Month: February 2023

Janet Vertesi writes about trying to go to Disneyland with her family while remaining anonymous: “Once upon a time, you could just go to Disneyland. You could get tickets at the gates, stand in line for rides, buy food and tchotchkes, even pick up copies of your favorite Disney movies at a local store. It wasn’t even that long ago. The last time I visited, in 2010, the company didn’t record what I ate for dinner or detect that I went on Pirates of the Caribbean five times. It was none of their business. But sometime in the last few years, tracking and tracing became their business. Like many corporations out there, Walt Disney Studios spent the last decade transforming into a data company.”

$500 million Ponzi scheme preyed on Mormons

The Las Vegas attorney, then 49, had been anticipating this visit for months, he would tell an FBI hostage negotiator. He’d already drafted letters to his wife and four children, explaining what he could and describing how much he loved them. On this Thursday in March, Beasley knew his time was up. He placed the letters upstairs on the desk in his office. Then, alone in the house, he went to the front door. One of the agents — identified only as “J.M.” in a detailedcriminal complaint filed March 4 in the U.S. District Court of Nevada — opened his suit jacket and flashed his badge. Beasley stepped fully into the doorway. He held a loaded pistol against his head.

Continue reading “Going to Disneyland without giving them your data”

Authorities in Western Australia are searching for a radioactive capsule, which they believe fell off a truck while being transported. The capsule is smaller than a penny, while the search zone is a stretch of vast desert highway about as long as California’s coastline. The capsule, a small silver cylinder measuring 0.3 inches by 0.2 inches, came from a Rio Tinto mine and formed a part of a sensor used in mining. It contains a small amount of cesium-137 and is dangerously radioactive, according to the authorities. An hour of exposure at about a meter away is the equivalent of having 10 X-rays, and prolonged contact can cause skin burns, acute radiation sickness and cancer, they said.

The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is coining new words to describe our world

From Clive Thompson: “The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is a project started by two artists and anthropologists, Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante. They founded it in 2014 specifically for the purpose of collecting, translating and creating a new vocabulary for the Anthropocene. In essence, they devote themselves to coining new words to help describe the new dislocations, emotions, and phenomena being caused by global warming and global weirding. They’ve traveled around the world, setting up an official-looking table — at which they sit, often wearing matching uniforms — and talk to members of the public about their climate experiences, working with them to craft new words.”

Continue reading “Australians scour the desert for radioactive capsule”