Math

The Best Way To Win a Horse Race? Mathematicians May Have the Answer (sciencemag.org) 52

sciencehabit summarizes a new article from Science magazine: Attention racehorse jockeys: Start fast, but save enough energy for a final kick. That's the ideal strategy to win short-distance horse races, according to the first mathematical model to calculate how horses use up energy in races. The researchers say the approach could be used to identify customized pacing plans that, in theory, would optimize individual horses' chances of winning.

The team took advantage of a new GPS tracking tool embedded in French racing saddles. The trackers let fans watch digital images of the horses move across a screen, and they gave the researchers real-time speed and position data. The scientists studied patterns in dozens of races at the Chantilly racetracks north of Paris and developed a model that accounted for winning strategies for three different races: a short one (1300 meters), a medium one (1900 meters), and a slightly longer one (2100 meters), all with different starting points on the same curved track. The model takes into account not just different race distances, but also the size and bend of track curves, and any slopes or friction from the track surface.

The results might surprise jockeys who hold horses back early for bursts of energy in the last furlough. Instead, a strong start leads to a better finish, the team found. That doesn't mean those jockeys are wrong, though. Too strong of a start can be devastating as well, leaving the horse 'exhausted by the end,' one of the researchers says.

Even so, "We can't truly model performance," argues a veterinarian at the University of Sydney with over 30 years of experience working at horse racetracks. But he also asks Science, "Do we really want to?

"For people who love horse racing, the uncertainty provides the excitement, and the actual running of the horses provides the spectacle and the beauty."
Idle

All Three Monoliths Gone -- Two Removed By Activist Vandals (eastbaytimes.com) 119

A Reddit user found Google Earth photos showing the Utah monolith may have appeared in its canyon up to five years ago, according to The Daily Beast. But it's gone now: Last week, a team of four people removed the Utah obelisk. One of them, a Utah adventure guide, explained their actions in an Instagram post. "We removed the Utah Monolith because there are clear precedents for how we share and standardize the use of our public lands, natural wildlife, native plants, fresh water sources, and human impacts upon them. The mystery was the infatuation and we want to use this time to unite people behind the real issues here — we are losing our public lands — things like this don't help," Sylvan Christensen wrote.

Although the statue had damaged some of the surrounding rock formations, its real cost came when hordes of tourists drove cars and rode helicopters to the remote canyon to see it, Christensen said. "This land wasn't physically prepared for the population shift (especially during a pandemic)," he wrote. "People arrived by car, by bus, by van, helicopter, planes, trains, motorcycles and E-bikes and there isn't even a parking lot. There aren't bathrooms — and yes, pooping in the desert is a misdemeanor. There was a lot of that."

"The group of four took the big pieces of the monolith and placed them in a wheelbarrow and said 'leave no trace' as they rolled it away," reports CNN, citing a photographer who witnessed the event.

The second mysterious monolith that appeared in Romania has also been "removed by parties unknown," reports the Bay Area Newsgroup. But a third monolith also mysteriously appeared 200 miles south of San Francisco in the small town of Atascadero on Tuesday, according to SFGate. Though their reporter has a theory as to why: Atascadero is a handy place. There's plenty of rugged cowboy types, and plenty of people with the room and machinery to weld and rivet some sheets of metal together. The local band when I was in high school was in fact known for riveting metal parts and tubing onto stages and cars and painting the whole thing silver...

[W]hen Atascadero saw this monolith trend hitting, someone took note of the importance of getting in fast, went out into their garage and built a monolith.

"And then, overnight, it was gone," notes the Bay Area News Group. Forbes describes the young men responsible as "Dressed in camo gear, armed with night-vision goggles and energy drinks," and at least once referencing the QAnon conspiracy theory. "One of the men even states: 'We don't want illegal aliens from Mexico, or outer space.'"

The Bay Area News Group writes: The revelation that the culprits drove five hours from Southern California to tear it down, live-streaming the trek, has angered Central Coast residents. Video shows the four young men chanting "Christ is king" as they tear down the monolith and replace it with a plywood cross. They also made racist and anti-immigrant statements...

In a statement Thursday, Atascadero Mayor Heather Moreno said: "We are upset that these young men felt the need to drive 5 hours to come into our community and vandalize the Monolith.

"The Monolith was something unique and fun in an otherwise stressful time."

United States

That Mysterious Silver Monolith In the Utah Desert Has Disappeared (cnn.com) 73

A Slashdot reader quotes CNN: A tall, silver, shining metal monolith discovered in the desert in southeastern Utah — which prompted theories of alien placement and drew determined hikers to its secret location — has now disappeared, the state's Bureau of Land Management said Saturday.

The monolith was removed by an "unknown party" sometime Friday night, the agency said in a Facebook post.

"We have received credible reports that the illegally installed structure, referred to as the 'monolith,' has been removed" from BLM public lands, the post said. "The BLM did not remove the structure, which is considered private property."

The monolith was first discovered November 18 by officers from the Utah Department of Public Safety's Aero Bureau. They were flying by helicopter, helping the Division of Wildlife Resources count bighorn sheep in southeastern Utah, when they spotted something that seemed right out of "2001: A Space Odyssey..." Pilot Bret Hutchings guessed it was "between 10 and 12 feet high..."

In an official statement, the Utah Department of Public Safety emphasized that it's still illegal to install structures or art on public lands, "no matter what planet you're from."
Bug

New Videogame Bug Turns Spider-Man Into a Trash Can (gamespot.com) 52

A new bug in the PlayStation game Spider-Man: Miles Morales "turns Miles into various inanimate objects, including bricks, cardboard boxes, and even a trash can," reports GameSpot: Despite Miles' changed appearance, he can still perform many of his heroic antics, including web-swinging and beating up bad guys. It's an important lesson to all of us in these trying times: You might look like trash, but you can still do your job.
Today Engadget reports that the glitch even turns Spider-Man into a patio heater: If you've ever wanted to keep people toasty warm while fighting crime, now's your chance.

We've asked [the game's creator] Insomniac Games for comment, although it already tweeted that the hiccup was "equally embarrassing as it is heart-warming." Into the Spider-Verse's Phil Lord joked that the heater would find its way into the sequel if the team had "any self respect at all."

Social Networks

Kickstarter Mistakenly Emails Responses To Complaints From Seven Years Ago (bbc.com) 8

The BBC reports: Crowdfunding website Kickstarter has surprised some of its users by replying to complaints they made seven years ago.

Users who received responses to long-expired projects from 2013 took to Twitter to congratulate the company on its response times.

Kickstarter said the emails were "auto-generated in error... The emails folks received yesterday was due to an unfortunate human error while working on a clean-up task completely unrelated to the ticket from 2013," a company spokeswoman said.

"It's important to remember we are still a small team at Kickstarter and mistakes can happen."

The Internet

UK Agency Demands Company Stop Using Name Which Includes an HTML Closing Tag (msn.com) 107

A British software engineer came up with "a fun playful name" for his consulting business. He'd named it:

"">

Unfortunately, this did not amuse the official registrar of companies in the United Kingdom (known as Companies House). The Guardian reports that the U.K. agency "has forced the company to change its name after it belatedly realised it could pose a security risk." Henceforward, the software engineer's consulting business will instead be legally known as "THAT COMPANY WHOSE NAME USED TO CONTAIN HTML SCRIPT TAGS LTD." He now says he didn't realise that Companies House was actually vulnerable to the extremely simple technique he used, known as "cross-site scripting", which allows an attacker to run code from one website on another.
Engadget adds: Companies House, meanwhile, said it had "put measures in place" to prevent a repeat. You won't be trying this yourself, at least not in the U.K.

It's more than a little amusing to see a for-the-laughs code name stir up trouble, but this also illustrates just how fragile web security can be.

Idle

Tesla Tequila Sells Out Within Hours, Triggers Bidding Wars on eBay (electrek.co) 72

Thursday Tesla's web site began selling $250 bottles of Tesla-branded tequila, describing it as a "small-batch premium 100% de agave tequila anejo made from sustainably sourced highland and lowland agaves."

Electrek explores the frenzy that followed: The product sold out in hours after it appears on Tesla's website and even before Elon Musk could tweet a link to the Tesla Tequila to his close to 40 million followers... Electrek's own article about the launch of Tesla Tequila was read by over half a million people within a day of posting about it.

The product is not even in the hands of consumers just yet, but some people who placed reservations for it are trying to resell them already. Based on some listings on eBay, people are asking between $400 to $1,500 for a bottle of Tesla Tequilla. Some are even selling empty bottles and still asking for up to $1,000....

We don't even know if the tequila is any good.

This is purely selling on the strength of Tesla's brand.

AI

Soccer Telecast Ruined When AI-Controlled Camera Mistakes Ref's Bald Head For Ball (futurism.com) 59

Futurism reports: Fans of the soccer team Caledonian Thistle FC from Inverness, Scotland, experienced something hilarious this week when the robot camera operator — automatically trained to keep the lens trained on the soccer ball using AI — kept mistaking the linesman's bald head for the ball, as IFL Science reports.

The result: angry (or amused) soccer fans kept losing track of the game because the camera kept swiveling to zoom in on the referee's hairless head, as seen in a video uploaded to YouTube (bonus points for the excellent soundtrack).

The Almighty Buck

A Few Trick-or-Treaters in Canada Receive a Surprising Treat: Bitcoin (cointelegraph.com) 37

Cointelegraph reports: While many children dressed as ghosts, goblins, and witches last night may have been disappointed to find an inedible thin piece of cardboard left out in a goodie bag, a lucky few recognized the treat as a Bitcoin prize.

According to an October 31 tweet from Brad Mills, the crypto user filled a Halloween candy box with more than just chocolates and sweets — he also added $200 in Bitcoin (BTC) cards. Mills posted a video of him adding the two gift cards, each worth roughly 0.007 BTC following the coin's rise to $14,000, and filmed the reactions of trick or treaters in his Canadian neighborhood.

One boy in a white costume was the first to meticulously dig through the box before saying to his group of friends, "I just got a $100 Bitcoin gift card!"

Cellphones

Tesla Owner: I Butt-Dialed a $4,280 Autopilot Upgrade -- And They Haven't Refunded Me (cnbc.com) 104

CNBC reports: On September 24th, physician Dr. Ali Vaziri was unpleasantly surprised by a mobile alert from his bank, which said he had just purchased a $4,280 upgrade for his Tesla Model 3. The large transaction, he quickly surmised, was a "butt dial" or accidental purchase made through the Tesla app on his iPhone. "My phone was in my jeans," Vaziri told CNBC. "I took it out, put it on this charger that comes with your Tesla and that's it. A minute later? I got the text. I've never purchased anything through the Tesla app before...."

Moments after he received the mobile alert from his bank, Vaziri called his local Tesla store and service center. They couldn't help directly, but gave him the number for a customer service hotline. He called the number, and requested a refund. Instead of processing the doctor's refund request on the spot, the customer service rep told Vaziri to click on the refund button in his Tesla app to process his request. Vaziri informed them there was no such button in the Tesla app, just some text and a link to the refund policy. An e-mail he received from Tesla confirming the unauthorized purchase contained only vague information about a refund, and no buttons to click or links to a page where he could process a refund request either. The email, which Vaziri shared with CNBC, drove him to Tesla's support web site, which in turn told him to call his local service center.

To this date, Vaziri says, Tesla customer service has not provided him with a refund, nor has the call center provided him with so much as a confirmation number or e-mail to acknowledge his calls about the refund. Instead, he processed a stop payment request through his credit card company.

Idle

Could Our Entire Reality Be Part of a Simulation Created by Some Other Beings? (gizmodo.com.au) 203

Sam Baron, associate professor at Australian Catholic University, focuses on the connection between key topics in the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of time concerning temporal ontology.

In a recent article in Gizmodo, he answers the ultimate question: Could our entire reality be part of a simulation created by some other beings? Let's assume these extraterrestrial beings have a computer on which our universe is being "simulated". Simulated worlds are pretend worlds — a bit like the worlds on Minecraft or Fortnite, which are both simulations created by us. If we think about it like this, it also helps to suppose these "beings" are similar to us. They'd have to at least understand us to be able to simulate us. By narrowing the question down, we're now asking: is it possible we're living in a computer simulation run by beings like us? University of Oxford professor Nick Bostrom has thought a lot about this exact question. And he argues the answer is "yes". Not only does Bostrom think it's possible, he thinks there's a decent probability it's true...

According to Bostrom, if these simulated people (who are so much like us) don't realise they're in a simulation, then it's possible you and I are too. Suppose I guess we're not in a simulation and you guess we are. Who guessed best? Let's say there is just one "real" past. But these futuristic beings are also running many simulations of the past — different versions they made up. They could be running any number of simulations (it doesn't change the point Bostrom is trying to make) — but let's go with 200,000. Our guessing-game then is a bit like rolling a die with 200,000 sides. When I guess we are not simulated, I'm betting the die will be a specific number (let's make it 2), because there can only be one possible reality in which we're not simulated.

This means in every other scenario we are simulated, which is what you guessed. That's like betting the die will roll anything other than 2. So your bet is a far better one.

Professor Baron notes there's also two factors that decrease the likelihood of this hypothesis:
  • How likely is it there are beings so advanced they can run simulations with people who are "conscious" like us in the first place?
  • How likely is it such beings would run simulations even if they could? Maybe they have no interest in doing this.

"Sadly, we don't have enough evidence to help us decide."

Gizmodo doesn't indicate that professor Baron's came from a 9-year-old (as part of a series called "Curious Kids".) The 9-year-old's original wording of the question:

"Is it possible the whole observable universe is just a thing kept in a container, in a room where there are some other extraterrestrial beings much bigger than us?"


Idle

13 Scientists Troll Scientific Journal With a Bogus Paper about Earth's Black Hole (popularmechanics.com) 65

"They're trolling us... we think. But how the hell did this get published?" asks Popular Mechanics.

Slashdot reader worldofsimulacra shares their report: Scientists have uncovered a bizarre, indefensible paper that squeaked through peer review at what appears at first pass to be a legitimate medical journal... 13 listed authors from wildly different fields throw together a series of escalating falsehoods. "Recently, some scientists from NASA have claimed that there may be a black hole like structure at the centre of the earth," the abstract begins. It only gets crazier from there:

"The earth's core is the biggest system of telecommunication which exchanges waves with all DNAs and molecules of water. Imaging of DNAs on the interior of the metal of the core produces a DNA black brane with around 109 times longer than the core of the earth which is compacted and creates a structure similar to a black hole or black brane. We have shown that this DNA black brane is the main cause of high temperature of core and magnetic of earth...."

One of the theories to explain the paper is that it was generated using "peer-review-tricking" artificial intelligence, which shuffles key terms and phrases and glues them together into something almost coherent.

Apparently you can't trust everything you read in the Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences. The paper's title? "A Black Hole at the Center of Earth Plays the Role of the Biggest System of Telecommunication for Connecting DNAs, Dark DNAs and Molecules of Water on 4+N- Dimensional Manifold."

At the top of the paper, the journal has since appended a retraction, leading to a page warning "An internal investigation" has "raised sufficient evidence" that the paper is "not directly connected with the special issue Global Dermatology and contain inconsistent results...

"We apologize to our audience about this unfortunate situation."
Idle

Researcher Discusses Whether Time Travel Could Prevent a Pandemic (popularmechanics.com) 145

University of Queensland student Germain Tobar who worked with UQ physics professor Fabio Costa on a new peer-reviewed paper "says he has mathematically proven the physical feasibility of a specific kind of time travel" without paradoxes, reports Popular Mechanics: Time travel discussion focuses on closed time-like curves, something Albert Einstein first posited. And Tobar and Costa say that as long as just two pieces of an entire scenario within a closed time-like curve are still in "causal order" when you leave, the rest is subject to local free will... In a university statement, Costa illustrates the science with an analogy


"Say you travelled in time, in an attempt to stop COVID-19's patient zero from being exposed to the virus. However if you stopped that individual from becoming infected, that would eliminate the motivation for you to go back and stop the pandemic in the first place. This is a paradox, an inconsistency that often leads people to think that time travel cannot occur in our universe. [L]ogically it's hard to accept because that would affect our freedom to make any arbitrary action. It would mean you can time travel, but you cannot do anything that would cause a paradox to occur...."


But the real truth, in terms of the mathematical outcomes, is more like another classic parable: the monkey's paw. Be careful what you wish for, and be careful what you time travel for. Tobar explains in the statement:


"In the coronavirus patient zero example, you might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would. No matter what you did, the salient events would just recalibrate around you. Try as you might to create a paradox, the events will always adjust themselves, to avoid any inconsistency."

Idle

639-Year Organ Performance Changes Chords for the First Time in Seven Years (theguardian.com) 105

"Fans have flocked to a church in Germany to hear a chord change in a musical composition that lasts for 639 years," reports the BBC. "It is the first change in the piece, As Slow As Possible, in seven years."

The Guardian reports: The performance of the composition began in September 2001 at the St Burchardi church in the eastern town of Halberstadt and is supposed to end in 2640 — if all goes well.

The music piece by the American composer John Cage is played on a special organ inside the medieval church... A compressor in the basement creates energy to blow air into the organ to create a continuous sound. When a chord change happens, it's done manually. On Saturday, soprano singer Johanna Vargas and organist Julian Lembke changed the chord.

The BBC notes the score for the 639-year composition is just eight pages long. But though the piece was written in the 1980s, it wasn't until nine years after the composer's death in 1992 that anyone dared to attempt playing it. That performance then began — with a pause that lasted nearly 18 months.

The next chord change is scheduled for February 5 of the year 2022.
Transportation

Major League Baseball Games are Experiencing 'Drone Delays' (cbssports.com) 31

CBS Sports reports: Wednesday's game between the New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays was stopped in the bottom of the first because of a "drone delay." After the second base umpire pointed to something in the sky and motioned for teams to leave the field, the cameras picked up an identifiable flying object hovering over the field during the game.
CBS reports it's the third drone delay experienced by Major League Baseball this year: The first came in a Twins-Pirates game in early August, and the second happened just a week later in a game between the Red Sox and Rays...

This move isn't just a hazard for those on the field, it's actually outright illegal. The Federal Aviation Administration's rules state that drones and other "unmanned aircraft systems" are prohibited from flying within a radius of three nautical miles of any MLB stadium starting one hour before a game's scheduled start and ending one hour after the game's end. This isn't just exclusive to baseball, as it also applies to NFL games, top-tier NCAA football games and auto racing events.

Transportation

Drone Drops Hundreds of Marijuana Bags On Tel Aviv (gizmodo.com) 40

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: A drone over Tel Aviv's Rabin Square dropped hundreds of bags of weed on Thursday, setting off a mad scramble by onlookers to stock up, the Jerusalem Post reported.

According to the Post, the giveaway was orchestrated by a Telegram group called Green Drone that advocates for the legalization of marijuana throughout Israel. (Medical marijuana is legal in Israel and a major export as of May; the Ministry of Security partially decriminalized recreational marijuana use in 2017 but full legalization efforts are still being negotiated.) The group told followers on Telegram that this was just the start of an ongoing "rain of cannabis...."

The Times of Israel, however, reported that the weed-dropping drone might have had more to do with viral marketing than activism: the Green Drone channel is also a marijuana delivery service. The bags dropped also contained business cards with a contact number for potential customers... Police arrested two individuals on suspicion of having operated the drone.

Idle

How Bill Gates Celebrated Warren Buffett's 90th Birthday (cnn.com) 40

The seventh-wealthiest man in the world, Warren Buffett, turns 90 today. Famously the tycoon/philanthropist pledged to give away 90% of his wealth, founding with Bill and Melinda Gates "The Giving Pledge," a campaign urging the world's wealthiest individuals to dedicate the majority of their wealth to giving back. Over $1.2 trillion has now been pledged, with participants including Elon Musk, Ted Turner, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and Microsoft's other co-founder, Paul Allen.

CNN reports that Gates "offered a sweet and funny video tribute to his billionaire pal," who besides drinking six cans of Coke each day is also "a notorious dessert-a-holic." Doing his best Martha Stewart impression, and with Randy Newman's "You Got a Friend" playing in the background, Gates made a delicious-looking Oreo cake, complete with Buffett's face on the top, drawn in chocolate icing. In the end of the 60-second video, Gates cuts a slice, puts it on a plate with a fork, and leaves the message "Happy 90th birthday Warren" in Oreo dust...

The cake was a special tribute to Gates' friendship with Buffett. In 2016, Gates recounted a story on his blog about how he caught Buffett eating his favorite dessert for breakfast: Oreos. "One thing that was surprising to learn about Warren is that he has basically stuck to eating what he liked when he was six years old," Gates wrote. "I remember one of the first times he stayed at our house and he opened up a package of Oreos to eat for breakfast. Our kids immediately demanded they have some too. He may set a poor example for young people, but it's a diet that somehow works for him."

The editor of Forbes also joined the celebration: Next year will mark a decade for the Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy, our annual meeting of 150 or so of the world's biggest givers and greatest problem-solvers. The impact is enormous, and it wouldn't happen without today's birthday boy, 90-year-old Warren Buffett. In 2011, I pitched the most generous philanthropist ever the idea of turning our definitive wealth ranking from a static list into a club for good. Warren being Warren, he embraced it immediately, strategically and wholeheartedly, and the Summit was born...

The highlight each year is a talk that Warren and I have, usually during lunch... For Warren's big birthday, we dug through nine years of Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy video archives to find some of his most inspiring and obscure gems, [each] edited down to 90 seconds or so. Happy Birthday, Warren!

Open Source

Remembering the Golden Age of Computer User Groups (arstechnica.com) 55

Slashdot reader #16,185 wrote regularly for the newsletter of a small-town computer users group. Now they've written an article for Ars Technica reminding readers that "The Homebrew Computer Club where the Apple I got its start is deservedly famous — but it's far from tech history's only community gathering centered on CPUs." Throughout the 70s and into the 90s, groups around the world helped hapless users figure out their computer systems, learn about technology trends, and discover the latest whiz-bang applications. And these groups didn't stick to Slacks, email threads, or forums; the meetings often happened in real life. But to my dismay, many young technically-inclined whippersnappers are completely unaware of computer user groups' existence and their importance in the personal computer's development. That's a damned shame... Computer groups celebrated the industry's fundamental values: a delight in technology's capabilities, a willingness to share knowledge, and a tacit understanding that we're all here to help one another...

Two things primarily made user groups disappear: first was the Internet — and the BBSes that preceded them. If you could articulate a question, you could find a website with the answer. But computers also became easier to use. Once personal computers went mainstream, troubleshooting them stopped being an esoteric endeavor.

The typical computer user group is gone now. For the exceptions, you can find an incomplete and mostly out-of-date list via the Association of PC User Groups, though online exploration may lead you to more options. For example, the Toronto PET Users Group (TPUG) is the longest continually operating Commodore user group. Washington Apple Pi is still going strong, as is the Triangle Linux Users Group. IBM's user group, SHARE, began in the 1950s and continues to support enterprise users, though it's primarily a conference these days...

Hopefully tech will continue to inspire ways to get together with other people who share your enthusiasm, whether it's Raspberry Pi meetups, Maker days, or open source conferences such as Drupalcon or PyCon. You also continue the computer user group ethos by finding ways to help other tech enthusiasts locally. For example, Hack Club aims to teach skills to high school students. Hack Clubs are already in two percent of US high schools across 35 states and 17 countries, with about 10,000 students attending clubs and hackathons each year.

So even if computer user groups largely are a thing of the past, their benefits live on. User groups were the precursor to the open source community, based on the values of sharing knowledge and helping one another. And who knows, without user groups promoting a cooperative viewpoint, the open source community might never have taken off like it did.

The article includes photographs of the OS/2 community's magazine Extended Attributes, the M.A.C.E. Journal (for Atari users), the Commodore Eight Bit Boosters newsletter, and the 1979 publication Prog/80 ("dedicated to the serious programmer.")

And it also includes video of a 1981 visit to the Boston Computer Society by a 25-year-old Bill Gates.
Idle

A Covid-Friendly Wearable Shocks You With 450 Volts When You Touch Your Face (medium.com) 78

A reporter for Medium's tech site OneZero recently spotted an especially bizarre ad on Instagram: The ad features a GIF of a person wearing a Fitbit-style wristband, with the text "Eliminate Cravings." Across the frame from their hand sits a giant slice of cake. As the person reaches towards the cake, the wristband turns red and zaps them with electricity. You can tell it's zapping them because the whole frame vibrates, and little lightning bolts shoot out of the wristband, like in an old-school Batman movie. All that's missing is an animated "POW!"

At first, I thought it must be either a joke or a metaphor...

Nope. It turns out the Pavlok is exactly what the ad suggests: a Bluetooth-connected, wearable wristband that uses accelerometers, a connected app, and a "snap circuit" to shock its users with 450 volts of electricity when they do something undesirable. The device costs $149.99 and is available on Amazon. The company says it has over 100,000 customers who use the device to help kill food cravings, quit smoking, and to stop touching their face... I immediately saw two fundamental truths at the exact same time. Firstly, the mere existence of an automated self-flagellation wristband is proof that we've reached Peak Wearables. And second, this is the perfect device for Our Times...

Pavlok's founder says he came up with the idea for the company after paying an assistant to slap him every time he went on Facebook.... Through a Chrome extension, it can also (Doom scrollers rejoice) automatically punish actions like spending too much time on Facebook, Twitter, and other potentially time-wasting websites. It can zap you when you open too many Chrome tabs — a use case I'd love to recommend to several programmer friends... But perhaps the most relevant feature for today's world is the ability to program the device to shock you every time you touch your face. This is something which humans do alarmingly often — up to 16 times per hour. The practice has been implicated in spreading coronavirus, or at least contaminating face masks and leading to wasted PPE...

Pavlok may sound bizarre, but it's just the logical extension of an overall trend toward using tech to tweak and prod our brains into new ways of thinking... Pavlok acts as the metaphorical stick to these apps' carrots, giving you the option to beat your brain into submission instead of just tweaking it.

In 2016 Mark Cuban called Pavlok "everything but a legitimate product" in what was probably one of the least-success Shark Tank appearances ever. But Medium's reporter seems convinced it's the appropriate response to this moment in time. "I only need to look at Twitter to feel that I'm being jolted awake with a powerful electrical shock...

"The real thing feels kind of appropriate."
Apple

Steve Wozniak Turns His 70th Birthday Into a Charity Event (wozbday.com) 18

In 2000 Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak answered questions from Slashdot readers. More than 20 years later, CNET writes: Party on, Woz. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak turned 70 on Tuesday, and invited the world to his virtual birthday party. The event raised funds for singer Jewel's Inspiring Children Foundation, which provides mentorship and mental health resources for at-risk youth. And while the star-studded event is over, you can watch the replay online.

Wozniak and his wife, Janet, can be seen in party footage watching the event from their Northern California home. The celebration featured recorded performances and birthday greetings from such celebrities as William Shatner, Kristi Yamaguchi, Shaquille O'Neal, Chris Rick, Nancy Pelosi, Emmylou Harris and more.

There's now a three-hour-plus video of the party, complete with comments from those who already watched, available to view online. If you want it in shorter slices, Wozniak has been sharing brief videos from the party on his Twitter account...

The party may be over, but it was the kickoff event for "11 Days of Wozdom," a series of social media challenges, with prizes for some participants.

There's also a terrific biographical video on the site — plus a link to 24 special auctions supporting Woz's favority charity. Bid on a dinner with both Woz and comedian Drew Carey, a tour with Woz of comedian Jay Leno's classic car garage, or a private concert with Jewel that's hosted by Woz. (And there's also a meeting with Woz on Zoom, and a chance to have him record a personalized video message.)

It looks like everyone's celebrating. In 2010 Jonathan Mann, who writes a song a day, recorded the viral hit "That's Just the Woz" to celebrate Steve Wozniak's 60th birthday. This week -- now up to song #4,235 -- Mann recorded a follow-up song, also pointing his viewers to the URL for Woz's favorite charity.

"Instead of presents, help save and transform children's lives," Woz tweeted on Monday.

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