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Lost albums
Steve Hyden goes long on lost albums:
These are the three kinds of “lost” albums I am interested in:
1. Albums that remain unreleased, either by artist’s choice or record-label maleficence.
2. Albums that were unreleased for a time but then came out after they achieved iconic
“lost” status, to the point where even now they still seem “lost” even though they technically aren’t anymore.3. Albums that might not actually exist.
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Hampsters getting an MRI
Veterinary medicine has to get creative to provide treatment. Here’s a video of a hampster getting an MRI.
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The bankification of everything
Every company offers credit card now. This has led to every company becoming an unregulated bank.
Upward of 40 percent of Americans now pay for basic items like groceries and health care using borrowed money — and this excludes credit cards. A third of younger Americans hold their savings on nonbank tech platforms like Venmo, and industries from retail to transportation derive anywhere from 14 percent to half of their profits from partnerships with credit card companies.
While this new type of financialization takes many different forms, the endgame is the same: Most major corporations now aspire to become unregulated banks, opening up new avenues to make even more money hand over fist. Banks operating credit cards are the highest-profit-margin enterprises in the economy. Every company wants a share of the loot, amassed from high fees and low overhead costs.
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Taco Bell 50K marathon
In Denver, someone figured out a 50 km loop that stops at 10 Taco Bells. Naturally, you would create an ultra marathon involving eating Taco Bell menu items.
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Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman and MJ Lenderman broke up. Then she had to record a love song for him
Karly Hartzman wries an essay about her breakup, yet having to record a love song. It’s full of lyricism and captures a certain feeling.
I filled my Marvin the Martian cup with tequila on our neighbors’ porch next door. While swaying on the wooden porch swing, I ate collard greens with pork-jowl bits that my bandmate Xandy brought to the party. I nursed several pieces of homemade cornbread.
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Everynoise, the music genre explorer
Everynoise, the music genre explorer. You click a genre and get a sample. Selections skew electronic, but still fun.
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Geoguessing
Did you know that there are competitions surrounding identifying a certain geographic, location, a.k.a.geoguessing? Like, could you identify a location in 30 seconds based on a single image?
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Covid altering immune systems?
One idea is that Covid may be altering our immune systems.
Malgorzata Gasperowicz, a Calgary based developmental biologist, says that if immunity debt fully explained rising infection counts we’d expect to see a uniform rebound across all pathogens. But we don’t, she says.
For instance, a 2024 study of more than 4000 viral cases from Ontario, Canada,4 found higher rates of bacterial infections in people recovering from covid-19 than in those recovering from influenza or RSV—although study groups weren’t perfectly matched by age or clinical setting, limiting direct comparisons.
Jeimy says that many infants and toddlers admitted to hospital with rare infections since 2022 weren’t yet born when pandemic restrictions were in place, and they therefore couldn’t be experiencing immunity debt. They were, however, likely exposed to SARS-CoV-2.
Wolfgang Leitner, chief of the Innate Immunity Section at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), speculates that covid-19 may somehow impair the immune system’s “memory” of past infections, potentially making even healthy people more vulnerable to future pathogens. He wonders whether the virus leaves lasting scars on the immune system’s T cell defences. “But that’s just (my) hypothesis,” he emphasises in an email.
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Will o the wisps explained
We may finally have a full explanation into how will ‘o wisps work. We knew methane and other swamp gasses were involved, but how did they ignite?
As with the static electricity produced by stroking hair, fur, or carpet in the right conditions, the microlightning results from a buildup of opposing charges until the field created is strong enough to make them leap a gap.
High-speed imaging reveals the source of the charge as the surface of tiny bubbles of methane, which become either positively or negatively charged as they move through water, split, and combine. The charge concentration appears to survive the bubbles’ escape to the air. When the spark jumps the gap between a neighboring positive and negatively charged bubble, it leads to non-thermal oxidation, releasing energy from the chemical reaction between methane and oxygen, but mostly as blue-violet light rather than heat.
