When Eddie Loved Dave
An unlikely Pasadena love story: The high-school bromance of Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth
By GREG RENOFF
Early in the summer of 1973, singer David Lee Roth and guitarist Eddie Van Halen performed together for the first time. Playing in front of an audience of buzzed students from John Muir, Blair and Pasadena high schools in an east Pasadena backyard, this embryonic version of Van Halen, then called Mammoth, blasted out songs by Black Sabbath, Grand Funk Railroad and Cream, rattling windows and shattering eardrums while party attendees chugged keg beer.
Last week, Eddie Van Halen died from cancer, at age 65, and tributes to his transformational musical contributions poured in from around the world. But long before anyone outside of the San Gabriel Valley had heard of the band, this pairing of two aspiring musicians who had little in common save their long hair drew together a generation of hard-rock-loving SoCal teens.
Cow Hugging
Cow-hugging is the new animal therapy trend we all need
By Catherine Park
Therapy animals are not a new concept, but in a world where mental health is being tested by an ongoing pandemic, people are searching for comfort it what might seem like unusual places.
A practice that originated in the rural town of Reuver in the Netherlands, âkoe knuffelen,â which means âcow huggingâ in Dutch, is gaining global popularity, according to a BBC report.
Itâs not just the act of hugging a cow that helps relieve stress and lower anxiety, but making contact with any furry critter could help improve oneâs mental health.
Cows are the optimal cuddling buddy, and itâs not just because theyâre adorable.
A 2007 study in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science states that cows âshow cues of deep relaxation, stretching out and allowing their ears to fall back when massaged in particular areas of their neck and upper back.â
âCow cuddling is believed to promote positivity and reduce stress by boosting oxytocin in humans, the hormone released in social bonding. The calming effects of curling up with a pet or emotional support animal, it seems, are accentuated when cuddling with larger mammals,â according to the BBC.
The need for companionship during a socially-distanced time is steadily increasing.
Marbles
Torlonia Collection of ancient marbles displayed in Rome
ROME (AP) â One of the most important private collections of ancient Greek and Roman marble sculptures is going on display in Rome as part of the Eternal Cityâs 150th anniversary celebrations.
The 90 works from the Torlonia Collection were opening Monday in the newly refurbished Villa Caffarelli, one of the Capitoline Museumâs exhibition spaces overlooking the ancient Roman Forum. Organizers said there were plans to offer to lend the works to other museums, but said the coronavirus pandemic had put those plans on hold for now.
The 620-piece Torlonia Collection is considered one of the greatest private collections of classical art, featuring marble busts, reliefs, sarcophagi and statues. It was begun by one of Romeâs 19th century patricians, Prince Alessandro Torlonia, and was created in part from archaeological excavations of the Torlonia familyâs various estates in Rome.
21st Century Saint
Teen one step from becoming first millennial saint
A British-born Italian teenager who dedicated his short life to spreading the faith online and helping the poor will be beatified by the Catholic Church Saturday.
That leaves him just one miracle away from becoming the world’s first millennial saint.
Internet and computer-mad youngster Carlo Acutis, who died of leukaemia in 2006 aged 15, was placed on the path to sainthood after the Vatican ruled he had miraculously saved another boy’s life.
The Vatican claims he interceded from heaven in 2013 to cure a Brazilian boy suffering from a rare pancreatic disease.
He will be beatified in Assisi, the home of his idol Saint Francis, who dedicated his life to the poor. Some 3,000 people are expected to follow the ceremony on giant screens set up in five squares in the central Italian city.
Robot Beetle Cool
Robot Beetle Faces A Real Beetle In This Jaw Dropping Fight Between Nature And Machine
Written By Gladwin Menezes
In a video that surfaced recently, a robot beetle can be seen going up against a real beetle. The fight between the two has caused netizens to react in awe and amusement. The insect wrestled the machine while being filmed and the results were spectacularly astonishing.
The video begins with the mechanical beetle fidgeting and poking the real beetle. Unaware of what is happening, the real beetle tries its level best to reason out with the situation he is in. The shiny black beetle is the live beetle whereas the dark black beetle is the mechanical one. Upon first glance, one can easily notice that the mechanical or robotic beetle is much larger and seems way too stronger in terms of size and might. The real beetle, on the other hand, seems of a regular size and not as intimidating as the robot beetle.
How To Bait A Whale
Sex, drugs and rare pooches: How casino hosts lure in big gamblers
By Michael Kaplan
Youâd think it would be simple to drop millions of dollars at a casino.
But extracting that kind of dough tends to require a delicate dance between casino, player and host: the person charged with luring gamblers to bet big and lose big. It can involve private jets, exotic hotel suites, bottles of Cristal, Cuban cigars and pretty much anything the gambler wants. Itâs a perfect environment for squeezing out the massive losses that keep casino chandeliers burning.
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Stolen Mao Zedong scroll ‘worth millions’ found cut in half
A stolen calligraphy scroll said to be worth millions has been found in Hong Kong, after it was cut in half.
Thieves had stolen the scroll by Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong from an art collector’s home in a burglary last month.
They then sold it at a fraction of its value. It was apparently cut up as the 2.8m-long (9ft) scroll was deemed too long to display, said Hong Kong police.
The original owner says the artwork’s value has been “definitely affected”.
The scroll contains stanzas of poetry handwritten by the founder of the People’s Republic of China. Its owner has claimed it is estimated to be worth around $300m (ÂŁ230m), though it is not known how the valuation was obtained.
The scroll was stolen in a massive heist on 10 September, when three men broke into the home of Fu Chunxiao, a well-known collector of stamps and revolutionary art.
They also made off with antique stamps, copper coins and other pieces of calligraphy by Mao. The total haul was worth HK$5bn ($645m; ÂŁ500m) according to Mr Fu, who was reportedly in mainland China when the burglary took place.
Dreams w/Latte
Island of Nowhere
The Island That Humans Canât Conquer
A faraway island in Alaska has had its share of visitors, but none can remain for long on its shores.
Text by  Sarah Gilman / Photos by  Nathaniel Wilder
St. Matthew Island is said to be the most remote place in Alaska. Marooned in the Bering Sea halfway to Siberia, it is well over 300 kilometers and a 24-hour ship ride from the nearest human settlements. It looks fittingly forbidding, the way it emerges from its drape of fog like the dark spread of a wing. Curved, treeless mountains crowd its sliver of land, plunging in sudden cliffs where they meet the surf. To St. Matthewâs north lies the smaller, more precipitous island of Hall. A castle of stone called Pinnacle stands guard off St. Matthewâs southern flank. To set foot on this scatter of land surrounded by endless ocean is to feel yourself swallowed by the nowhere at the center of a drowned compass rose.
My head swims a little as I peer into a shallow pit on St. Matthewâs northwestern tip. Itâs late July in 2019, and the air buzzes with the chitters of the islandâs endemic singing voles. Wildflowers and cotton grass constellate the tundra that has grown over the depression at my feet, but around 400 years ago, it was a house, dug partway into the earth to keep out the elements. Itâs the oldest human sign on the island, the only prehistoric house ever found here. A lichen-crusted whale jawbone points downhill toward the sea, the roseâs due-north needle.
Compared with more sheltered bays and beaches on the islandâs eastern side, it would have been a relatively harsh place to settle. Storms regularly slam this coast with the full force of the open ocean. As many as 300 polar bears used to summer here, before Russians and Americans hunted them out in the late 1800s. Evidence suggests that the pit houseâs occupants likely didnât use it for more than a season, according to Dennis Griffin, an archaeologist whoâs worked on the archipelago since 2002. Excavations of the site have turned up enough to suggest that people of the Thule cultureâprecursors to the Inuit and Yupâik who now inhabit Alaskaâs northwestern coastsâbuilt it. But Griffin has found no sign of a hearth, and only a thin layer of artifacts.
Eddie Van Halen Gone
They’re Getting Closer
âItâs Been A Long Time Since Weâve Seen Something Like Thisâ; Meteor That Lit Up Pittsburgh Skies Was Seen In 15 States
The meteor that flew over the Pittsburgh area on Wednesday morning has now been reported as having been seen over 700 times.
By: KDKA-TV News Staff
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) â When the skies above Pittsburgh lit up early Wednesday morning, social media was abuzz trying to figure out what it was or what had just happened.
At 6:24 a.m., the skies lit up with what appeared to be a fireball flying through the atmosphere.
KDKA spoke with Jay Reynolds, a Research Astronomer at Cleveland State University, who is now in his sixteenth year there, says that it was a meteor.
BDSM Going Viral
A Dominatrix on Why BDSM Business Is Booming During Trump and COVID
Mistress Iris writes about the reasons why people are turning to dominant/submissive roleplay during these chaotic times.Â
Oscar Wilde famously said, âEverything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.â Itâs a wonderfully worded quote but a bit mistaken about sex, power, and the rest. In Wildeâs Victorian England, power was obvious and everywhere; sex was repressed. The world we live in today is far more suffused in sex, but a bit less comfortable with the omnipresence of power (which is why addressing privilege and oppression is commonly met with such reactionary vitriol and/or tear gas).
âBut why are you talking about politics, professional dominatrix?â you might ask. Some people want to cordon off the sexual world, and pretend that it doesnât interact with the broader world we all live in, but in my work as a pro-domme Iâve often gotten to see the intricate ways that peoplesâ sexual fantasies reflect and respond to the stressors and freedoms they experience in their outside life. When Donald Trump won the 2016 election, I saw a surge in female, racial, and religious minorities who contacted me; people who, because of external events, were required to be unyielding and resolute in their day-to-day struggles, seeking heavy play that helped them break down within the context of a safe and trusting environment. Iâve seen a similar response during COVID-19, and wanted to deconstruct it a bit.
Because I’m Stressed
Bart/Easton-Ellis: COVID Could Bring Back Film
from MovieMaker
Peter Bart Predicts 1960s-Style âReinventionâ of Movies
By Tim Molloy
Peter Bart, who helped oversee films including Rosemaryâs Baby and The Godfather, says he believes cinema is ready for a âreinventionâ like the one of the late 1960s that spawned the brilliant films of the following decade.
Bart, who helped his friend Robert Evans lead Paramount in a bold new direction after audiences dwindled in the mid-1960s, says on the latest Bret Easton Ellis Podcast that the movie business is in a similarly dark place now to the one it was in then.
âDue to the pandemic and other factors, the movie business has simply lost its audience⊠because of the virus, but also the movies were beginning to lose interest. And I think now, as then, there will be a reinvention situation,â said Bart, 88.
âThe difference, of course, and this is an importance difference, is the mid-60s were characterized by certain amazing developments,â Bart said. âSociety was beginning to change, and the movies had to come along and somehow change in a way that showed understanding of that societal change.â
Sign O’ the New Times
Prince Collaborators Reflect on 1987 Opus âSign Oâ the Timesâ
“[Ideas] just flowed out of him like he was a conduit to the universe,” says Revolution keyboardist Matt Fink
by Ron Hart
By the mid-80s, Prince was a global superstar thanks to the worldwide success of 1984âs Purple Rain.
So when he started work on his follow-up â eventually released on March 31, 1987 as the double-LP Sign Oâ the Times â it came amidst a creative tsunami that saw two more classic albums with his longtime band the Revolution (1985âs Around The World in A Day and the following yearâs Parade), the 1986 film Under The Cherry Moon and three ultimately shelved titles (Dream Factory, Camille and Crystal Ball).
For those who worked closest to him during this period, including Revolution keyboard wizard Matt Fink (aka Dr. Fink), longtime engineer Susan Rogers and bassist Levi Seacer, Jr., it was astounding to see such a voluminous output from Prince during this time.
âHis creative mind is just so wild,â Fink tells SPIN. âLike he was always thinking of stuff. He was always thinking and conjuring up ideas. It just flowed out of him like he was a conduit to the universe. He was a muse of the universe.â
âI had a lot of personal time with him,â Seacer explains. âAnd when I was with him by himself, it was really like sitting with one of your regular buddies. And it was so interesting being around somebody whose fountain was just overflowing with creativity, and then you go back into the real world and everybodyâs fountains are cut off. So what he was good at was trying to encourage you to open that fountain and say, âHey, you got a lot in there; why donât you just let it out so you can put more in?â I didnât realize I could actually do all of that. And when you do that, you can really find out who you are, and then that faucet donât stop flowing.âÂ
Dreams On-demand
Real-life Inception as scientists figure out how to plant ideas in dreams
Researchers at MIT have been testing a fascinating new technique called targeted dream incubation, which allows them to insert certain topics into someone else’s dreams
It may sound like the plot of Inception, but scientists have figured out how to plant ideas into other people’s dreams.
Researchers at MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces have been testing a new technique called targeted dream incubation (TDI), which allows them to insert certain topics into someone’s dreams.
Past studies have shown that when sleepers enter a rare dream state known as lucid dreaming, they gain awareness that they’re dreaming and can thus have some control over what happens in their mind.
TDI achieves a similar result by targeting people during hypnagogia, a semi-lucid dream state that occurs as someone is falling asleep.
Harry Evans Gone
Harold Evans Dies at 92, Pioneering Editor Who Stood up to Rupert Murdoch, Ran US News, Random House, NY Daily News
by Roger Friedman
Harry Evans has been on my mind for a month. Isnât it weird when that happens? I felt like something was wrong. This was the first year I hadnât seen Harry since I met him in 1985. Several times I looked up his number intending to call him and didnât. And now itâs too late. Harry has left us at age 92, dead from congestive heart failure.
I call him Harry but heâs Harold Evans, former editor of the Times of London who stood up to Rupert Murdoch, was fired and wrote a great book about the experience called âGood Times, Bad Times.â His second wife, almost 30 years his junior, was Tina Brown, the young hot shot editor of Tatler magazine in London. They moved to New York in 1982. Tina took over the just-revived and failing Vanity Fair. Harry took several jobs with Mort Zuckerman, owner of US News, then the Daily News, and Atlantic Monthly Press books, a venerable publishing company. They became the hottest media couple in the world.
AMP is where I met Harry. He hired me to be publicity director. In a short time heâd shaken up the place, contracted for a number of non fiction books by name writers. The biggest project was âJe Suis Le Cahier,â the first ever publication of Picassoâs notebooks which would accompany a huge exhibition at the Pace Gallery. The day I met Harry he was 58 years old and was like a little spitfire. Wiry and tiny, he was constantly in motion. He was unlike everyone Iâd encountered in the book business, which was staid and lazy.
âWhat should we do with Picasso?â he asked me. I said, well, Picassoâs daughter, Paloma, is famous for making perfume and jewelry. Maybe she could help us and do some publicity? Youâre right! he cried. He ran into his office, pulling me, and called Tina at Vanity Fair to get Palomaâs phone number. Within seconds we had this woman on the phone, made a lunch date at the very snazzy Four Seasons. My head was spinning. What just happened? Everything was about to change, fast.
Covid Era Begats Drone Era
From Sci-Fi To Everyday Business: Welcome To The Age Of The Robot
While drones and robots may have once evoked a sense of fantasy and science fiction, these devices may be starting to prove their potential as major contributors to business and everyday life. And today, the widespread effort to limit human contact due to the Covid-19 pandemic could perhaps accelerate those trends, as robots are deployed for a variety of public safety usesâfrom assisting doctors and delivering supplies to sterilizing public spaces.
Delivery drones and small robotic delivery trucks could play an increasingly important role as the e-commerce industry grows. In fact, industry analyst Technavio forecasts a growth in the autonomous delivery robot market of almost $17 billion between 2020 and 2024. And with steady online sales during the Covid-19 pandemic, robot and drone deliveries could offer a safer alternative to human couriers while also potentially reducing costs.
In the early days of the pandemic, for example, robots were drafted in China to conduct contactless grocery drops. Plans are also underway to combine walking robots and self-driving cars in order to conduct the final step of delivering packages from cars to customersâ doorsteps.
Our New Mini-moon
Mystery object entering Earth’s orbit ‘to become planet’s mini-moon until May’
An object known as 2020 SO is heading towards Earth, and could stay in orbit of the planet from October until May next year â although some think it could just be space junk
By Joshua Smith
Earth could be about to get a new moon â but experts have been left baffled at what the mystery object actually is.
An object known as 2020 SO is heading towards Earth and from October it will be a “mini-moon”, which could stay in orbit of the planet until May next year.
Another object, named 3753 Cruithne, has already been dubbed Earth’s “second moon” â meaning 2020 SO would be our third.
Cruithne is in a normal elliptic orbit around the Sun.
Its period of revolution around the Sun, approximately 364 days at present, is almost equal to that of Earth.
Loving Music & Loathing Bullshit
The Great Stanley Crouch
An American immigrant jazz buff expresses his gratitude to a supremely gifted critic who loved the music and loathed bullshit
BY TONY BADRAN
If I had to name the one writer who was most pivotal for me and for my full assimilation in America, it would undoubtedly be Stanley Crouch, the famed jazz and cultural critic who died last Wednesday in New York at age 74. At this moment in American life, where anything and everything that identifies us and binds us as Americans is under direct assault, Crouch is perhaps more essential than ever, and his passing all the more devastating.
Perhaps even more than Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison, Crouch tied it all together for me. He had a terrific ear for the music I love, and his uncompromising pugnacious style spoke to me directly. For someone who came to America from a sectarian Third World society, his commentary on the Balkanization of America was penetrating and, as weâre seeing today, scarily pertinent.
Crouch had no patience for the self-pitying race politics of grievance and authenticity. He saw it as a hustle and had nothing but contempt for its toxic sales pitch. He arrived at this conviction the hard way, as he explains in the prologue to his fabulous Considering Genius:
The tribal appeal is always great and there is nothing more tempting to the most gullible members of a minority group than suddenly hearing that, merely by being born, one is not innately inferior to the majority but part of an unacknowledged elite. I was not so sophisticated that I could avoid the pull of those ideas and found myself reading all kinds of books about Africa, and African customs and religion. ⊠I would have been pulled all the way into the maw of subthought, from which it might have taken longer to emerge if Jayne Cortez hadnât introduced me to Ralph Ellisonâs Shadow and Act. ⊠Unlike those younger black people who were busy jettisoning their heritage as Americans and Western peopleâboth of which brought the built-in option of criticismâEllison took the place of his ethnic group and himself as firm parts of American life and a fresh development in Western culture.
This affirmation of Americanness in the face of all tribal impulses, âethnic narcissism,â and Balkanization, reflects the influence of Ellison and Murray, and their realization, in Crouchâs words, that âAmerica is a land of synthesis.â In The Omni-Americans, Murray builds on Constance Rourkeâs description of the composite nature of the American characterââpart Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian, and part Negro.â Blackness, in other words, is a foundational element of the American national character, meaning that all Americans are culturally part Black, whether they like it or not, and that appeals to racial or cultural purityâby anyone, regardless of skin color or claimed ancestryâare sheer nonsense.
Like America, its vernacular aesthetic expression, jazz, is also a composite, an experiment in hybridity. And like America, the Black element in jazz is foundationalânot something that needs special pleading or diversity coaches to promote inclusion. Crouch was uncompromising on this point. He fought vigorously against any attempt to remove from its definition the core elements of jazz, which were the contribution of Black artistsâblues and swing.
Vote The Assholes Out
The story behind that Patagonia tag, and how the Trump era changed outdoor recreation
By SAMMY ROTH
Browse Patagoniaâs online shop, and youâll find T-shirts condemning Big Oil, encouraging people to vote with planet Earth in mind and declaring that when it comes to wilderness, Americans must âdefend it or lose it.â
But the company is getting far more attention for a cheeky, hidden message that appears only on the tag of a limited-edition pair of shorts, in tiny print.
The message: âVOTE THE ASSHOLES OUT.â
The label, which went viral on Twitter, was only the latest Trump-era call to action from Patagonia. The company has responded to the federal governmentâs environmental rollbacks with increasingly vocal campaigns to protect the countryâs public lands â and yes, it says the four-word message applies to the president, along with other politicians who refuse to act on climate change.
Tesla Slumber Mode
TESLA DRIVER PULLED OVER GOING 93 MPH WHILE COMPLETELY ASLEEP
by JON CHRISTIAN
Canadian cops say they pulled over a Tesla that was traveling at 93 miles per hour â while the driver was completely asleep, with the seat pulled down like a bed.
âThe officer was able to obtain radar readings on the vehicle, confirming that it had automatically accelerated up to exactly 150 km/h [93 mph],â the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in a statement to Global News.
Non-smoker Held At Gunpoint
Oregon woman holds suspected arsonist at gunpoint as wildfires rage
By Natalie O’Neill
An Oregon woman forced a suspected arsonist to the ground at gunpoint after she found him on her property with matches, dramatic video footage shows.
âWhat are you doing on my property? Did you light anything on fire?â Kat Cast shouts as she clutches a firearm, according to footage she posted on Facebook.
When the unidentified man responds that he was âjust passing through,â she demands to know why heâs holding matches.
âI smoke,â he replies â to which Cast asks to see his cigarettes. The man then admits that he has none, and she holds him there until police arrive and haul him away in handcuffs.
Ripe giant sperm found in female ostracod
100-million-year-old giant sperm found fossilised in amber could be oldest ever
An international team of palaeontologists unearthed the âspectacular findâ, which was preserved inside a female crustacean.
They believe the mussel-like creature mated shortly before becoming trapped in the resin.
Their findings, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, provide “an extremely rare opportunity” to learn more about the evolution of the reproductive process, they said.
Until now the oldest known fossilised sperm was found inside a 50-million-year-old worm cocoon from Antarctica.
The crustacean, a new species of ostracod called Myanmarcypris hui, is thought to have lived in coastal and inland waters of what is now Myanmar.
It would have been surrounded by trees that released huge amounts of resin.
While a majority of male animal species, including humans, produce large quantities of very small sperm to increase chances of fertilisation, there are exceptions.
Some creatures, such as fruit flies and modern-day ostracods, produce a small number of oversized sperm, with tails several times longer than the animal itself.
In these cases, the researchers say, chances of fertilising an ovum can increase with the size of the sperm cell.
Eaten By Mycelium
This âLivingâ Coffin Uses Mushrooms to Compost Dead Bodies
The âLiving Cocoonâ has already been used in one burial, at the Hague
By Becky Ferreira
IMAGE: BOB HENDRIKX — LOOP BIOTECH
For tens of thousands of years, humans have developed funeral rites and burial practices that reflected the attitudes of their particular time and place. These traditions of honoring the dead continue to evolve into the 21st century, as people seek âgreen burialsâ that are more environmentally friendly than standard coffins.
One of the newest examples comes from Loop, a Dutch biotech company that recently unveiled a biodegradable coffin made of fungus, microbes and plant roots. Called the âLiving Cocoon,â the coffin is designed to hasten bodily decomposition while also enriching soil around the plot.
âNormally, what we do as humans is we take something out of nature, we kill it, and we use it,â said Bob Hendrikx, founder of Loop, in a call. âSo I thought: what if we humans start moving from working with dead materials toward a world in which we work with living materials?â
âWe would not only become less of a parasite, but we could also start exploring super-cool material properties, like living lights, walls that are self-healing, and that kind of stuff,â he added.
Hendrikx was inspired to develop the Living Cocoon while presenting a living home concept at last yearâs Dutch Design Week. While houses are obviously for the living, Hendrikx got to thinking about adapting the concept into a coffin powered by mushroom mycelium, which is the filamentary vegetative part of the fungus.
âMycelium is natureâs biggest recycler,â Hendrikx said. âIt is continuously looking for dead organic matter to transform into key nutrients.âÂ
The Oldest Foot
Human footprints dating back 120,000 years found in Saudi Arabia
Issam AHMED, AFP
Around 120,000 years ago in what is now northern Saudi Arabia, a small band of homo sapiens stopped to drink and forage at a shallow lake that was also frequented by camels, buffalo, and elephants bigger than any species seen today.
The people may have hunted the large mammals but they did not stay long, using the watering hole as a waypoint on a longer journey.
This detailed scene was reconstructed by researchers in a new study published in Science Advances on Wednesday, following the discovery of ancient human and animal footprints in the Nefud Desert that shed new light on the routes our ancient ancestors took as they spread out of Africa.
Today, the Arabian Peninsula is characterized by vast, arid deserts that would have been inhospitable to early people and the animals they hunted down.
The Cosmic Brain
Physicist: The Entire Universe Might Be a Neural Network
“The idea is definitely crazy, but if it is crazy enough to be true? That remains to be seen.”
Itâs not every day that we come across a paper that attempts to redefine reality.
But in a provocative preprint uploaded to arXiv this summer, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth named Vitaly Vanchurin attempts to reframe reality in a particularly eye-opening way â suggesting that weâre living inside a massive neural network that governs everything around us. In other words, he wrote in the paper, itâs a âpossibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network.â
For years, physicists have attempted to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. The first posits that time is universal and absolute, while the latter argues that time is relative, linked to the fabric of space-time.
In his paper, Vanchurin argues that artificial neural networks can âexhibit approximate behaviorsâ of both universal theories. Since quantum mechanics âis a remarkably successful paradigm for modeling physical phenomena on a wide range of scales,â he writes, âit is widely believed that on the most fundamental level the entire universe is governed by the rules of quantum mechanics and even gravity should somehow emerge from it.â
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Robinhood Insanity
âItâs a Whole Other Level of Insanityâ: How Pandemic Day Traders Are Turning Wall Street Upside Down
Sudden spikes in the value of bankrupt Hertz and joke cryptocurrency Dogecoin are upending the market as hobbyist traders on Reddit and Robinhood go rogue. âIt doesnât really matter what the underlying value of the stock is,â says one. âIf thereâs enough momentum behind it, you can still make money.â
A few years ago an eight-year-old Shiba Inu dog named Kabosu became an internet meme, her furry face juxtaposed with snippets of text in the parlance of stoner philosophy (âwow. much cake.â). The meme was known as âdoge,â and it blew âlolcatâ out of the water. Shortly thereafter, in 2013, a cryptocurrency called Dogecoin was launched, mostly as a joke. The coin ballooned then flatlined, hewing since then with the swings of the volatile bitcoin marketâuntil July, when its stock value skyrocketed 104%.Â
What was going on? The cryptocurrency wasnât new, and it had never been taken very seriously, even by its own investors. How could a seemingly random stock suddenly more than double in value? âIt was a TikTok trend,â said David Hanlin, an e-commerce adviser and day trader who got in on the Dogecoin bump. âIn terms of the actual value of Dogecoin from anything other than a meme standpoint, itâs pretty low. But it doesnât really matter what the underlying value of the stock or the cryptocurrency is. If thereâs enough momentum behind it, you can still make money.â
Such is the approach of many day traders, or retail tradersâpeople, often hobbyists, who trade stocks on popular platforms like Robinhood. Since the start of the pandemic, new users have flooded these platforms, propelled in some cases by a conviction that crisis breeds opportunity, and in others by newfound free time. Robinhood alone reported more than 3 million new funded accounts by May, half of which were started by first-time traders. And daily average revenue trades on Robinhood more than doubled in the second quarter compared to the preceding quarter.
Many on Wall Street are baffled by the surge and have become more circumspect about how they read trends. âIâve spent the last year, basically since March, trying to understand whatâs happening, and honestly, I couldnât tell you exactly. Iâm very good at what I do, but there are times Iâm just like, I have no fucking clue whatâs happening,â said one equity trader for a Manhattan firm. âWe were calling it banana land, the guys I work with, because itâs just, like, crazy. And then we started calling it ayahuasca land because itâs not even bananas anymore, itâs a whole other level of insanity.â
Toots Hibbert Gone
Toots Hibbert Dies: Reggae Artist Credited With Naming The Genre Was 77
By Bruce Haring
His death comes days after his group released its first full-length LP and new album in ten years, titled Got to Be Tough. The recording features contributions from Ringo Starr and Ziggy Marley.
Hibbert met Henry âRaleighâ Gordon and Nathaniel âJerryâ in 1962 shortly after he moved to Kingston. They formed the band Toots and the Maytals. Their 1969 recording, Pressure Drop, was instrumental in breaking the band worldwide after it was used in the seminal 1972 reggae film The Harder They Come.
Before that, Toots and the Maytals released a 1968 song, Do the Reggay, which is credited with giving the musical genre its name.
Forrest Fenn Gone
Forrest Fenn, the Eccentric New Mexico Art Dealer Who Buried Treasure for Explorers in the Rocky Mountains, Has Died at 90
Fenn’s $2 million treasure was reportedly found in June.
Just months after revealing that an intrepid explorer had finally solved the 10-year-old treasure hunt he plotted, New Mexico art and antiquities dealer Forrest Fenn has died. He was 90 years old.
Fenn filled his 12th-century bronze treasure chest with golden nuggets, gemstones, and pre-Columbian antiquities from his personal collection. Together, the box and its contents were said to be worth $2 million.
To announce the hunt, Fenn included a cryptic 24-line poem with clues to its location in The Thrill of the Chase, his self-published 2010 memoir. He claimed the goal was to get people off their couches in search of adventure.