At least Fyre Festival 2 seems to have ended with a whimper - it sold tickets but then refunded them all.
Either they're counting on there being no floor to human stupidity, or they aren't expecting to get legitimate investors and it's a money-laundering scheme. If it's the first option, I'm not sure they're wrong.
Conjugal visit leads to two ruined black turtleneck sweaters.
But just think how many diagnoses you can get from the minute amounts of specimens on said sweaters.
Incidentally, after being on this site on the same machine not ten minutes ago, I am now getting the error (got a couple of times yesterday too):
This site can't provide a secure connection
unfogged.com uses an unsupported protocol.
ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH
Mobile works when I get this error.
6: Now I'm diagnosing you as a germaphobe. Get in there, you pansy.
144 diagnoses is a lot for one conjugal visit.
Happens if you don't clean the couch first.
Heebie, you demonstrated excellent comic timing in this post!
Minivet: can you tell us what browser and version you're using, on what OS and version? Are both up-to-date with patches/updates?
I access unfogged with Google Chrome on modern Ubuntu and chromeos, both kept up-to-date near-daily, and have no problem.
At a certain point, formerly honest people will have to turn to fraud to earn a living. We should just have a revolution.
10: Windows and Chrome, and I'm updated on both, couldn't say the version atm.
One of my takeaways after reading Bad Blood and seeing how some people with tech start-up experience responded to the whole fiasco is that there's an alternative world where Theranos could have kept their lies to the kind of statements that rarely bring criminal charges and then "pivoted" to some service that was much less "visionary" but had a chance of working. I saw a lot of "except for the outright criminal fraud, this is very similar to a startup I worked for" takes on social media anyway.
I got the impression after the trial was over that there are still some rich people who think Holmes got a bad rap, it could have worked, the nay-sayers hated tech, etc. and they still have money to burn.
" the company's technology will use a laser to scan blood, saliva or urine from pets and "analyze the samples on a molecular level". The technology then would require only a matter of seconds to detect illnesses, cancer or infections."
Conceptually such a thing exists (Raman spectroscopy), just not on the scale or sensitivity they describe. I believe that's how Holmes duped everyone the first time around- drop some plausible sounding science jargon in the pitch, investors can look it up and superficially think it looks legit because they don't understand the details. This time around I'm sure they'll be asking AI if the tech is legit, gee I wonder what it will say.
Haha I did a quick search and that's exactly what they're doing. I've been talking to a real company that uses this and the scale they're developing, which is an advance in the field, is orders of magnitude away from "drop of blood in a few seconds."
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/10/business/HaemanthusPatent.html
I forgot the family name, but there's some prominent family in venture capital where I think either the son or grandson of the guy who made the family initial fortune was a big time Holmes supporter. Not sure about the other family members but this one guy was in the press a lot.
It's too bad George Schultz and Henry Kissinger missed out on this exciting opportunity.
"They cannot arrest a husband and wife for the same crime."
Or can they?
14: Urgh, I was assuming MALDI, which seems still implausible (again, sample wouldn't realistically be expected to include the analyte plus no practical way to quantitate without lots of heavy labeled standards) but less so.
"Fool me twice, wow you're pretty good at fooling, respect."
Speaking of urine, Lisinopril is apparently the 3rd most commonly prescribed medication in the United States and it isn't metabolized in the body. So you don't use it, you just rent it. There's probably other drugs that are similar, so we could all just save our pee for recycling. We'd save money and keep the fish from growing breasts or whatever they get from the urinate.
Plus, why are we paying for ammonia?
I would like venture capital or a nomination for Surgeon General.
Maybe it's all entirely honest and feasible except for one tiny bit of fraud, and that is that they are playing very fast and loose with the definition of "drop" (they mean "150 ml sample").
There is a Larry Niven story that involves this technology - the main character is a psychopath whose illness is kept in check by medication, all he has to do is one pinprick blood test a week after which his desktop blood testing machine lights up either a green bulb ("you are NOT off your head this week") or a red bulb ("you ARE off your head this week") and bad things start happening when the red bulb breaks simultaneously with his medication going out of date or something, so neither bulb lights up, and he just assumes that it's the green bulb that's broken because that's the one that normally lights up.
I know everyone already knows this, but damn, this is not the dystopian cyberpunk future I was expecting. Just yesterday I saw an ad for a phone ap that you can supposedly use to diagnose your sick houseplants and get recommendations for treatment with everyday commodities lying around your house. In William Gibson's Virtual Light one of the mentioned uses for the enhanced reality sunglasses macguffin is for a landscape architect to view gardens and get the exact species and variety of each plant in the display. Thankfully, his prediction that "tribal blackwork" tattoos would remain broadly popular did not come to pass.
Urine recycling was part of Kevin Costner's dystopia.
I think I don't even need to purify the medications out of the urine. I just need to reduce (substantially) the salts and other things you piss out because they are bad for you. Then you can get the medicine back by drinking your own urine. It's not "health" if it isn't disgusting.
27: the original cyberpunk novel was about the ability of AI chatbots to drive middle-aged American men completely off their heads, to the point where they team up with addled drug-addicted criminals and women with extensive surgical enhancements to do utterly insane and ultimately self-destructive things.
I admit that there are fewer Rastafarians currently in orbit than the novel predicted, or indeed than I would like to see.
How many Rastafarians would you like to see in orbit?
I think you'd need at least 800-1000 for a functioning Rasta community. If you only put like 3 or 4 in orbit, you don't have a sustainable Rasta presence. What you have is just space, temporarily occupied by some visiting Rastas.
Baby steps! We sent a Buddhist reiki coach from Antigua and Barbuda for an hour or so. I also just learned from Wikipedia that in 2021, "Cameron Bess became the youngest American at age 23 [...], first to go with a parent, first openly furry, and first openly pansexual to fly to space."
So there's that.
first openly furry
[Ham the space chimp snorts derisively]
Ham would also count as pansexual given that he was Pan (troglodytes) and therefore, presumably, attracted to other Pan.
33: good god I bet she was insufferable as a finalist at Aberdeen University having been to space. 10x gap year bore.
(The only time I met someone who's been to space I avoided talking about it because I presume he gets asked all the time and we stuck to Linux.)
Goddamnit. I got here at 8:00 am this morning for faculty meetings. It turns out they don't start until 3 pm today. The reason I got my times mixed up is that I printed out the 2024 schedule by mistake. Also I missed a meeting yesterday, again, because I printed out the 2024 schedule by mistake.
37: ...but I've never been to me.
38: that reminds me of when I was trying to schedule my preliminary exams in a PhD program and I was having a lot of trouble finding a day that would work for all four committee members. At one point, one wrote back to say that a specific date would work, then a few minutes later emailed again to say they'd been looking at the wrong year and the date wouldn't work after all.
43: That reminds me of when I was trying to defend my dissertation, and the external committee member told me to forge his signature because he was out of the country for the next four months.
38: If Trump did something like that, people would be calling him senile.
35: Once you've piloted a spacecraft, you probably move up from dating other chimps directly to Tinder-matching with hairy women. He did retire to North Carolina.
"Keisha and her daughter, Ana, are descendants of the ancient Atlanteans, a lineage long thought lost to history. Raised on Earth, they always felt a deep connection to the ocean, spending countless hours swimming in its depths, feeling the pulse of the planet in the rhythm of the waves. But their destiny lay far beyond the shores of their home. It was in the stars, where the echoes of their ancestors called out to them, urging them to rediscover the forgotten powers of their lineage. One fateful night, while standing on a secluded beach under a blanket of stars, the ocean before them began to glow with an otherworldly light. From the depths, a ship of pure light and water emerged--a vessel crafted by their ancestors, hidden for centuries until the time was right. The ship, known as *AquaStar*, was a marvel of Atlantean technology, capable of traversing the cosmic oceans of space."
I went to a conference where one of my colleagues mistakenly confused Music Row and Music Valley and booked a hotel in completely the wrong place. When he noticed the problem it seemed like it would be too late to cancel. But when he called it turned out that he'd booked the wrong hotel but *also* the wrong year, and so could easily cancel and book in the correct hotel instead.
Omaha just elected a Democratic mayor. Omaha has elected a lot of Democrats, but the mayor has been a the same Republican for 12 years.
||
The Taco (for Trump Always Chickens Out) trade notched up its latest win yesterday|>
My doll factory that I started the Thursday before last Thursday will now go broke.
https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/horn-africa/ethiopiaeritrea/ethiopia-and-eritrea-slide-closer-war-amid-tigray-upheaval
he was out of the country for the next four months
Remember when that was considered a valid excuse? Those were good times.