What did you think of Twitter Data Dash?

The Guardian describes it as "a Super Nintendo-style browser game that recaps Twitter's private policy."

And the Verge applauds the game — released Wednesday — for its "delightful pixel art aesthetic." "Welcome to PrivaCity!" reads a description of the game on the site. "Get your dog, Data, safely to the park.

"Dodge cat ads, swim through a sea of DMs, battle trolls, and learn how to take control of your Twitter experience along the way...."

The game itself is a pretty straightforward side-scrolling platformer. Each level is themed around what I can best describe as Twitter Things — one features cats wearing ad boards, another has you avoiding trolls — and your goal is to collect five bones as quickly as you can. If you get the bones, the game will explain something about Twitter's privacy settings related to that level and even offer a button linking to Twitter's settings. When you beat the cat ad level, for example, you'll see a message about how Twitter customizes your experience on the platform and points to where you can turn personalized ads on or off....

Twitter introduced the game as part of a bigger push around its privacy policy, which the company has rewritten. "We've emphasized clear language and moved away from legal jargon," Twitter said on its Safety account.
Gizmodo calls the game "adorable," but also "buggy". And they also have some quibbles with its ultimate message: It's a bit rich that Twitter made a game about avoiding faceless advertisers when the platform is actively doing everything it can to make ads tougher to avoid....

[A]fter watching our personas bounce from level to level with our lil blue dog in tow, it became clear that this game is less for us — or any Twitter user, really — and more for the company itself. It's a way to paper over uncomfortable topics like "privacy" and "consent" and "ownership of our personal data" with a lil blue dog, collecting lil bones by hopping across lil stages. Just promise you won't think about where those bones came from in the first place.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: He was the co-publisher of the first popular digital culture magazine, MONDO 2000, from 1989–1993. Now as R. U. Sirius approaches his 70th birthday, a San Francisco-based writer conducts a rollicking interview for the Berlin-based Spike Art Magazine. ("I wanted to speak with someone who had weathered the shakedown of history with art, humour, and a dose of healthy delusion. Or derision. Whatever arrived first...")

That interview itself was star-crossed. ("What came first, R.U.'s stroke or the Omicron surge? As I recovered from a bout of corona, R.U. fell ill with his own strain.. ") But eventually they did discuss the founding of that influential cyberculture magazine. (Editor Jude Milhon is credited with coining the word "cypherpunk" for an early crytography-friendly group co-founded by EFF pioneer John Gilmore.) Asked about the magazine's original vision, Sirius says "I was pretty much diverted by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson and their playful, hopeful futurisms, their whole shebang about evolutionary brain circuits being opened up by drugs and technology."


I needed something to get me out of bed at the end of the 1970s. I mean, punk was great – rock and roll was great – but it wasn't inspiring any action. I remember my friends stole some giant lettering from a sign at a gas station and some of it hung behind the couch in our living room where we took whatever drugs were around and tossed glib nihilisms back and forth. The letters read "ROT".... I couldn't sink any deeper into that couch, so there was nowhere to go except up into outer space.

The surrealism and so forth were influences that travelled with me when I moved to California to create this new thing based on psychedelics, technology, and incorrigible irreverence that eventually became Mondo 2000.


It's a funny interview. ("The 'R.U. a Cyberpunk' page from an issue of Mondo is the only thing most people below a certain age have ever seen from the magazine and we were taking the piss out of ourselves....") They scrupulously avoid mentioning Mondo's undeniable influence on the early days of Wired. But inevitaby the conversation comes back around to that seminal question: whither cyberpunk?


Q: The internet, which was a prime source of Mondo subject matter, is home to many eyes, rabbit holes, and agents of algorithmic manipulation. Where is cyberpunk culture alive and well in our contemporary moment? Are you still invested and engaged with cyberpunk as a means of exploring radical possibilities and ideas...?

RUS: [T]here's not really a cyberpunk movement... Surrealism was a movement for a number of years because an anguished control freak named André Breton maintained it in various formations. We didn't have that person, and if we had, he or she or they probably would have been laughed out of the sandbox for the attempt....

I'll remain influenced by playful spontaneity from ancient 20th-century moments not because of any dedication, but only because that's probably the only way I was ever going to be able to write or create. I lack rigor and once declared it a sign of death.


And Sirius jokes at the end that "usually my attitude is that the world today is bloated with people opinionizing so, this interview is a mistake!"

In 1972, photo prints that developed before your eyes were "downright magical," argues Fast Company — "and still meaningful today."

A new article at Fast Company points out that while Polaroid went bankrupt twice, and stopped making cameras in 2007, "Then an unexpected thing happened: It turned out that even Polaroid couldn't kill Polaroid." Even as instant photography's eulogies were being written, a band of enthusiasts known as The Impossible Project bought the last Polaroid factory that hadn't been hastily dismantled and started producing film packs again. The task required reformulating its own chemistry from scratch, and it was years until the results reached the vicinity of original Polaroid quality. Fans were very patient.

Eventually, the Impossible Project and Polaroid came under the same ownership, adopted Polaroid as the unified brand, and started making instant cameras again. The new models start at $100 and look a lot like that 1977 OneStep, even when they're adorably miniaturized. It's almost as if Polaroid's years in limbo were a bad dream.... Polaroid and several smaller companies refurbish old models, replacing worn parts and otherwise returning them to optimum performance. Repairing an SX-70 generally involves permanently removing its leather, but replacement skins are available in an array of styles, from the traditional to the psychedelic.

Increasingly, yesteryear's Polaroid cameras are springing back to life in surprising ways. Wisconsin-based Retrospekt not only revives old models, but also encases antique innards in new plastic shells, allowing it to sell branding crossovers such as Malibu Barbie and Pepsi-themed Polaroid cameras. Hong Kong's Mint offers a camera called the SLR670 that's really a restored SX-70 accompanied by a gizmo that plugs into the flash port to allow for manual settings. And Open SX-70 is a project to smarten up the SX-70 by replacing its 1970s circuit board with a tiny Arduino computer.
Other things I learned from the article:

• "Each film pack contained its own battery, so the camera would never run out of juice at an inopportune moment."
• Kodak was forced out of the instant photography market in 1986 by a Polaroid patent infringement suit in which Polaroid won $925 million in damages.
• Edwin Land's "final gambit to revolutionize photography" was 1977's wildly unpopular Polavision instant home movies.
• There's a 1974 ad for the cameras narrated by Laurence Olivier.

Streaming right now on Hulu: a three-hour live special in which two members of something called the "Red Bull Air Force" try to make aviation history, reports People: On Sunday, April 24, Aikins and Farrington will try to switch planes mid-air in a stunt at Sawtooth Airport in Eloy, Arizona, that can be seen exclusively on Hulu, according to a press release from Red Bull. The planes will be "completely empty" and facing the ground when Luke Aikins and Andy Farrington attempt the daring switch, which will air during a three-hour livestream event.

To complete the feat, Aikins and Farrington will fly a pair of Cessna 182 single-seat aircraft up to 14,000 feet before putting them into a vertical nosedive and jumping out, with the goal of skydiving into each other's planes.

The cousins will stop the planes' engines and aim them toward the ground as they complete the stunt. A custom airbrake with the ability to hold the planes in a controlled-descent terminal velocity speed of 140 mph will also be utilized to complete the trick. After catching up to the opposing stuntman's plane, Aikins and Farrington will enter the cockpits and turn the planes back on as normal, piloting them to land.

Aikins is an experienced skydiver, having completed more than 21,000 jumps throughout his career. Farrington, meanwhile, has completed 27,000 jumps.
"I call it more calculated than crazy," Aikins says in an interview with the web site Complex. "We work really hard to make sure that everything's going to be okay. We don't flip a coin and fingers crossed and hope it all works out. We mitigate the risk down to something that's acceptable and what's acceptable to me."

Slashdot reader alaskana98 writes: In what has become a stubborn sibling to the 'Face on Mars' phenomenon, the legend of the Dark Knight alien satellite has persisted for years and is the fascinating story of a seemingly mundane NASA photo tied together with reports of seemingly mysterious radio waves captured in the early days of radio, all combining to make the ultimate space conspiracy theory.

It goes something like this — an ancient alien space probe, dubbed the 'Dark Knight, has been long orbiting Earth and covertly monitoring its blissfully unaware inhabitants for mysterious purposes for roughly 10,000 years. Flash forward to the 1899, where technological pioneer Nikola Tesla, while experimenting with radio technology in his Colorado laboratory supposedly captured mysterious emanations from an unearthly object. Later in the 1920's, Norwegian engineer Jørgen Hals found that radio signals he transmitted were being echoed back to him a few seconds later, something called 'long delayed echoes' — still unexplained to this day. It has been proposed that these echoes were signals being relayed back to earth by something called a 'Bracewell Probe', a hypothetical automated spacecraft sent out with the goal of making contact with other intelligent species.

Flash forward to 1998, an unassuming photo from the STS-88 mission in 1998 to attach the U.S. module to the Russian portion of the ISS captured a tantalizing glimpse of an unnaturally geometric shape menacingly loitering toward the bottom of the frame. To true believers, this was evidence of an ancient probe keeping tabs on the earthly locals. Combined, these disparate events swirl together to create the stuff of dreams for the ardent conspiracy theorist and even the causal sci-fi buff. Ultimately, the object in the STS photo was most likely a thermal cover. The radio waves Tesla heard? Likely natural radio emisions of a natural or terestial source.

Space.com took a deep dive into this myth and explored how it — and the - dark knight myth has taken a hold on the imaginations of those who find themselves peering out into the inky blackness of the night and wonder to themselves "are we being watched from above"?

Slashdot reader mmanciop reminded us that Ubuntu released a new version of its "circle of friends" logo this week (which its designer says gives it "a more contemporary look and feel.")

From the Ubuntu blog: We proudly present to you the transformation of the Circle of Friends logo for Ubuntu. The new logo isn't a revolution; rather, it's an evolution of the Circle of Friends. As you can see at the top of the post, the classic white-on-orange colour scheme hasn't changed. But the new version sports sleek lines which bind the Circle of Friends even more closely together.

While it is important to have a respectful continuity with the previous Circle of Friends, the updated version is leaner, more focused, more sophisticated. It also makes a little more sense that the heads are now inside the circle, facing each other and connecting more directly. The rectangular orange tag is a break from the conventional square or circle, as it allows for the boldness of the orange to express itself and provides a recognisable colourful mark across media. Finally, the logo moves from a tiny superscript to a large, dynamic and leading presence.

Some might wonder why we had to touch the Ubuntu logo at all. As one can imagine, it is a daunting honour to work on something so many of us have such a strong connection to. But in the end, a logo should match what it represents. Similar to how Ubuntu continues to evolve and adapt to new uses in technology, its logo should follow suit to encapsulate and reflect such ongoing change.
For comparison, here's the original logo.

Share your reactions in the comments. (For example, how do you think it compares to other logos?) Do you like it more or less than, say, the logo for Raku?

SFGate reports: The largest plane ever built has been destroyed at an airport outside Kyiv, Ukraine Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba said Sunday....

The Antonov An-225 Mriya was built in Ukraine in 1985 when the nation was still controlled by the Soviet Union. It has six turbofan engines and is the heaviest aircraft ever built. It was created as a strategic airlift cargo craft, carrying Soviet space orbiters, but was later purchased by Antonov Airlines. It's since been used to airlift oversized cargo and large loads of emergency aid during natural disasters....

Although Kuleba's tweet confirmed the plane's demise, Antonov says it is still gathering information on the massive plane's fate.

"We are all cranks now...." argues a new article on Gawker (relaunched last July). That is, we're all just like yester-year's "obsessive writers of letters to the editor, the meticulous hoarders of correspondence, the avid collectors of fine and rare grudges...."

"I have not, since my father brought home a Compaq Presario in 1995 and plugged it into our phone line, encountered one pocket of space in all of the World Wide Web that does not, to some degree or another, crankify all who inhabit it...." [N]owadays, saying something deeply unwell about an article you don't like to thousands of people is as trivial as ordering a coffee. And if the internet in general has lowered these barriers, social media has gone a step further. People who never set out to be cranks in the first place are actively incentivized to do so. This isn't just because whenever you post you get a thrilling little tally of all the people who agree with you, it's because of how these platforms are designed to maximize engagement. The ideal poster for social media companies is one who posts often, who posts stridently, and who responds to as much stuff as possible.

So, to be on Twitter or Facebook is to sit in a room while someone holds up random pieces of stimulus and demands your appraisal of each. What do we reckon of this? Okay, how about this? And this? What's your view here? Were you to design a machine to turn otherwise normal, healthy people into cranks — a kind of crankification engine, if you like — you would probably arrive at something like these platforms.

Of course, Twitter and Facebook don't crankify their users out of malice, they do it to turn a profit, which may actually be worse. When the cranks of yore would write a tirade spanning several faxes to their local member of parliament about a hedge that was bothering them, they did this for no-one but themselves. This is not the case for the Neo-crank. When we use our finite capacity for wonder to publicly opine about fictional teens using drugs on a television show, or people reading in bars, or one American girl leaving her fake-sounding college to attend a different fake-sounding college, a company is making bank off it. To put it another way, the Silicon Valley robber-barons are getting rich off the uncompensated labor of yeoman cranks, who till the posting fields in the sweltering heat of the discourse until their brains give out.... [T]his kind of relentless churn of opinion, this unceasing urge to prosecute our case on things we hadn't even heard about an hour before, this gamification of being right — which is all the life of a crank really boils down to — is a deeply unhealthy way of interacting with the world around us.

For one thing, it robs us of our genuine curiosity. The paradox of the crank is that while they hold opinions on everything, they aren't particularly curious about anything.

"It may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious," OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever tweeted Wednesday.

Futurism says that after republishing that remark, "the responses came rolling in, with some representing the expected handwringing about sentient artificial intelligence, but many others calling bull." "Every time such speculative comments get an airing, it takes months of effort to get the conversation back to the more realistic opportunities and threats posed by AI," UNSW Sidney AI researcher Toby Walsh chimed in....

Independent sociotechnologist Jürgen Geuter, who goes by the pseudonym "tante" online, quipped in response to Sutskever's tweet that "it may also be that this take has no basis in reality and is just a sales pitch to claim magical tech capabilities for a startup that runs very simple statistics, just a lot of them...."

Leon Dercynski, an associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, ran with the same idea. "It may be that there's a teapot orbiting the Sun somewhere between Earth and Mars," he bantered. "This seems more reasonable than Ilya's musing, in fact, because the apparatus for orbit exists, and we have good definitions of teapots...."

These critics, it should be noted, are not wrong to point out the outlandishness of Sutskever's claim — it was not only a departure for OpenAI and its chief scientist, but also a pretty unusual comment to make, given that up to this point, most who work in and study AI believe that we're many years away from creating conscious AI, if indeed we ever do.

Sutskever, for his part, seems unbothered by the controversy.

"Ego is (mostly) the enemy," he said Friday morning.

"People are still paying between $5,000 and $50,000 to attend the annual flagship TED conference. In 2021," notes The Drift magazine, noting last year's event was held in Monterey, California. "Amid wildfires and the Delta surge, its theme was 'the case for optimism.'"

The magazine makes the case that over the last decade TED talks have been "endlessly re-articulating tech's promises without any serious critical reflection." And they start with how Bill Gates told an audience in 2015 that "we can be ready for the next epidemic." Gates's popular and well-shared TED talk — viewed millions of times — didn't alter the course of history. Neither did any of the other "ideas worth spreading" (the organization's tagline) presented at the TED conference that year — including Monica Lewinsky's massively viral speech about how to stop online bullying through compassion and empathy, or a Google engineer's talk about how driverless cars would make roads smarter and safer in the near future. In fact, seven years after TED 2015, it feels like we are living in a reality that is the exact opposite of the future envisioned that year.....

At the start of the pandemic, I noticed people sharing Gates's 2015 talk. The general sentiment was one of remorse and lamentation: the tech-prophet had predicted the future for us! If only we had heeded his warning! I wasn't so sure. It seems to me that Gates's prediction and proposed solution are at least part of what landed us here. I don't mean to suggest that Gates's TED talk is somehow directly responsible for the lack of global preparedness for Covid. But it embodies a certain story about "the future" that TED talks have been telling for the past two decades — one that has contributed to our unending present crisis.

The story goes like this: there are problems in the world that make the future a scary prospect. Fortunately, though, there are solutions to each of these problems, and the solutions have been formulated by extremely smart, tech-adjacent people. For their ideas to become realities, they merely need to be articulated and spread as widely as possible. And the best way to spread ideas is through stories.... In other words, in the TED episteme, the function of a story isn't to transform via metaphor or indirection, but to actually manifest a new world. Stories about the future create the future. Or as Chris Anderson, TED's longtime curator, puts it, "We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world... may be simply to stand up and say something." And yet, TED's archive is a graveyard of ideas. It is a seemingly endless index of stories about the future — the future of science, the future of the environment, the future of work, the future of love and sex, the future of what it means to be human — that never materialized. By this measure alone, TED, and its attendant ways of thinking, should have been abandoned.
But the article also notes that TED's philosophy became "a magnet for narcissistic, recognition-seeking characters and their Theranos-like projects." (In 2014 Elizabeth Holmes herself spoke at a medical-themed TED conference.) And since 2009 the TEDx franchise lets licensees use the brand platform to stage independent events — which is how at a 2010 TEDx event, Randy Powell gave his infamous talk about vortex-based mathematics which he said would "create inexhaustible free energy, end all diseases, produce all food, travel anywhere in the universe, build the ultimate supercomputer and artificial intelligence, and make obsolete all existing technology."

Yet these are all just symptoms of a larger problem, the article ultimately argues. "As the most visible and influential public speaking platform of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, it has been deeply implicated in broadcasting and championing the Silicon Valley version of the future. TED is probably best understood as the propaganda arm of an ascendant technocracy.

"The U.S. National Weather Service Miami-South Florida warned the public on Sunday that immobilised iguanas could fall out of trees," reports Reuters, "due to unusual cold temperatures across the region. "Iguanas are cold-blooded. They slow down or become immobile when temps drop into the 40s (4-9 Celsius). They may fall from trees, but they are not dead," the service said on Twitter.

Temperatures in South Florida reached a low of 25 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday morning, according to the National Weather Service, and high temperatures on Sunday were expected to remain in the upper 50s to low 60s.... Although most of the reptiles will likely survive this period of immobilisation, zoologist Stacey Cohen, a reptile expert at Palm Beach Zoo in Florida, said freezing temperatures were a threat to their survival and pointed to a cold snap in 2010 that wiped out a large number of the population.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Yes, it's true. 83-year-old Tommy Chong and and 75-year-old Cheech Marin have reunited to create NFTs — a whole series of 'em — "bringing to life new characters and storylines," according to an official announcement, "while simultaneously celebrating Cheech & Chong's 50-plus year career of commercial and cultural success."

The NFT series will be called "Homies in Dreamland."

"As many know, I am deeply involved in the art community," Cheech says in the announcement. "As an early believer, I am glad we are introducing an NFT project now, ushering in a new era of branding for the duo and the art community."

And Tommy Chong calls NFTs "a new way for people to express themselves and reach out to others.

"Art is connecting with others and reaching the deeper parts of self. This can bring people from the NFT world into the world of Cheech and Chong, and together in the world of NFTs."
Last month Cheech and Chong even announced an official Discord channel for their NFT series — where they're also hosting movie and trivia nights. But "the holders of the NFT art collectible will gain access to a variety of utility, including future airdrops and special access/utility tokens randomly inserted throughout the collection."

The NFT series will release sometime this month, according to the announcement, with artwork by Jermaine Rogers, known for his poster art for musical acts including David Bowie, Childish Gambino, Tool, Foo Fighters, Radiohead, and Run The Jewels...

The Register reports on a unique response to CES: Six right-to-repair advocates assembled on Friday morning to present Repair.org's second annual Worst in Show Awards, a selection of the "the least private, least secure, least repairable, and least sustainable gadgets at CES."

In a presentation streamed on YouTube, author and activist Cory Doctorow presided over the condemnation session. He said that he has been attending the Consumer Electronics Show for decades and vendors will gladly enumerate the supposed benefits of their products. "But what none of those people will ever do is tell you how it will fail," said Doctorow. "And that's kind of our job here today, to talk about the hidden or maybe not so hidden and completely foreseeable failure modes of these gadgets."

Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit, gave the new Mercedes EQS EV the award for the worst product in terms of repairability. Showing a slide of the warning screen the car presents to its driver, he said, "You cannot open the hood of the car. It is locked, warning of accident, warning of injury if you open the hood. Mercedes' perspective is, 'Hey, this is an electric car. There's nothing the owner needs to do under the hood of this car."

Wiens said this is not the first time Mercedes has gone down this road, noting that a few years ago the company removed the dipstick from its C-class vehicles, arguing that only an authorized technician should change the oil.

"So this is everything that is wrong with the future," he said.
Some other higlights (via the Register)... Nathan Proctor, national campaign director for public interest non-profit USPIRG, gave the "worst in class for the environment" award to Samsung's new NFT Aggregation Platform, which he described as "a way to buy, sell and display your NFT artwork from your huge ginormous OLED Samsung TV."

Proctor added "If you don't know what an NFT is, I am honestly jealous of your life," calling it "sort of like a Beanie Baby craze for crypto tech bros — if Beanie Babies required massive continual energy consumption on a warming planet to remain corporeal."

And the Community Choice poll for Worst in Show went to John Deere — presumably for fighting right-to-repair laws in every single state legislature — while the tractor companywas also recognized by Paul Roberts, founder of securerepairs.org, for its industry-lagging bad outreach to the security community.

U.S. President Abraham Lincoln pardoned a soldier in the Civil War, and in 1998 that document was re-discovered. But "It was the date that made the document significant," writes Ars Technica: April 14, 1865, "meaning the pardon was likely one of the last official acts of President Lincoln, since he was assassinated later that same day at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. The pardon was broadly interpreted as evidence for a historical narrative about the president's compassionate nature: i.e., his last act was one of mercy."

But now scientists at America's National Archives have conducted a new analysis (published in the journal Forensic Science International: Synergy), and "confirmed that the date was indeed forged (although the pardon is genuine)." An archivist named Trevor Plante became suspicious of the document, noting that the ink on the "5" in "1865" was noticeably darker. It also seemed as if another number was written underneath it. Then Plante consulted a seminal collection of Lincoln's writings from the 1950s. The pardon was there, but it was dated April 14, 1864 — a full year before Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. Clearly the document had been altered sometime between the 1950s and 1998 to make the pardon more historically significant..

Investigators naturally turned to the man who made the discovery for further information. They began corresponding with Thomas Lowry [a retired psychiatrist turned amateur historian] in 2010. Initially, Lowry seemed cooperative, but when he learned about the nature of the investigation, he stopped communicating with the Office of the Inspector General, thereby arousing suspicion. So the investigators knocked on the historian's door one January morning in 2011 for an interview. Shortly thereafter, the National Archives released a statement that Lowry had confessed to altering the date on the pardon. Lowry confessed to bringing a fountain pen into the research room, along with fade proof, pigment-based ink, and changing the "4" in "1864" to a "5." Lowry couldn't be charged with any crime because the statute of limitations for tampering with government property had run out, but he was barred from the National Archives for life.

But there's a twist: Lowry soon recanted, claiming he had signed the confession under duress from the National Archives investigators...
Long-time Slashdot reader waspleg writes that Ars Technica "goes through the analysis of how it was verified to be a forgery using several techniques," including ultraviolet light and X-ray fluorescence analysis to study chemicals in the ink. From the article: An examination under magnification and reflective fiber optic lighting showed the ink used to write the "5" was indeed different in overall color compared to the other numbers in the date. Furthermore, "Vestiges of ink from a scratched away number can be seen below and beside the darker '5,' as well as smeared across the paper," the authors wrote. Additional analysis under raking light — a technique that accentuates hills and valleys in the paper texture — revealed abrasions to the paper under and around the "5" that were not observed anywhere else on the document. The team also determined that the paper around the "5" is thinner than everywhere else, and that ink residue of the scratched-away "4" were caught in the abraded paper fibers, clearly visible using transmitted light microscopy...
"The authors also concluded that there is no way to restore the document to its original state without causing further damage."

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: It's a newspaper puzzle that's like Sudoku, except it's impossible. [Sort of...] They call it "The Challenger" puzzle — but when the newspaper leaves out a crucial instruction, you can end up searching forever for a unique solution which doesn't exist!

"If you're thinking 'This could be a 9 or an 8....' — you're right!" complains Lou Cabron. "Everyone's a winner today! Just start scribbling in numbers! And you'd be a fool to try to keep narrowing them down by, say, using your math and logic skills. A fool like me..." (Albeit a fool who once solved a Sudoku puzzle entirely in his head.) But two hours of frustration later — and one night of bad dreams — he's stumbled onto the web page of Dr. Robert J. Lopez, an emeritus math professor in Indiana, who's calculated that in fact Challenger puzzles can have up to 190 solutions... and there's more than one solution for more than 97% of them!

At the end of the day, it becomes an appreciation for the local newspaper, and the puzzles they run next to the funnies. But with a friendly reminder "that they ought to honor and respect that love — by always providing the complete instructions."

Slashdot reader ellithligraw brings the news that the oldest person on earth has died in the Philippines this week at age 124.

CNN Philippines reports: Susano was born on Sept. 11, 1897, which was before the country became independent from Spanish rule. As of September this year, Guinness World Records was still verifying the documents needed for her to be officially declared as the world's oldest living person.
NextShark calls Susano "the last surviving person born in the 19th century." And they add that, according to Manila Bulletin, "Susano has 14 children. One of them is considered a centenarian at the age of 101."

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: This week Marvel released an epic three-minute trailer hyping December's releases of Spider-Man: No Way Home. "It comes after the initial trailer, which focused on the movie's multiversal villains, broke YouTube records over the summer," CNET reported Tuesday (racking up 355.5 million views in its first 24 hours).

But then one more universe collided...

Basically, some internet wise guys re-edited the trailer, splicing its audio over clips from the Fox Kids' 1994 cartoon series Spider-Man. (Opening credits here.) "This has no right being this good," argues CNET — especially since the actual movie's trailer arrived "amidst a ludicrous amount of fanfare and hype."

But it's all oddly appropriate, since CNET notes the upcoming movie features five sinister villains from nearly 20 years of Spider-Man movies, reaching back to the Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield era ("likely spurred on by the events of the Disney Plus Loki series.")

So maybe it's fitting that it was also invaded by the television cartoon universe...

A wild bear broke into a parked car looking for food. This set AI pundit Lance Eliot a-thinking... The AI driving system of a self-driving car is always intact. A parked self-driving car is immediately able to become a moving car.... If the self-driving car is making use of its object detection system, even though the autonomous vehicle is parked, the AI driving capability would be alerted at [a hypothetical] pending crash that is about to occur... Depending upon what the AI developers anticipated, the AI driving system might activate the self-driving car and attempt to quickly drive away from the converging human-driven car.
For most makers of self-driving cars, this is an obscure "edge" case. But Eliot imagines a world where a self-driving car is parked next to a forest... The human hiker has left the autonomous vehicle and has trekked somewhere deep in the woods. A bear meanders into the parking lot, looking for a free meal. If the AI driving system is using its object detection features, the bear would likely be detected. When the bear decides to wander directly toward the self-driving car, the AI driving system might activate the autonomous vehicle and drive away from the bear.

It is unclear if the bear will somehow divine that the self-driving car is capable of moving on its own accord... After a while, it seems plausible to suggest that bears will be concerned that those free meal containers (on wheels) seem to move away upon the bear approaching. This will possibly discourage some bears and they will steer clear of parked cars. Other bears might turn this into a game. Kind of hide-and-seek, of sorts. Approach a car, it moves away. Fun! Walk over to the car and see which way it goes next. A grand old time in the parking lot, that's for sure.
And as long as we're telling shaggy bear stories... The odds are that self-driving cars will be designed differently on the interior than are conventional human-driven cars. For example, there is no need for a steering wheel and nor any need for the pedals. Those will no longer be included. The interior is opened up to allow for perhaps swiveling seats, possibly reclining seats so that you can sleep on a long journey inside a self-driving car. Given that type of interior, the bear is bound to find things a lot more comfortable inside a self-driving car than a conventional human-driven car. The next thing you know, bears will fall in love with self-driving cars, doing so because it is a quiet, spacious, and secure place to rest and relax. No need to worry about predators getting at the bear while relishing the plush and roomy interior....

A second question is whether the bears might figure out how to communicate with the AI driving system. You know, bears are pretty sharp. Perhaps a truly enterprising bear could convince the AI to take the bear for a cozy ride while inside the self-driving car.

Don't be especially surprised if you start to see bears riding around in self-driving cars.

And please remember, you heard about it here, first.

Today the iconic Bitcoin white paper "celebrates thirteen years of financial disruption," notes Cointelegraph, "after being first published on Oct. 31, 2008, by an anonymous person or entity named Satoshi Nakamoto." (Here's a 2013 story from Slashdot about version 0.3.)

Cointelegraph writes: The white paper, titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, foresaw the need for a peer-to-peer online payment system that is self-governing, secure and limited in quantity. The Bitcoin network was launched on Jan. 3, 2009, with each Bitcoin priced at $0.0008.... Today, Bitcoin maintains a stable trading value well above $60k after experiencing a gradual appreciation of 7,749,999,900% since its launch.
Cointelegraph celebrated the anniversary by embedding a video of the original bitcoin white paper being read by comedian Gilbert Gottfried — but they weren't the only ones. Entrepreneur/investor Anthony Pompliano celebrated with the return of what he describes as a decentralized pizzeria" named Bitcoin pizza. (An interactive online map shows participating locations around the U.S.A. where pizzas can be ordered with cash or with 0.0003 BTC — either through the web site or through the Uber Eats app.)

"If you want to pay for your pizza in bitcoin, I will gladly take your bitcoin," Pompliano says in a video posted to Twitter. "I don't think that you should use your bitcoin to buy the pizza — but we now accept bitcoin." The five available topping combos even have bitcoin-themed names like "No Keys, No Cheese" and "Satoshi's Favorite" — and the pizzas are all delivered in a special commemorative bitcoin-themed pizza box. "Every single dollar that I make from this, I donate to bitcoin developers," Pompliano explains in the video. "I make zero dollars from Bitcoin Pizza."

"And we're going to keep building this until eventually we are the single largest independent pizza chain in the United States. And then after we become the single largest independent pizza chain in the United States, we're going to turn around, and then we're going to go international."

"What if we told you there was a hamster who has been trading cryptocurrencies since June — and recently was doing better than Warren Buffett and the S&P 500?" asks NPR: Meet Mr. Goxx, a hamster who works out of what is possibly the most high-tech hamster cage in existence.

It's designed so that when Mr. Goxx runs on the hamster wheel, he can select among dozens of cryptocurrencies. Then, deciding between two tunnels, he chooses whether to buy or sell. According to the Twitch account for the hamster, his decision is sent over to a real trading platform — and yes, real money is involved.
Last Monday, after 100 days the hamster's portfolio was up 48%, reports one site, "before Bitcoin tumbled, which brought the rest of the crypto market down with it." But the hamster's portfolio is still up nearly 30% since he started trading in June, the article points out, "outperforming Bitcoin, the S&P 500, and even Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway."

The hamster's business partner adds that profits aren't yet enough to cover the initial investment on Mr. Goxx's cage. And there's other issues...

"Since Mr. Goxx is an honorable business rodent, he must calculate with about 35% tax being subtracted on all his returns, so there is still some work left before he can really talk about making money."