Haha! Lucky riders on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland were treated to a live Jack Sparrow animatronics performance yesterday by Johnny Depp. He made a surprise visit to the park as part of a PR stunt. It’s fun to hear the passengers as they realize that the real Johnny Depp is standing right in front of them.
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Johnny Depp surprises Pirates of the Caribbean riders as live animatronic at Disneyland
When long-lived websites close down, they often give little notice, sending archivists scrambling to rescue its work for posterity. About.com, the venerable topic-mining hive abruptly put to death, seems to be a counter-example: a faceless mountain of bland, undifferentiated, half-plagiarized content that no-one seems sad to see vanish . Even its own CEO is plainly contemptuous of it. That’s why Vogel tells Business Insider he’s going to shut the site down as of May 2nd. “I got a phone call from Joey Levin, who is the CEO of IAC [About.com Group’s parent company]. He asked, ‘What do you think of About.com?'” Vogel told BI. “My answer — in perfect arrogance — was ‘I don’t.’ Who thinks of About.com? Nobody.” But not all of About.com is going away necessarily. Vogel says he will take parts of the website and turn them into separate niche verticals, then announce a new name for the overarching brand at a conference in New Orleans. “A year ago we were a general interest site,” Vogel told The Drum in March. “We were not growing. In fact, we were kind of shrinking. We had great content, but we were doing the wrong thing.” About.com was one of the earliest big web successes to cash out: to Prime Media in 2000 for $690m, then to the New York Times in 2005 for $410m, IAC in 2012 for $300m, and now to the deep void for sweet fuck all—but also the hope that the staff and infrastructure can be used to launch something new. “I’m not going to be the guy who ruined About.com,” Vogel told Business Inside. “ It’s already ruined, so this is all upside here. ”
Humans discard a trillion single-use plastic bags every year. If you were a wax worm, this statistic would make you drool. The caterpillar loves to eat them. From Atlas Obscura : Frederica Bertocchini, a biologist at the Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology in Spain, noticed some wax worms had managed to eat their way through the plastic bags they were being kept in. While other organisms can take weeks or months to break down even the smallest amount of plastic, the wax worm can get through more—in a far shorter period of time. The researchers let 100 wax worms chow down on a plastic grocery bag, and after just 12 hours they’d eaten about 4 percent of the bag, according to findings published Monday in the journal Current Biology. That may not sound like much, but that’s a vast improvement over fungi, which weren’t able to break down a noticeable amount of polyethylene after six months. Image of wax worm: skeeze/Pixabay
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This worm eats plastic bags
Quelli che il Calcio (That which is Football) is one of Italy’s top sports broadcasts and it is played in the country’s prisons; it has a ticker that you can send SMSes to that then show up on screen. (more…)
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Mafia used the text-message ticker at the bottom of a sports broadcast to get messages to mob bosses
50 armed men in camou flak jackets driving armored cars cordoned off the roads leading to a transportation company’s office in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay (a “smugglers’ haven in the border region with Brazil and Argentina”), blew the entire face of the building up with demolition equipment, stole an estimated $40M and escaped by motorboat up the Panama River. (more…)
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In Paraguay, the "heist of the century" is blamed on a notorious Brazilian prison-gang
Robots (or spiders, or crawlers) are little computer programs that search engines use to scan and index websites. Robots.txt is a little file placed on webservers to tell search engines what they should and shouldn’t index. The Internet Archive isn’t a search engine, but has historically obeyed exclusion requests from robots.txt files. But it’s changing its mind, because robots.txt is almost always crafted with search engines in mind and rarely reflects the intentions of domain owners when it comes to archiving. Over time we have observed that the robots.txt files that are geared toward search engine crawlers do not necessarily serve our archival purposes. Internet Archive’s goal is to create complete “snapshots” of web pages, including the duplicate content and the large versions of files. We have also seen an upsurge of the use of robots.txt files to remove entire domains from search engines when they transition from a live web site into a parked domain, which has historically also removed the entire domain from view in the Wayback Machine. In other words, a site goes out of business and then the parked domain is “blocked” from search engines and no one can look at the history of that site in the Wayback Machine anymore. We receive inquiries and complaints on these “disappeared” sites almost daily. A few months ago we stopped referring to robots.txt files on U.S. government and military web sites for both crawling and displaying web pages (though we respond to removal requests sent to info@archive.org). As we have moved towards broader access it has not caused problems, which we take as a good sign. We are now looking to do this more broadly. An excellent decision. To be clear, they’re ignoring robots.txt even if you explicitly identify and disallow the Internet Archive. It’s a splendid remember that nothing published on the web is ever meaningfully private, and will always go on your permanent record.
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Internet Archive to ignore robots.txt directives
I subscribe to the Humans at Sea YouTube channel because it often has interesting videos like this one about a cargo ship’s security team firing on Somali pirates trying to board.
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Somali pirates VS cargo ship’s security guards
The deceptively simple Collatz Conjecture is one of mathematics’ most difficult puzzles. Alex Bellos shows off a cool rendering by Edmund Harris that looks like a beautiful life form from the sea. (more…)
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Mathematical conjecture generates beautiful lifelike form
https://streamable.com/ydbh1 Sometimes I suspect that Capybaras are horses that haven’t yet realized they’ve been transformed into giant gerbils.
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Capybaras relaxing in a spring-fed hot tub
Stealing phones at Coachella is nothing new. My daughter had hers stolen a few years ago, and when I mentioned it to someone I ran into at the supermarket, she said her son’s phone had been stolen that year as well. And then a stranger who overheard us piped in that her son had also lost his phone to an “Apple picker,” as she referred to the thief. But this year, when a gentleman from New York swept through the festival picking phones from oblivious Coachella goers, a few people turned to Find My iPhone for help. The app led them to 36-year-old Reinaldo De Jesus Henao with a backpack stuffed with phones. According to NBC San Diego : The crime spree was discovered when several people noticed their phones were missing and activated the “Find My Phone” feature, police said. Those signals led the victims to Henao. Security guards detained him and when Indio police arrived they found more than 100 phones in Henao’s backpack, according to police. Some of the phones were returned to the victims that day or the next. Image by iphonedigital
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Man steals over 100 phones at Coachella, busted by Find My iPhone