Post-Beeple
One Year After Beeple, the NFT Has Changed Artists. Has It Changed Art?
Hardly at all.
By Blake Gopnik
Around 1425, the Florentine artist Masaccio painted the first major works in one-point perspective. That revolutionized what artists could do ever after.
In Paris in 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre demonstrated his new photographic invention. It changed the nature of visual representation and museum walls haven’t been the same since.
On March 11, 2021, all of one year ago, Mike Winkelmann, whose nom d’artiste is Beeple, sold a collage of computer illustrations for $69 million simply because that collage came attached to a digital certificate called an NFT. That colossal price launched a mad scramble among creators of all kinds — illustrators, musicians, photographers, even a few veteran avant-gardists — to join the NFT gold rush.
In the 12 months since, something like $44 billion has been spent on about six million NFTs, usually issued to certify digital creations but sometimes for physical objects like paintings and sculptures.
Hot Basquiat
Basquiat Is Hotter Than Warhol—and Now a Billionaire Wants to Sell a 1982 Work for $70 Million
Collector Yusaku Maezawa is auctioning off his wall-size Basquiat, featuring a devilish figure, at Phillips this spring
By Kelly Crow
A billionaire who recently rocketed to the International Space Station said he is sending one of his prized Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings to auction this spring for an estimated $70 million. The move hints at the shifting whims of the world’s wealthy but also underscores the continuing strength of the art market overall.
Yusaku Maezawa wasn’t well-known in art circles when he paid Christie’s a record-breaking $57.3 million for his untitled 1982 Basquiat six years ago. The collector reveled in the win by posting an image on his Instagram account, shrugging off the typical discretion exercised by some top buyers.
Now, the fashion mogul behind e-commerce site Zozotown said he is ready to resell his breakout Basquiat, enlisting boutique auctioneer Phillips to offer up the painting in May in New York. The 16-foot-wide work is splashed with red and salmon hues and features a horned devil-like figure that curators have suggested could be the former New York graffiti artist’s conflicted self-portrait.
[ click to continue reading at WSJ ]
Autopocalypse
Death by robots? Study finds automation is ruining people’s lives — and raising mortality rates!
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Death by robots might seem like an unusual cause of death, but as robots replace people on factory floors, there has been a rise of suicides and drug overdoses — especially in people between 45 to 54. A new study found a link between automation of U.S. manufacturing and an increased mortality rate among working-class adults.
Automation is partially responsible for a decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs. Prior research has estimated a loss of 420,000 to 750,000 jobs during the 1990s and 2000s, most of which were manufacturing jobs.
“For decades, manufacturers in the United States have turned to automation to remain competitive in a global marketplace, but this technological innovation has reduced the number of quality jobs available to adults without a college degree — a group that has faced increased mortality in recent years,” says lead author Rourke O’Brien, assistant professor of sociology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences in a media release. “Our analysis shows that automation exacts a toll on the health of individuals both directly — by reducing employment, wages, and access to healthcare — as well as indirectly, by reducing the economic vitality of the broader community.”
[ click to continue reading at Study Finds ]
All Hands On Deck
Steam Deck Hands On: Valve Successfully Frees PC Gaming From the Desktop
Available today, the Steam Deck trades raw power for the impressive ability to make your PC gaming library portable.
By Jordan Minor
As someone who flew across the country to pick up a Steam Machine, only for Valve’s first attempt at merging gaming PCs and console concepts to go up in smoke, it’s telling that I’m still excited for the Steam Deck (starting at $399). After months of speculation and anticipation, we finally got our hands on Valve’s high-powered handheld gaming PC, a device that ships today to the first customers that preordered it. We’ll need more time for a full review, but here are our thorough first impressions of the Steam Deck, a handheld that delivers new joys to PC gamers who are willing to compromise on old standards.
The Steam Deck is big, but not that big. The 7-inch, 720p screen is roughly on par with what the Nintendo Switch offers, complete with a prominent bezel. The thicker main body (1.9 inches vs. 0.5 inches) is where you’ll find the volume buttons and microSD card slot and USB-C charging port. I wouldn’t want to drop the unit, but it feels sturdy enough that I wouldn’t immediately freak out if I did.
[ click to continue reading at PC Mag ]
Cloudocracy
Our New Cloud-Based Ruling Class
by YANIS VAROUFAKIS
Capital is everywhere, yet capitalism is on the wane. In an era when the owners of a new form of “command capital” have gained exorbitant power over everyone else, including traditional capitalists, this is no contradiction.
ATHENS – Once upon a time, capital goods were just the manufactured means of production. Robinson Crusoe’s salvaged fishing gear, a farmer’s plough, and a smith’s furnace were goods that helped produce a larger catch, more food, and shiny steel tools. Then, capitalism came along and vested owners of capital with two new powers: The power to compel those without capital to work for a wage, and agenda-setting power in policymaking institutions. Today, however, a new form of capital is emerging and is forging a new ruling class, perhaps even a new mode of production.
At the beginning of this change was free-to-air commercial television. The programming itself could not be commodified, so it was used to attract viewers’ attention before selling it to advertisers. Programs’ sponsors used their access to people’s attention to do something audacious: harness emotions (which had escaped commodification) to the task of deepening… commodification.
The essence of the advertiser’s job was captured in a line spoken by Don Draper, the fictional protagonist in the television serial Mad Men, set in the advertising industry of the 1960s. Coaching his protégé, Peggy, on how to think about the Hershey chocolate bar their firm was peddling, Draper caught the spirit of the times:
“You don’t buy a Hershey bar for a couple of ounces of chocolate. You buy it to recapture the feeling of being loved that you knew when your dad bought you one for mowing the lawn.”
Salumeria
A Look Inside the Curing Room at Chicago’s Lardon, Quite Possibly America’s Finest Salumeria
Chef Chris Thompson breaks down the process behind his immaculate cured meats
BY EMILY MONACO
Vegetarians, you may want to look away
It’s 33 degrees today in Chicago — a good temperature for butchering, according to Lardon chef Chris Thompson, but not for curing, a task best carried out at about twice that. But the temperature won’t stop Thompson from his regular Thursday morning routine: putting up coppa, finocchiona and more for the pork-focused menu at his Logan Square restaurant, which decidedly and unapologetically breaks with plant-forward dining trends.
Thompson proudly leads the way through the curing room, a tight squeeze rendered even tighter thanks to the plethora of bresaola, prosciutto, salami and more hanging within — meats Thompson proudly refers to as his “babies.”
“We probably have over 3,000 pounds of meat in here, right now,” he says with a grin, most of which comes from whole hogs raised locally and humanely by Trent Sparrow of Catalpa Grove in Dwight, Illinois.
Three Pietas
Michelangelo’s three ‘pietas’ united in historic first
Florence (Italy) (AFP) – It is admired the world over as an exquisite depiction of maternal grief. But Michelangelo’s “Pieta” has overshadowed two other moving sculptures on the same subject by the Renaissance giant.
That is why Florence’s Opera del Duomo museum in Italy is putting on display together for the first time all three versions of the Virgin Mary mourning over the body of her son Jesus Christ.
The Tuscan museum’s original “Bandini” goes on show Thursday alongside casts of the “Pieta” and “Rondanini”, which are on loan from the Vatican Museums.
The Mouth Of The South
Q&A: Ted Turner Biographer Porter Bibb
All the drama around CNN and Jeff Zucker got me thinking about Ted Turner. I called up Porter Bibb, who wrote the best-selling 1993 biography of CNN founder Ted Turner, Ted Turner: It Ain’t As Easy as It Looks. Bibb told me about how he came to be Turner’s biographer, and, most interestingly, Turner’s unsparing, unfavorable thoughts about CNN under recently-ousted Jeff Zucker, and John Malone’s relationship to Turner.
Turner’s life — his father’s suicide, winning the America’s Cup, turning a rinky-dink Atlanta station at the end of the dial into a media powerhouse, his marriage to Jane Fonda — is the raw material for a great TV series. In the age of streaming, Bibb thinks Turner’s full life is better suited for a multi-part limited series, though he compares the possibilities not unfairly to Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator. (Interested? Ping me and I’ll put you in touch with Bibb, who controls the rights).
The book was optioned years ago to a couple of Turner executives, but rights eventually reverted to Bibb. A few others have kicked the tires, including Oliver Stone. But as Bibb explains, he’s feeling a new eagerness to see something come to screen both because of the timeliness of the story and Turner’s declining health.
Bibb was Rolling Stone’s first publisher where he recruited high school buddy Hunter Thompson to write for Jann Wenner’s publication; now he’s an investment banker (currently at Mediatech Capital Partners) specializing in media deals for 40 years.
Nandi Bushnell
Trigger Art
Great art is supposed to be ‘triggering’
The rise of trigger warnings is a threat to artistic freedom.
by Ella Whelan
What ‘triggers’ us in art is subjective. At the opening night of JM Synge’s Playboy of the Western World in Dublin in 1907, audience members were triggered into rioting, including throwing projectiles at the stage, because of its shocking content – including a portrayal of patricide and scenes involving ladies’ knickers. Sinn Féin leader Arthur Griffith described the play as ‘a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform’. WB Yeats, who had not expected such a reaction, berated the audience for having ‘disgraced yourselves again’. Synge, however, was quietly triumphant, writing to his fiancé the morning after: ‘It is better any day to have the row we had last night, than to have your play fizzling out in half-hearted applause. Now we’ll be talked about.’
Almost 115 years later, the idea that art can and should surprise us in shocking or even hurtful ways feels like a thing of the past. The art world today is often so terrified of unruly audiences, who these days take to hurling tweets instead of rotten fruit, that trigger warnings are now ubiquitous. They have become a means of controlling and anticipating what kind of reaction a piece might elicit.
The Bard
Selema Masekela Is on a Mission to Return Surf Culture to the People
The bard of the action sports world chats about African surf culture, his career highlights, and his secret love for Miranda Lambert
BY DANNY AGNEW
Selema MasekelaIan – Drachman/Mami Wata
For anyone familiar with the world of action sports, Selema Masekela needs no introduction. The legendary sports commentator was ESPN’s host of both the X Games and Winter X Games for 13 years, has covered both the Olympics and World Cup for NBC Sports, and served as both host and executive producer of VICELAND’s docu-series Vice World of Sports. His voice and visage are inextricably linked with some of the most — if you’ll pardon the expression — “holy shit” sporting moments of the last quarter century.
The son of famed South African jazz musician Hugh Masekela (and an accomplished musician in his own right), Selema has also spent a significant portion of his life on the African continent and has of late been hard at work on Afrocentric surf apparel brand Mami Wata. The term “Mami Wata” translates to “Mother Water” (or “Mother Ocean”) and serves as a powerful moniker to invoke the brand’s celebration of African surf culture as well as their mission to create jobs, grow economies and support youth surf therapy organizations on the African continent. In addition to their range of eye-catching tees, hoodies and boardshorts (all designed and produced in South Africa), Mami Wata also supports said organizations via the book AFROSURF, described as “a visual mindbomb packed with over 200 photos, 50 essays, surfer profiles, thought pieces, poems, playlists, photos, illustrations, ephemera, recipes, and a mini comic, all wrapped in design that captures the diversity and character of Africa.” It’s a dope read and we highly recommend picking up a copy.
The Rock ‘n Roll GOAT
Xbombing
SpaceX’s Starlink Satellites Are Photobombing Astronomy Images, Study Says
Streaks left by passing satellites mar observatories’ celestial images, potentially hinder spotting of dangerous asteroids
By Aylin Woodward
As the armada of satellites circling Earth grows, a new study shows that astronomy images are being marred by streaks of reflected sunlight left by the fast-moving objects.
SpaceX alone launched nearly 150 of its expanding fleet of Starlink telecommunications satellites in the past month.
For the study, published Jan. 14 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers examined the effects of Starlink satellites on about 300,000 images taken by an instrument at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California. Between November 2019 and September 2021, they noted a 35-fold increase in the number of corrupted images.
Gold Cube
Mystery as gold cube worth $11.7million ‘pops up’ in NYC’s Central Park – and it has its own security guards
A MYSTERIOUS gold cube worth an estimated $11.7million appeared in New York’s Central Park on Wednesday morning accompanied by its very own security detail.
The cube, composed of 186 kilograms of pure 24-karat gold, was rolled out in front of a snowy Naumburg Bandshell at 5am in the morning surrounded by photographers and NYPD officers.
The hollow gold block is the creation of 43-year-old German artist Niclas Castello, who has branded it the “Castello Cube.”
The 410-pound work is not for sale but was used as publicity for the launch of accompanying cryptocurrency, the Castello Coin.
Magnet Fishing
Florida boy reels in .50-caliber Barrett sniper rifles while fishing
By Sarah Sicard
Over a balmy winter weekend in South Miami-Dade, Florida, a young boy and his grandfather set out to fish along a canal. What they reeled in weren’t fish, but holy mackerel were they a catch.
Duane Smith was shocked when his grandson Allen Cadwalader pulled in two .50-caliber Barrett sniper rifles while magnet fishing, the Miami Herald reported.
Smith and Cadwalader went out with magnetic rods after viewing a YouTube video on it, and decided to drop lines in the C-102 canal.
“We ended up with two pounds of scrap metal and 40 pounds of gun,” Smith told the Miami Herald, adding, “I figured, since it was our first time, this was beginner’s luck.”
Pilbarra
Is the Pilbara the oldest place on Earth?
by Dan Avila
(Credit: Dan Avila)
Dating to around 3.6 billion years ago, the Pilbara region of Western Australia is home to the fossilised evidence of the Earth’s oldest lifeforms.I
In recent years, science has confirmed what Aboriginal Australians, the world’s oldest continuous living culture, always knew: the Pilbara region of Western Australia is among the oldest places on Earth.
The Pilbara began to form more than 3.6 billion years ago and its vast landscape of deep pindan reds and endless panoramas, which stretches from the west coast to the Northern Territory border, is an ancient, forbidding place. For those travelling to the region for the first time, the initial sense of space and solitude can be daunting: it’s roughly double the size of Great Britain, but with a population of just 61,000, it is one of the most sparsely populated regions on Earth.
Trappedverse
My Family Is Trapped in the Metaverse
Virtual reality isn’t great, but it’s a lot better than dealing with everything else out there.
by Adrienne So
ON A WHIM, I recently started rewatching Ready Player One, the Steven Spielberg adaptation of Ernest Cline’s seminal novel about a future in which virtual reality is the real world. In the opening scene, protagonist Wade Watts clambers around a ramshackle trailer park before placing a headset on his face. Everyone has largely abandoned the decrepit, rundown reality for the Oasis—a virtual world of limitless possibilities, where everyone can do, be, or look like pretty much anything they want.
If you’d asked me if we were close to Ready Player One a year ago, I would’ve snorted and listed any of the objections my more skeptical colleagues have noted. However, on a recent Saturday afternoon, my husband put on the Meta Quest 2 VR headset to play Puzzling Places, a 3D puzzling game, while our children played with their stuffed animals and I sorted laundry.
After lunch, my 6-year-old daughter was allowed to spend a half-hour in Google’s Tilt Brush, a 3D drawing app where she created a frosty winter scene, complete with falling snow and snowmen named Lisa and Tom. My 4-year-old watched, enraptured, as the headset cast to the screen. After dinner, I caught my husband putting the headset on again. I told him to charge it when he was done because I was going to try a few new games with my coworker in an hour.
B-O-L-O-G-N-A Mask
Oscar Mayer bologna-inspired face mask hydrates and horrifies
My bologna face mask has a first name.
by Amanda Kooser
Maybe don’t wear this out in public.Oscar Mayer
I have no idea what’s in bologna. The off-pink deli meat is something I haven’t thought about since childhood. Then along comes meat-maker Oscar Mayer with a bologna face mask, and I’m now having deep thoughts about lunch and self-care.
Scratching sound. Rewind. Bologna face mask?! Oscar Mayer, never one to shy away from flashy marketing moves, is selling a $4.99 Bologna Hydrogel Sheet Face Mask on US Amazon as of today, for as long as supplies last.
Oscar Mayer is riffing on the playful idea of biting out eye and mouth shapes from a piece of bologna and then holding it over your face like a mask. Where did this bizarre ritual come from? I don’t know and I’m afraid to ask, but it sounds like a very American thing to do.
First Sleep, Second Sleep
The forgotten medieval habit of ‘two sleeps’
By Zaria Gorvett
It was around 23:00 on 13 April 1699, in a small village in the north of England. Nine-year-old Jane Rowth blinked her eyes open and squinted out into the moody evening shadows. She and her mother had just awoken from a short sleep.
Mrs Rowth got up and went over to the fireside of their modest home, where she began smoking a pipe. Just then, two men appeared by the window. They called out and instructed her to get ready to go with them.
As Jane later explained to a courtroom, her mother had evidently been expecting the visitors. She went with them freely – but first whispered to her daughter to “lye still, and shee would come againe in the morning”. Perhaps Mrs Rowth had some nocturnal task to complete. Or maybe she was in trouble, and knew that leaving the house was a risk.
Either way, Jane’s mother didn’t get to keep her promise – she never returned home. That night, Mrs Rowth was brutally murdered, and her body was discovered in the following days. The crime was never solved.
Nearly 300 years later, in the early 1990s, the historian Roger Ekirch walked through the arched entranceway to the Public Record Office in London – an imposing gothic building that housed the UK’s National Archives from 1838 until 2003. There, among the endless rows of ancient vellum papers and manuscripts, he found Jane’s testimony. And something about it struck him as odd.
Originally, Ekirch had been researching a book about the history of night-time, and at the time he had been looking through records that spanned the era between the early Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution. He was dreading writing the chapter on sleep, thinking that it was not only a universal necessity – but a biological constant. He was sceptical that he’d find anything new.
So far, he had found court depositions particularly illuminating. “They’re a wonderful source for social historians,” says Ekirch, a professor at Virginia Tech, US. “They comment upon activity that’s oftentimes unrelated to the crime itself.”
But as he read through Jane’s criminal deposition, two words seemed to carry an echo of a particularly tantalising detail of life in the 17th Century, which he had never encountered before – “first sleep”.
[ click to continue reading at BBC ]
The Beautiful Model
The Standard Model of particle physics: The absolutely amazing theory of almost everything
The Standard Model. What a dull name for the most accurate scientific theory known to human beings.
More than a quarter of the Nobel Prizes in physics of the last century are direct inputs to or direct results of the Standard Model. Yet its name suggests that if you can afford a few extra dollars a month you should buy the upgrade. As a theoretical physicist, I’d prefer The Absolutely Amazing Theory of Almost Everything. That’s what the Standard Model really is.
Many recall the excitement among scientists and media over the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson. But that much-ballyhooed event didn’t come out of the blue – it capped a five-decade undefeated streak for the Standard Model. Every fundamental force but gravity is included in it. Every attempt to overturn it to demonstrate in the laboratory that it must be substantially reworked – and there have been many over the past 50 years – has failed.
In short, the Standard Model answers this question: What is everything made of, and how does it hold together?
Pokerbots
How A.I. Conquered Poker
Good poker players have always known that they need to maintain a balance between bluffing and playing it straight. Now they can do so perfectly.
By Keith Romer
Last November in the cavernous Amazon Room of Las Vegas’s Rio casino, two dozen men dressed mostly in sweatshirts and baseball caps sat around three well-worn poker tables playing Texas Hold ’em. Occasionally a few passers-by stopped to watch the action, but otherwise the players pushed their chips back and forth in dingy obscurity. Except for the taut, electric stillness with which they held themselves during a hand, there was no outward sign that these were the greatest poker players in the world, nor that they were, as the poker saying goes, “playing for houses,” or at least hefty down payments. This was the first day of a three-day tournament whose official name was the World Series of Poker Super High Roller, though the participants simply called it “the 250K,” after the $250,000 each had put up to enter it.
At one table, a professional player named Seth Davies covertly peeled up the edges of his cards to consider the hand he had just been dealt: the six and seven of diamonds. Over several hours of play, Davies had managed to grow his starting stack of 1.5 million in tournament chips to well over two million, some of which he now slid forward as a raise. A 33-year-old former college baseball player with a trimmed light brown beard, Davies sat upright, intensely following the action as it moved around the table. Two men called his bet before Dan Smith, a fellow pro with a round face, mustache and whimsically worn cowboy hat, put in a hefty reraise. Only Davies called.
Autonomyverse
Enter the Metaverse
Unlike the Internet, the dawning digital environment promises autonomy from the physical world.
by Bruno Maçães
It is no coincidence that the metaverse as a practical project emerged out of the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic. The concept is older, tracing its origins to such science fiction classics as Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, but the last two years have transformed it into an actual business proposition, capable of dictating a name change for Facebook (now Meta) and moving billions of dollars in capital markets.
The great migration to digital during the pandemic showed the enormous advantages of being able to work and live within an artificial, secondary universe. In this universe, the laws of space and time no longer apply, or at least they can be bent, enhancing human powers in ways still to explore: an end to long commutes and the achievement of measurable increases in productivity; the ability to participate in meetings and conferences on different continents and on the same day; and children still able to attend school, even amid the worst public-health emergency in a century.
Unfortunately, the limits of digital experience were no less apparent. A lot gets lost when human interaction takes place on a screen. The results of remote schooling have so far proved mixed, at best. A digital work environment soon revealed itself as considerably more exhausting than the real counterpart. Human beings are built for the kind of immersive interaction that takes place in the physical world, where all five senses get involved. Some of our mental abilities, including memory, suffer markedly when we are reduced to disembodied egos on Zoom. As for entertainment, digital experiences are still so far from the actual fun of going to a restaurant or a music concert that nothing one tried on the Internet during the lockdowns measured up.
Microsoft Blizzard
Microsoft to Purchase Activision Blizzard for $68.7 Billion
Microsoft says the acquisition will help “provide building blocks for the metaverse.”
IGN initially reported that Kotick would remain as Activision Blizzard CEO, but has updated their story to say that Kotick’s future at the company remains unclear.
Microsoft has agreed to buy video game giant Activision Blizzard in an all-cash deal for $68.7 billion, further propelling the company’s expansion into the metaverse.
Activision is home to some of the world’s most popular video games including the Call of Duty franchise and Candy Crush. For Microsoft, which owns the gaming and console-maker XBox, the deal, if completed, will represent its largest acquisition in history. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news.
Andre Leon Talley Gone
ANDRE LEON TALLEY DEAD AT 73
Fashion icon Andre Leon Talley has died at 73 … TMZ has learned.
A source with direct knowledge tells us Vogue’s former creative director and one-time editor-at-large passed away Tuesday at a hospital in White Plains, NY. It’s currently unclear exactly what he was battling in the hospital.
Talley was instrumental to Vogue’s vision and direction in the ’80s and ’90s, when he worked his way up the magazine ranks to eventually become the news director — which he helmed from ’83 to ’87 — and then ascended to Vogue’s creative director in ’88.
Crypto Anger
Crypto Enthusiasts Meet Their Match: Angry Gamers
By Mike Isaac and Kellen Browning
SAN FRANCISCO — For years, Christian Lantz has played S.T.A.L.K.E.R., a first-person shooter game set in a post-apocalyptic Ukraine that became a cult hit for its immersive role playing. So when the 18-year-old high schooler heard a sequel was coming this year, he knew he had to buy it.
That was until GSC Game World, the Ukrainian company behind the computer game, announced last month that the new S.T.A.L.K.E.R. would incorporate the crypto-based assets known as nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. In the new game, GSC said, players could buy and sell NFTs of items like clothing for their in-game characters. The company heralded the move as a “transformative step” toward the virtual world known as the metaverse.
Mr. Lantz was incensed. He joined thousands of fans on Twitter and Reddit who raged against NFTs in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s sequel. The game maker, they said, was simply looking to squeeze more money out of its players. The backlash was so intense that GSC quickly reversed itself and abandoned its NFT plan.
Bulltheft
Why thieves are snatching French bulldogs across the US
The two thieves who brutally robbed 27-year-old Marieke Bayens at gunpoint on a California street were not after her purse — or her. They wanted the little dog at the end of her leash: Merlyn, a French bulldog.
From New York to Los Angeles, and from Miami to Chicago, thefts of the prized breed have been on the rise.
Small and friendly — and thus easy to grab — French bulldogs are hugely popular, selling for thousands of dollars on the black market.
They have the added draw of being a “dog of the stars.”
The most famous victim so far has been Lady Gaga. Armed men last year stole her pet bulldogs Koji and Gustav, even opening fire on an employee who was walking them (he was wounded but survived).
The superstar singer offered a $500,000 reward for their return and eventually got the dogs back. Police made five arrests in the case.
Surveillanceverse
Surveillance will follow us into ‘the metaverse,’ and our bodies could be its new data source
by Tatum Hunter
Erin McDannald joins her colleagues in the office about three days a week by popping on an Oculus headset from Facebook parent company Meta or clicking into a desktop application. She can maneuver through an exact replica of the brick-and-mortar Washington, D.C., office building her company left behind when it switched to remote work.
McDannald is CEO of Environments, an interior-design-turned-software company building so-called immersive work experiences in virtual reality, and it’s testing its own product. Five employees work in the virtual office, each with their own avatar that looks (kind of) like them. The company takes care to make employee avatars resemble their human counterparts only to a point — too lifelike, and they get creepy. Too abstract, and the whole thing starts to feel unprofessional, McDannald said. Employees marking work anniversaries have tiny, celebratory icons above their avatars’ heads, like in the computer game “The Sims.” McDannald can walk over to an employee’s virtual desk and check in at any time. Despite the ramped-up opportunity for managerial oversight, she said no employees have objected.
“I think there will be a merging of our physical and online personas,” she said.
NFTs Bad
The Worrisome Rise of NFTs
An astrobiologist says non-fungible tokens do not bode well for our species’s future.
BY CALEB SCHARF
Humans are very good at inventing commodities, and we’ve been at it for a long time. See that pebble over there? Well, that’s a better pebble than all these others, and if you give me something in exchange for it, I’ll let you take ownership. It’ll be your pebble, forever. And soon there will be a market in pebbles, a pebble community, pebble exhibitions and auctions filled with pebble speculators, pebble exchanges, and pebble artists.
The deeper, evolutionary reasons why we do this—or why any species commodifies objects or experiences—are not immediately obvious. It could be a trait that supports social interaction and cohesion, helping distribute food and resources more efficiently throughout a population. Or perhaps it supports the signaling of individual fitness or intention that can guide our reproductive strategies. A behavior statistically favored in an intricate web of Darwinian selection, eking out a tiny advantage for the genetic lineage of anyone who plays along.
If bits of data were more like Michelangelo’s marble, the whole notion of NFTs would be irrelevant.
What further complicates this (as with any such trait) is the cost incurred for individuals or a species; the expenditure of resources and energy. The most explicit, and worrisome, example today is the emergence of commodities like cryptocurrencies or Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). In simple terms, just as a cryptocurrency is meant to be infallibly secure and fair, an NFT is a way to assign secure provenance and ownership to a digital asset. That digital asset might be an image, a video, or some hybrid digital experience.
Honey Gone
A street musician spent years building a one-of-a-kind drum kit on wheels. Then, one morning, it was gone
Sheriff Drumman performs in the Target parking lot in Inglewood. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
A few minutes before the Los Angeles Rams take on the Seattle Seahawks at the billion-dollar SoFi Stadium on a late December evening, about six football fields away, there’s a party being held in the Target parking lot.
A smattering of people are dancing in the winter air to the percussive sounds of a man pounding away on a gleaming, golden-nectar drum set he affectionately calls “Honey.”
It’s a massive rig: 13 pieces, including three snares, two bass drums (one of which boasts a double kick pedal) and a gargantuan ride cymbal. Behind the kit, his back against the tailgate of a cherry red Ford F-350, sits Sheriff Drumman, flashing a smile that could outshine the sun.
Gameverse
To Understand the Metaverse, Look to Video Games
Produced by ‘Sway’
When it comes to the metaverse, Phil Spencer could give Mark Zuckerberg a run for his money. The head of Xbox and executive vice president of gaming at Microsoft, Spencer says popular games like Microsoft’s Halo and Minecraft — and competitors like Roblox and Fortnite — are already creating virtual worlds similar to the metaverse. And he says that video games, whose sales have soared during Covid, could offer lessons for the workplaces that have moved online in the pandemic: “We look at these virtual spaces, and some of the things that we’ve learned in video games of people coming together to cooperate together, to achieve tasks.”
[You can listen to this episode of “Sway” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]
[ click to continue reading at The New York Times ]