightly, and in a twinkling it's come apart, crumbling to the ground like a clod of earth! I stand holding my chopper and glance all around, dwelling on my accomplishment. Then I clean my chopper and put it away."

Lord Wenhui said, "Excellent! I have heard the words of a butcher and learned how to care for life!"'

http://schwitzsplint...e-knife-to.html

'the tale of Butcher Ting illustrates the "world-guided" behavior with which we performers can find ourselves and goes on to say that it "reminds us that such satisfying states of performance can be experienced in.. the most low caste…activities, including butchering… as well as in the finest of arts, and philosophy."'

https://taopracticed...f-the-zhuangzi/
]

'"It is highly likely that Shakespeare commissioned the monument. It was done by someone who knew him and had seen him in life. We can think of it as a kind of life portrait, a design for death that gives evidence of a life of learning and literature."

[...] "[...] We can therefore say that is how Shakespeare wanted to be represented in our memories. This is massive. It is compelling new light on what he looked like and how he operated."

[...] The figure is wearing an Oxford University undergraduate's gown, and the cushion detail is found in monuments memorialising lives of distinction in its college chapels.

She said the fact that he wanted to be memorialised with links to the university – despite never going to university himself – "now suggests some collegial association that we don't know about". [Or....]

[...] noting that in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, Hermione's statue comes to life at the end.'

https://www.theguard...M0TvxYoLIAH_jYI

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 19 March 2021 - 11:33 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'Nicholas Cage Spent $150M on a Skull, Pygmy Heads, 2 Castles

[...] The bulk of his money has gone towards real estate for what he calls his "holy grail quest." "I started following mythology, and I was finding properties that aligned with that," Cage said. His properties include two European castles [...] purchases include [...] an octopus, an ancient burial tomb, and shrunken pygmy heads. He also bought a 70 million-year-old dinosaur skull, which he later had to return to Mongolian historians. "You have good investments and bad investments," Cage said. "The good investments came from personal interest and my honest enjoyment of the history."'

https://www.thedaily...astles?ref=home

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 20 March 2021 - 09:01 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'Philadelphia police are looking for the thief who stole the front door off an apartment complex in the city's Spring Garden section, and it's not the first time this has happened.

Last weekend, the front door of the apartment complex in the 2000 block of Green Street was ripped right off, hinges and all. A closer look and you'd see some of the nails and debris was left behind by the person or group that stole it.

[...] notified by numerous homeowners and tenants alike about stolen doors in West Philadelphia and in the Spring Garden area.

Some of the doors are being illegally sold for as much as $10,000 in cities like New York. Online communities that are dedicated to tracking these transactions have shared posts about these recent thefts.

"I saw people posting on social media, 'Hey if you saw a crew working with a pickup truck working on the doors you wouldn't think anything about it, but if it's at night, you should second guess yourself,'" [...]

[...] information about the value of antique doors has spread, possibly explaining the increase in thefts.'

https://6abc.com/phi...hilly/10441448/

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 24 March 2021 - 04:38 PM

[worry]

When is a door not a door?
When it's a-stolen!

[Tiste Simeon]

There is an absolute storm going on over on Reddit right now, to do with the hiring of a new admin who, it turns out, is pretty pro-pedophilia. Tons of subs are going private in protest (all about the ad money!) It's kind of intriguing to watch it happen.

Here's a good explanation about what went down and more details (warning, some of them are pretty grim) about who she is and what she is connected to:
https://www.reddit.c...if_i_am_banned/

[Tiste Simeon]

And she no longer works for Reddit...

[Aptorian]

Reddit seems to in general hire strange people. Now a days you only ever hear about Reddit management when they do some kind of massive PR fuck up.

I miss when the site was much smaller and cleaner in 2010.

This post has been edited by Aptorian: 25 March 2021 - 05:51 AM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'New Study Shows Microplastics Turn Into "Hubs" for Pathogens, Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

It's estimated that an average-sized wastewater treatment plant serving roughly 400,000 residents will discharge up to 2,000,000 microplastic particles into the environment each day. Yet, researchers are still learning the environmental and human health impact of these ultra-fine plastic particles[...] found in everything from cosmetics, toothpaste and clothing microfibers, to our food, air and drinking water.

[...] researchers found certain strains of bacteria elevated antibiotic resistance by up to 30 times while living on microplastic biofilms that can form inside activated sludge units at municipal wastewater treatment plants.

[...] "These wastewater treatment plants can be hotspots where various chemicals, antibiotic-resistant bacteria and pathogens converge and what our study shows is that microplastics can serve as their carriers, posing imminent risks to aquatic biota and human health if they bypass the water treatment process."

"Most wastewater treatment plants are not designed for the removal of microplastics, so they are constantly being released into the receiving environment," [...] "Our goal was to investigate whether or not microplastics are enriching antibiotic-resistant bacteria from activated sludge at municipal wastewater treatment plants, and if so, learn more about the microbial communities involved."'

https://news.njit.ed...0surface%20that

'One of America's $135.8 Million Fighter Jets Shot Itself


[...] the F-35 was flying in a training mission at night [...] Arizona when it shot itself. This particular F-35 has an externally mounted gatling gun that fires a 25mm armor piercing high explosive round. [...] the gun discharged and the round exploded, damaging the underside of the jet.


[...] The F-35 is the most expensive weapon ever built. [...] The total cost for the entire F-35 program is estimated to be more than a $1 trillion over the course of the program's lifetime.'

https://www.vice.com...ets-shot-itself

'Gravitational lenses could allow a galaxy-wide internet

[...] our first emissaries to the stars will be robotic probes. [...] we will want them to phone home and tell us what they've discovered. The stars are distant, so the probes will need to make a very long-distance call.

[...] Although we can transmit powerful radio signals into space, the strength of these signals grows faint over stellar distances. Most of what we transmit couldn't be detected beyond a few light years given our current technology. Several solutions have been proposed, such as using focused laser light, but a new study looks at using gravitational lensing to get the job done.

[...] Since stars gravitationally warp the space around them, light passing near a star can be gravitationally lensed. This effect can be used to focus radio light similar to the way a glass lens focuses optical light.

[...] did some basic calculations of the kind of bandwidth one could get between the sun and nearby stars such as Alpha Centauri and Barnard's Star. The data rate could be on the order of kilobits/second, which is on the order of the old dial-up days of the internet. Not great by modern standards, but certainly enough to transmit useful images and data from another star.'

https://phys.org/new...e-internet.html

'The Massive Remnants of an Alien World Are Hidden Near the Earth's Core, Study Proposes

Two gigantic chunks of material lurking deep under the surface of Earth might be remnants of an alien world called Theia that violently collided with our infant planet in an ancient impact that created the Moon.

[...] suggests that two mysteriously dense zones located more than 1,000 miles under Earth's surface are "left-over Theia mantle materials," [...]

[...] geodynamical models as well as evidence collected about these subterranean zones, which are known as large low-shear-velocity provinces (LLSVPs), or more informally as the "blobs." Located under the Pacific Ocean and West Africa, these continent-sized LLSVPs are hundreds of miles high and thousands of miles across, making them the most massive formations in Earth's interior.

[...] Scientists have generally estimated that this bygone planet, named Theia after the mother of a Greek lunar goddess, was about the size of Mars, but some models suggest it was both smaller and bigger than that scale.

[...] initial calculation suggested the scale of the LLSVPs was roughly in line with an ancient impact origin, though Theia would need to have been bigger than Mars because a lot of this mantle material would be lost to space in the aftermath of the crash.

[...] if scientists could get their hands on pristine samples of the Moon's mantle, perhaps retrieved from the exposed crater in the lunar South Pole, they might be able to compare its composition to the makeup of the LLSVPs. Though these blobs are located far too deep inside our planet to be directly sampled, their composition can be inferred from seismic studies of their densities and analysis of volcanic islands that are linked to these deep zones via mantle plumes.'

https://www.vice.com...-study-proposes

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 25 March 2021 - 03:04 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'Naked woman rescued from Florida sewer after driver hears her screaming

[...] reported missing three weeks earlier

[...] seeing the woman, naked, 8ft down at the bottom of the drain. Dispatchers on the other end of the call sounded incredulous that someone was stuck in the sewer[ without being eaten...]

[...] onlookers who had gathered cheering as she was saved, as rescuers held sheets up around the entrance to the drain to respect the woman’s privacy[...]

The woman later told officials she was swimming in a canal when she noticed a door and entered it. She said she eventually became lost and ended up three miles away from where she first began, surviving on a can of ginger ale she discovered unopened along the way.'

https://www.theguard...n-rescued-sewer

Unless she was eating rats or raw sewage (or whatever else is down there---alligator carcass?) it seems unlikely she'd survive that long.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'Graphic: MMA fighter literally loses finger during bout

"[...] Khetag Pliev went to the corner between rounds and noticed that his finger was missing."

"Colour commentator @CMPunk: "It wasn't a compound fracture, a break, it wasn't a dislocation, a break, a laceration. His finger was just gone. It's gone."

"CM Punk asking Pliev's opponent Devin Goodale about the finger, but he says he was hit in the head and has no memory of what happened. "

[...] the search was on for Pliev's ring finger like the MMA version of an Easter Egg hunt.

[...] "They just made a PA announcement [...] that they are trying to locate a fighter's missing finger.

It evidently fell off into his glove during the bout and is missing somewhere in the venue."

While the exact moment the finger broke off is unknown, it is believed that a glove grab by Goodale in round two may have been the culprit. And there was no need to search the arena for the finger as it was in the glove the whole time.'

[...] "[...] he was transported to the hospital to have it reattached."'

https://www.bloodyel...story-mma-video

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 02 April 2021 - 05:11 AM

[Tsundoku]

What is this I don't even ...

https://www.news.com...339e06b62a8a5e7

‘Marriage equality’: Australian man pushing to decriminalise ‘consensual incest’ in 60 countries
An Australian man is pushing to change incest laws in 60 countries, comparing the issue to gay and mixed-race marriage.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'After police in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, responded to a call early on Friday morning about a “couch on fire in a front yard,” officers found the “incredibly intoxicated” Nikolay Lukyanchikov sitting in front of the fire pit, setting $100 bills on fire, with a gun sitting on a nearby bench in plain view. Police found what they described as the badly charred remains of an “unknown animal” in the fire bit, on top of a metal grill. Further investigation revealed that the animal was Lukyanchikov’s dog. [...] Police say they found bullet holes, blood, and gore inside of Lukyanchikov’s home. Lukyanchikov was arrested and now faces multiple charges[...] It is unclear if the animal killed is one of the dogs featured prominently on Lukyanchikov’s Facebook page.'

https://www.thedaily...=cheats&via=rss