Fake French Minister

Con man wears fake latex mask of French defense minister, swindles millions from wealthy victims:

For two years from late 2015, an individual or individuals impersonating France's defence minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, scammed an estimated €80m (£70m; $90m) from wealthy victims including the Aga Khan and the owner of Château Margaux wines.

The hustle required targets to believe they were being contacted by Mr Le Drian, who then requested financial help to pay ransoms for journalists being held hostage by Islamists in the Middle East...

So, in meetings arranged on Skype, the fraudster wore a custom-made Le Drian mask and sat in a facsmile of Le Drian's ministerial office, complete with flags and portrait of then-President François Hollande.

Light Posting Notice

Admin note: Posting may be lighter than usual the remainder of this week and next week, due to external obligations.

Amazon Nomads

"Anderson is an Amazon nomad, part of a small group of merchants who travel the backroads of America searching clearance aisles and dying chains for goods to sell on Amazon." (Via H.R.)

GE Smart Light Bulb Reset

Bruce Schneier: "Resetting Your GE Smart Light Bulb:"

If you need to reset the software in your GE smart light bulb -- firmware version 2.8 or later -- just follow these easy instructions:

Start with your bulb off for at least 5 seconds.

1. Turn on for 8 seconds
2. Turn off for 2 seconds
3. Turn on for 8 seconds
4. Turn off for 2 seconds
5. Turn on for 8 seconds
6. Turn off for 2 seconds
7. Turn on for 8 seconds
8. Turn off for 2 seconds
9. Turn on for 8 seconds
10. Turn off for 2 seconds
11. Turn on

Bulb will flash on and off 3 times if it has been successfully reset.

Welcome to the future!

Crawford On Bicycles

Jason Crawford: "Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?"

Lightning Attractor

"This Cell Tower in the Swiss Alps Is Struck by Lightning More Than 100 Times a Year". (Via H.R.)

Tourism Secret

"The Best Way to Tour a City Is Through Its Grocery Store"

The secret museum in every city is a grocery store. It’s where you can grab and squeeze and not-at-all-weirdly smell indigenous produce. The fishmonger runs an aquarium. The butcher is a zookeeper. But groceries also hoard the culture’s guilty pleasures — its Netflix-and-chill snacks are in its potato-chip flavors (my native London favorite was a packet of sea-salt-and-Chardonnay-wine-vinegar crisps, and Marmite ones always hit the spot, too). Its childhoods are in its confections (I loved Icelandic Prince Polo chocolate bars, which are actually imported from Poland).

Grasping Adversarial Objects

"Robots Have a Hard Time Grasping These 'Adversarial Objects'"

Filming The Tour De France

"The helicopter team that films the Tour de France is one of a kind". (Via H.R.)

Pizza Hut In Klingon

"Watch this fantastic 1994 Pizza Hut TV commercial that's entirely in Klingon"

Great Wave

Thoughts on digital access to The Great Wave by Katsushika Hokusai.

BTW, this is one of my favorites pieces of artwork.

Translating Long-Lost Languages

"Machine learning has been used to automatically translate long-lost languages"

Botanical Sexism

"Botanical Sexism Cultivates Home-Grown Allergies":

It’s the time year for watery eyes and itchy noses, and if you’re among the afflicted, you may be surprised to learn that decades of botanical sexism in urban landscapes have contributed to your woes.

Serial Toilet Clogger

Headline of the day: "Sheboygan serial toilet clogger sentenced to 150 days in jail, probation". (Via Marginal Revolution.)

AI Poker Update

"No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game"

Kitty Litter

"How Kitty Litter went from happy accident to $2 billion industry". (Via H.R.)

Escalators

"How the Escalator Forever Changed Our Sense of Space"

Goats Vs. Backyard

Video: "Timelapse of Goats Eating a Backyard"

Emojis and The Law

"Emojis are increasingly coming up in court cases. Judges are struggling with how to interpret them."

Alive After 41,000 Years

Worms frozen for 41,000 years in permafrost were found to still be alive after thawed.

Self-Driving Tesla Update

"Is a real, honest-to-goodness, self-driving Tesla on the way?"

Musk, in response to an inquiry about Tesla’s hardware systems, said late Sunday that the company could offer its new Fully Self Driving chip — FSD for short — as an upgrade to more than 500,000 older-model Teslas by the end of this year.

“End of Q4, most likely,” was how Musk replied to a question about when the company would start retrofitting cars that currently include Hardware 2 (HW2), a set of sensors, radars and cameras that Tesla rolled out almost three years ago, with the implication that such cars would eventually have full, autonomous driving capabilities.

Magnus Carlsen 2.0

Tyler Cowen: "The new and improved Magnus Carlsen"

Cowen describes a unique strategy adopted by the current world #1 chess master:

Other grandmasters prepare the opening in the hope of achieving an early advantage over their opponents.  Magnus’s preparation, in contrast, is directed at achieving an early disadvantage in the game, perhaps willing to tolerate as much as -0.5 or -0.6 by the standards of the computer (a significant but not decisive disadvantage, with -2 signifying a lost position).  Nonetheless these are positions “out of book” where Magnus nonetheless feels he can outplay his opponent, and this is mostly opponents from the world top ten or fifteen.

So far it is working.  One commentator wrote: “Magnus is turning into a crushing monster just like Garry. He isn’t the strangler anymore”

And it is hard to counter someone looking for a disadvantage!

Nuking The Moon

"Why the Air Force Almost Blasted the Moon with an H-Bomb"

Autonomous Aircraft Landing

"German Scientists Pull Off Truly Autonomous Aircraft Landing in Stunning Video". (Via H.R.)

Mirror Universe

"Scientists are searching for a mirror universe. It could be sitting right in front of you."

In a series of experiments she plans to run at Oak Ridge this summer, Broussard will send a beam of subatomic particles down a 50-foot tunnel, past a powerful magnet and into an impenetrable wall. If the setup is just right — and if the universe cooperates — some of those particles will transform into mirror-image versions of themselves, allowing them to tunnel right through the wall. And if that happens, Broussard will have uncovered the first evidence of a mirror world right alongside our own.

We'll know we're in real trouble if we find Spock-with-a-goatee.

Space And Booze

"Space and booze, an anecdotal history"

Fixing Bad Science

"What universities can learn from one of science’s biggest frauds"

Neanderthal Superglue

"Neanderthals glued their tools together". (Via H.R.)

Time In Space

"How Should Space Settlers Keep Track of Time?"

Remote Laser ID

"The Pentagon has a laser that can identify people from a distance -- by their heartbeat"

Holiday Hiatus

Admin note: No posting today on the US July 4th, holiday. Regular posts will resume tomorrow!

Giant Goldfish

"Giant Goldfish Shows Why You Should Never Flush Fish Down the Toilet"

Is LA The Next Silicon Valley?

Tyler Cowen: "The Next Silicon Valley Is... Los Angeles?"

New Property Of Light

"New property of light discovered":

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Spain and the U.S. has announced that they have discovered a new property of light—self-torque. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes how they happened to spot the new property and possible uses for it. 

(Via H.R.)

Post-Human Architecture Problem

"The Hiding Place: Inside the World's First Long-Term Storage Facility for Highly Radioactive Nuclear Waste"

Deep in the bedrock of Olkiluoto Island in southwest Finland a tomb is under construction. The tomb is intended to outlast not only the people who designed it, but also the species that designed it. It is intended to maintain its integrity without future maintenance for 100,000 years, able to endure a future ice age. One hundred thousand years ago three major river systems flowed across the Sahara. One hundred thousand years ago anatomically modern humans were beginning their journey out of Africa. The oldest pyramid is around 4,600 years old; the oldest surviving church building is fewer than 2,000 years old.

This Finnish tomb has some of the most secure containment protocols ever devised: more secure than the crypts of the Pharaohs, more secure than any supermax prison. It is hoped that what is placed within this tomb will never leave it by means of any agency other than the geological.

Improved Waterproofing

"A new way to make droplets bounce away". (Via H.R.)

Historic NASA Recreation

"NASA's restored Apollo Mission Control is a slice of '60s life, frozen in amber"

Physician Fatigue

My latest Forbes piece is now out: "Is Your Doctor Making Mistakes Because He Or She Is Too Tired?"

Fall Asleep Fast

"How to Fall Asleep in 2 Minutes or Less".

If that doesn't work, a fifth of tequila will also work for most people! (Via H.R.)

Quantum Computing For English Majors

"Quantum Computing for English Majors"

Auto Mechanics Recreate Renaissance Paintings

"Auto Mechanics Recreate Renaissance Paintings"

One example:

 

Antimatter Physics

"How Star Trek's warp drives touch on one of physics' biggest mysteries"

Symphonic Gong

Video: "How to play an 80-inch symphonic gong".

It's amazing how rich the sound is, with such gentle motions. One does not simply bang a gong.

Is There Anybody In There?

"Inverting the Turing Test -- Machine Learning to Detect Cognition in the ICU".

Direct link to the article, "Detection of Brain Activation in Unresponsive Patients with Acute Brain Injury".

Sibyl Hathaway Vs. The Nazis

"During World War II, a 56-year-old British noblewoman stood up to Nazi occupiers on the tiny island of Sark"

In June 1940, German forces took the Channel Islands, a small British dependency off the coast of France. They expected the occupation to go easily, but they hadn't reckoned on the island of Sark, ruled by an iron-willed noblewoman with a disdain for Nazis. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the story of Sibyl Hathaway and her indomitable stand against the Germans.

Atomic Radio

"We're one step closer to atomic radio". (Via H.R.)

DNA And Secrets

"The Death Of The Family Secret: Ancestry and other DNA-testing companies are bringing old family secrets to light. These friends are now dealing with the truth about their fathers."

Pro Cornhole

"Cornhole (yes, cornhole) is going pro". (Via Tyler Cowen.)

White Hat Physical Penetration Testers

Video: "I'll Let Myself In: Tactics of Physical Pen Testers"

As head of a Physical Penetration team, however, my deliverable day tends to be quite different. With faces agog, executives routinely watch me describe (or show video) of their doors and cabinets popping open in seconds. This presentation will highlight some of the most exciting and shocking methods by which my team and I routinely let ourselves in on physical jobs.

Magic Turing Machine

"It's possible to build a Turing machine within Magic: The Gathering"

Bad Burglar

"Burglar steals security camera, accidentally livestreams from own home"

Quantum Internet

"The Quantum Internet Is Emerging, One Experiment at a Time"

ENIAC Programming

The story of ENIAC programming. (Via H.R.)

Solar System "Wilderness"?

The latest debate on environmentalism: "How much of the solar system should be designated wilderness?"

The article lays out one position:

Martin Elvis at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Tony Milligan at Kings College London. They have studied the nature of exponential growth and say that our limited ability to predict its impact means we should take this into account when limiting how the solar system can be exploited.

They calculate that humans should be allowed to exploit an eighth of the solar system, with the rest designated as wilderness. And they warn that at current rates of growth, this limit could be reached within 400 years.

OTOH, I'm pretty much ok with utilizing the resources of any uninhabited lifeless regions for the benefit of humanity.

Flamin' Hot Cheetos

"How a janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos".

Great success story! (Via Gus Van Horn and H.R.)

Time-Free Zone

"Norwegian island wants to become the world's first time-free zone"

"When you live in Northern Norway, it doesn’t make sense to talk about daylight saving time, bedtime, dinner time, or any other time," says Kjell Ove Hveding, one of the key islanders behind the initiative. "The midnight sun makes clocks an unnecessary nuisance, and we wish to be a time-free zone"...

Islanders hope for the government’s approval to be free of traditional opening hours and to introduce more flexibility within the island.

Time-free living aligns well with the main industries of the island: fishing and tourism. According to Hveding, the local fishermen and women already spend days on the ocean without any regard for time and sleep.

Sky Rider Airline Seats

Proposed "Sky Rider" standing airline "seats" would allow airlines to cram even more passengers in a limited space. #UmNoThanks

New Mars Crater

"Fresh Crater Spied on Mars -- and It Looks Spectacular". (Via H.R.)

Extreme Building Longevity

"How to build something that lasts 10,000 years"

Physics Of Bubble Formation

"Two new papers explore the complicated physics behind bubbles and foams". (Via H.R.)

Good And Bad Airports

Best (and worst) airports.

Robotic Interviewer

"Swedish job candidates to be grilled by robotic interviewer":

“It is becoming very popular for organisations to be able to say they have a discrimination-free recruitment process. We want to take this idea as far as possible,” said Havva Ilhan, deputy head of staff at the municipality...

“All we want to know is what skills the candidate has. We are not interested in hobbies, family relationships, age or anything else that is immaterial and can create a preconceived image of the person when we choose who will go forward in the recruitment process,” Ilhan said.

Clinical Trials And Blockchain

"Prototype of running clinical trials in an untrustworthy environment using blockchain"

The Rise Of Online Recommendation Sites

"Don't Know Which Toaster to Buy? There's a Website for That."

Old Old English

"The English Word That Hasn't Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8,000 Years"

iOS Shortcut Ror Recording Police

"iOS Shortcut for Recording the Police":

Once the shortcut is installed and configured, you just have to say, for example, "Hey Siri, I'm getting pulled over." Then the program pauses music you may be playing, turns down the brightness on the iPhone, and turns on "do not disturb" mode.

It also sends a quick text to a predetermined contact to tell them you've been pulled over, and it starts recording using the iPhone's front-facing camera. Once you've stopped recording, it can text or email the video to a different predetermined contact and save it to Dropbox.

Medical Video Games

"Your doctor may be playing medical video games at work. That could be good for your health".

I especially love the idea of earning CME (continuing medical education) credits for gaming.

PIzza Economics

"We sell our pizzas for $16.50. Here's how the costs break down."

US Customs And Social Media

"What to do when Customs asks for your social-media account info"

Noninvasive Cancer Killing

"Laser Destroys Cancer Cells Circulating in the Blood". (Via H.R.)

Dinosaurs And Private Property

"Who Owns The Dinosaurs? It All Depends On Where You Find Them".

I'm basically ok with this concept.

Depressing Fermi Solution

"A Physicist Has Proposed a Pretty Depressing Explanation For Why We Never See Aliens"

Dracula's Cannonballs

"Dracula's cannonballs from 15th-century battle found in Bulgaria".

"Dracula's Cannonballs" would also be a good name of a punk band.

507 Mechanical Movements

"507 Mechanical Movements"

Thankful Octopus

"Stranded Octopus Thanks Woman for Saving Its Life Before Heading Back to Sea". (Click through to see video.)

Beer After Exercise

WSJ: "Can a Beer Help You Recover After Exercise?"

List On Free Will

"Free Will Is Real"

Designer Babies

"Stossel: Don't Be Scared of Designer Babies"

T-Cell Timing

"Immune Cells Measure Time to Identify Foreign Proteins". (Via H.R.)

What It's Like To Have 6 Fingers

Nature: "Augmented manipulation ability in humans with six-fingered hands"

Lightsaber Physics

"On the physical (im)possibility of lightsabers".  Direct link to the PDF. 

Includes plenty of Maxwell's equations!

BBQ Science

"The Science of Barbecue"

New Yawk

"Why some New Yorkers drop their 'R's". (Via H.R.)

Update: Link was bad, fixed now!

Star Wars Theme Park Update

"Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge is so ambitious Disneyland fans may not be ready for it"

YouTube Moderation Fail

"YouTube blocks history teachers uploading archive videos of Hitler"

Password Sanity

"Microsoft says mandatory password changing is 'ancient and obsolete'"

Seuss And Education

"How Dr. Seuss Changed Education in America"

It didn’t help that Dick and Jane belonged to what many have dubbed the dullest family on earth. The books were plotless, littered with mind-numbing, repetitious quasi-sentences. (“Look, Jane. Look, look. See Dick. See, see. Oh, see. See Dick.”) The illustrations were stodgy and bland. Flesch deemed the series “horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless.”

The author John Hersey, in an article on the literacy debate, for Life magazine, was not much kinder, calling the books “namby-pamby” and “insipid,” and the pictures “terribly literal.” Hersey wondered why primers couldn’t at least feature the talents of gifted children’s-book illustrators, and he listed Dr. Seuss among their ranks.

The head of Houghton Mifflin’s education division took note. He challenged Geisel to write a primer that emerging or reluctant readers would actually enjoy, pleading, “Write me a story that first graders can’t put down!” But for a wordsmith as playful and unconventional as Dr. Seuss—someone fond of phrases such as “howling mad hullaballoo,” who invented animals like the Yuzz-a-ma-Tuzz—there was a big catch: to qualify as a first-grade primer, the text would have to be tightly restricted to a list of three hundred and fifty simple, pre-approved vocabulary words, supplied by the publisher, with a preferred limit of just two hundred and twenty-five words.

Could Dr. Seuss deliver a page-turner that contained itself to no more than two hundred and twenty-five real, English, mostly monosyllabic words?

Stock Sectors Over 200 Years

"Visualizing 200 Years of US Stock Market Sectors". (Via Maximizing Progress.)

AirPods All The Time

"The Case for Wearing AirPods All the Time"

Left Behind, Cosmonaut Edition

"The last Soviet citizen: The cosmonaut who was left behind in space"

Sergei Krikalev was in space when the Soviet Union collapsed. Unable to come home, he wound up spending two times longer than originally planned in orbit. They simply refused to bring him back. 

Tiger Shark Food

"Tiger Sharks' Unexpected Food Source: Birds Falling from the Sky"

Perpetual Diamond Illusion

Optical illusion of the day: The Perpetual Diamond.

The Perpetual Diamond produces motion continuously and unambiguously in one direction despite never physically changing location. The phenomenon consists of a steady, mid-luminance diamond bordered by four thin edge strips and a surrounding background field. The direction of motion is determined by the relative phases of the luminance modulation between the edge strips and the background. Because the motion is generated entirely by changing contrast signals between the edge strips and background, the stimulus is a valuable tool for tests of spatial contrast, temporal contrast, contrast gain, and color contrast. 

The Risk Of Relying On IOT

"That major Google outage meant some Nest users couldn't unlock doors or use the AC"

How To Get To Mars And Back

"SpaceX beginning to tackle some of the big challenges for a Mars journey". (Via H.R.)

Apple Update, WWDC 2019

"The 10 most important announcements from WWDC 2019"

Nazi Uranium Cubes

"Tracking the journey of a uranium cube". (Via H.R.)

BTW, "Nazi Uranium Cubes" should be the name of a punk band.

Carroll On Gell-Man

Sean Carroll: "The Physicist Who Made Sense of the Universe"

How 10,000 Steps Became A Thing

"What 10,000 Steps Will Really Get You":

I-Min Lee, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard University T. H. Chan School of Public Health and the lead author of a new study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, began looking into the step rule because she was curious about where it came from. “It turns out the original basis for this 10,000-step guideline was really a marketing strategy,” she explains. “In 1965, a Japanese company was selling pedometers, and they gave it a name that, in Japanese, means ‘the 10,000-step meter.’”

Based on conversations she’s had with Japanese researchers, Lee believes that name was chosen for the product because the character for “10,000” looks sort of like a man walking. As far as she knows, the actual health merits of that number have never been validated by research.

Scientific or not, this bit of branding ingenuity transmogrified into a pearl of wisdom that traveled around the globe over the next half century, and eventually found its way onto the wrists and into the pockets of millions of Americans...

Digital Couture

"A digital 'dress' sold for $9,500: If people will only see it online, does it need to exist in real life?"

Leech Smuggling

(Smuggling) Markets In Everything: "Man caught smuggling nearly 5,000 leeches in luggage".

The market value of these medicinal leeches would have been approximately $40k - $100k, at $8 to $20 per leech.