James Frey's Blog, page 83

Ripe giant sperm found in female ostracod

from The Evening Standard 100-million-year-old giant sperm found fossilised in amber could be oldest ever by HARRIET BREWIS An international team of palaeontologists unearthed the “spectacular find”, 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 […]

Eaten By Mycelium

from VICE This ‘Living’ Coffin Uses Mushrooms to Compost Dead Bodies The ‘Living Cocoon’ has already been used in one burial, at the Hague By Becky Ferreira 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 […]

The Oldest Foot

from AFP via Yahoo! News 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 […]

The Cosmic Brain

from Futurism 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.” by VICTOR TANGERMANN It’s 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 […]

Robinhood Insanity

from Vanity Fair “It’s a Whole Other Level of Insanity”: 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. “It doesn’t really matter what the underlying value of the […]

Toots Hibbert Gone

from DEADLINE 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 ‘Raleigh’ Gordon and Nathaniel ‘Jerry’ in […]

Forrest Fenn Gone

from artnet 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. by Sarah Cascone 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 […]

Lust In The Heart and a Fatty On The Roof

from The New York Post Jimmy Carter admits son smoked pot with Willie Nelson on White House roof By Kate Sheehy Former President Jimmy Carter admits in a new documentary that one of his sons smoked pot with Willie Nelson on the roof of the White House. Carter, 95, was asked about the legendary country crooner’s previous accounts of puffing […]

As Slow As Possible

from OBSERVER John Cage’s 639-Year-Long Organ Concert Attracts a Crowd in Germany By Helen Holmes Artists of many different mediums have always loved to play with the concepts of time and duration, and legendary composer and conceptualist John Cage is no different. On September 5, 2001, one of the composer’s final projects was launched to the world: the slowest […]

GBS-3

from NAUTILUS Welcome to the Next Level of Bullshit The language algorithm GPT-3 continues our descent into a post-truth world. BY RAPHAËL MILLIÈRE One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” These are the opening words of the short book On Bullshit, written by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt. […]