What a week for news junkies! With a few exceptions, however, tonight’s stories are amusing or quirky or intriguing and are not the accurate but dire apocalyptic fare served up by the news media again this week.
- Learn how advertisers label us based on our internet interests;
- The discovery of a mysterious source of solar wind;
- What wildlife did during the covid anthropause;
- How Bojo got bojoed;
- What is the Reddit API furor about;
- A new strain of covid found in Ohio wastewater that points to one, yet unknown, individual;
- Why the San Andreas Fault hasn’t carved up SoCal (probably);
- How to watch a potentially hazardous asteroid zoom past earth this Sunday;
- Delta Airline has a plan for wheelchair-friendly plane seating;
- Another excellent ruling by SCOTUS, this one empowering disabled people;
- Weird things sold on China’s e-commerce site Temu; and
- A Yelp review of Trader Joe’s if read aloud by Werner Herzog.
But first, a quick look at Indictment Fest.
Let’s get this out of the way: If you must wade into the Trump indictment (again) tonight, try these two tweets. That super-mini-chandelier-ette sums up Trump, IMO: Cheap and gaudy. Too small for it’s name while still oversized for it’s setting.
This thread offers an amusing, alarming, enlightening overview.
The article also has a lookup tool to learn more about label categories.
If you spend any time online, you probably have some idea that the digital ad industry is constantly collecting data about you, including a lot of personal information, and sorting you into specialized categories so you’re more likely to buy the things they advertise to you. But in a rare look at just how deep—and weird—the rabbit hole of targeted advertising gets, The Markup has analyzed a database of 650,000 of these audience segments, newly unearthed on the website of Microsoft’s ad platform Xandr. The trove of data indicates that advertisers could also target people based on sensitive information like being “heavy purchasers” of pregnancy test kits, having an interest in brain tumors, being prone to depression, visiting places of worship, or feeling “easily deflated” or that they “get a raw deal out of life.” [...]
Because the segments also include the names of the companies involved in creating them, they also shed light on how disparate pools of personal data—collected by tracking people’s online activity and real-world movements—are combined into bespoke, branded groups of potential ad viewers that can be marketed to publishers and advertisers.
“The sudden global decline in human movement that followed the arrival of Covid-19 is sometimes called the “anthropause.” Scientists around the world used it as an opportunity to learn more about how humans affect the natural world and what happens when they disappear.”
When pandemic-related shutdowns kept people at home in early 2020, wild mammals roamed more freely across the landscape, according to a large global study that was published in Science on Thursday. The study is based on data collected by location-tracking tags affixed to 2,300 animals from 43 species, including brown bears in Alaska, giant anteaters in Brazil, reindeer in Norway, lions in Kenya and Asian elephants in Myanmar.
In places with the strictest lockdowns, the animals’ long-distance movements over a 10-day period increased by 73 percent, the researchers found, suggesting that the animals were ranging more widely and expanding their habitats. “Animals were able to go about their business without having to worry about where the humans were” … On shorter time scales, however, the mammals seemed more inclined to stay put; their top travel distances in any given hour were shorter than in 2019. That could be a sign that the animals were less likely to encounter people or cars that caused them to flee, the researchers said. In the most human-dominated habitats, the animals were also 36 percent closer to roads during the shutdowns, they found.
😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣
Reddit is in trouble right now. After announcing changes in April, news has surfaced that several of the most popular third-party Reddit apps would shut down by the end of the month. On top of that, five of the most popular subreddits are closing down for two days starting on June 12, and every other post on the “front page of the internet” is protesting Reddit’s API changes.
What’s going on? We’re here to get you up to speed on Reddit’s API changes, the Reddit blackout, and why everyone is losing their mind over one of the most popular social media platforms on the internet.
Let’s start at the top. API stands for Application Programming Interface, and they allow two applications to communicate with each other. As the name suggests, it’s an interface in which apps can send data back and forth without actually accessing the app itself. [...]
Reddit launched a free API seven years ago, but in April, it announced it would be making changes. Those changes included charging for API access. That means developers who have made an app for Reddit would now need to pay for requests.
An unidentified person in Ohio has a new strain or lineage of the COVID-19 infection and is unaware of it, according to a professor at the University of Missouri School of Medicine.
Marc Johnson, who teaches molecular microbiology and immunology at Missouri, found large amounts of a new, unique strain of COVID-19 while searching through a wastewater database of COVID samples, he told Insider. The strain is coming from one person in Ohio and has been primarily found in two areas of the state: the city of Columbus and in Washington Court House, Ohio, located about 40 miles southwest from Columbus. Johnson believes the person may be someone who commutes between these areas for work.
He said he first detected the new strain in a data sample last summer, and once again in March.
Fortunately, this new strain of COVID likely isn’t contagious, and is more likely to be a form of long COVID, Johnson said.
Unlike the Bay Area, which has seen two major earthquakes in under 120 years, Los Angeles and the rest of Southern California are in a 300-year “seismic drought” that’s baffled scientists for years.
Research published this week has revealed that a toxic 300-square-mile lake, and its effect on the pent-up tectonic plates below, may be a big reason why.
In short, the drying of the Salton Sea in modern times has, for now, reduced pressure on the San Andreas Fault and delayed the “Big One,” which may one day wreak devastation on the Los Angeles basin and its 13 million residents.
Delta is unveiling a first-of-its-kind seat that would allow passengers with disabilities to remain in their wheelchairs on airplane flights … Delta Flight Products … is working with U.K.-based Air4All, a consortium focused on accessibility in air travel, to develop the specialized seat which converts to a wheelchair restraint that can accommodate a power chair.
The new seat allows airlines to maintain the design of their aircraft cabin while “providing access to headrest, center console tray tables and cocktail table that adjust to serve passengers with wheelchairs in place,” Delta Flight Products said. It also offers passengers with disabilities an easier time getting on and off airplanes.
Launched less than a year ago, e-commerce site Temu has quickly established itself as the online world’s new favorite jumble sale—the destination of choice when you’re looking for an impossibly wide array of incredibly cheap products. [...]
I do not recommend any of these products, but if you like smoking weed and you’re too grown up to go with a crushed soda can, you can smoke weed out of...
If your drug-taking predilections have progressed past weed, Temu’s deals on glass pipes and “snuff spoons” cannot be beaten.