Month: January 2023

When Elon Musk surrendered the title of richest person on Earth late last year, he didn’t just lose a tiny bit of money. He lost a ton of it. According to Bloomberg Billionaires Index (as caught by CNN) the Tesla, SpaceX, and now Twitter honcho has, in just over a year, lost over $200 billion of his once staggering wealth. That means he’s lost more than anyone in modern history.

At his peak, in November 2021, Musk was worth $340 billion. Nowadays his three main companies are worth a total of $137 billion. What happened? Well, for one thing, the majority of Musk’s fortune is tied up in Tesla, his once popular electric car company. The company’s stock has plummeted; December was its worst month, last quarter was its worst quarter, and 2022 was its worst year.

One reason for the sinking interest in Tesla is competition from other automakers, who’ve been turning to electric cars as well. Surely not helping is that Musk’s antics since buying Twitter, which have found him embracing the far right, who would never be caught dead buying one of his Tesla cars, while alienating progressives, i.e., his potential customers.

As Musk’s fortunes have sunk, he’s been tweeting through it, even dropping strange jokes about his various failures. Meanwhile, he’s fired janitors at Twitter HQ, forcing employees to supply their own toilet paper. If he can still afford a Netflix account, he can drown his sorrows by watching a very popular movie that semi-accidentally makes fun of him.

(Via CNN)

Tulane and USC met on Monday afternoon in Dallas for the Cotton Bowl and the two teams put together an instant classic, with the Wave pulling off the upset by way of a 15-point comeback in the final 4:30 of the game. USC seemingly took control after opening the fourth quarter with Heisman Trophy winner Caleb Williams’ fifth TD pass of the game to go up 12, tacking on a field goal with 4:30 left to take a two-touchdown advantage.

However, the defense, as it has on a few occasions this year, After a two-play, 63-yard touchdown drive pulled them within 8, USC fumbled the kickoff and took over on their own one, where Tulane’s defense made a rare stop by stuffing a run two yards deep in the end zone for a safety, breathing life into their comeback bid.

On the ensuing drive, Tulane went 66 yards in 12 plays, culminating in a walkoff touchdown with eight seconds to play as Michael Pratt found Alex Bauman for a six-yard strike that was initially ruled incomplete.

The side angle showed the ball clearly never touched the ground, as Bauman and the defender’s arms were both under it as he corralled it for the game-winning score, as the extra point after lifted Tulane to a 46-45 win.

It was an insane game, with both offenses putting on a show. Williams finished with 462 yards and five touchdowns, while Tulane’s star running back Tyjae Spears gashed the Trojans for 205 yards and four touchdowns on just 17 carries. It’s a massive win for Tulane, a program that coach Willie Fritz has steadily built into an AAC power, while USC will end a strong first year under Lincoln Riley with back-to-back losses that showed just how vulnerable their defensive weakness is right now.

How did you ring in the new year? Did you drink too much? Not enough? If you spent it delivering a depressing rant about how you think America is a “third world country,” then congrats: You might be Donald J. Trump.

The former president bid farewell to 2022 at the resort in which he now lives, addressing a crowd of hundreds with one of his doom-and-gloom rants about how awful the country is without him lording over it.

We’re watching a war waging, we’re watching nuclear weapons talked about all the time, we’re watching inflation going through the roof,” Trump bellowed. “All of these things that we’re watching and so unnecessary, and so sad to see. Now we have airports where people can’t fly,” referencing the holiday storms that he presumably blames on his successor.

“It’s sad when people can’t come from New York to Florida, we’re like a third world country,” he told the crowd.
Trump didn’t contain his bleak-o-rama rants to Mar-a-Lago. On Monday, he took to his rinky-dink Twitter clone to complain about the border and then NATO.

Our Southern Border is far beyond HORRIBLE. There is no Country in the World that has such atrocious, unsafe, and disgusting conditions at their Border. We are worse than any Third World Nation! Just think, two years ago we had the safest and most stable Border in U.S. history. Criminals and Drugs entering our once great Country were at a decades low… And now, our beautiful USA is being poisoned from within, a Nation in DECLINE. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and Fast!

When I was President I made Member Nations pay up all of the money they weren’t paying to NATO. The U.S. was footing almost the entire NATO bill, and I quickly put a stop to that. Hundreds of billions of Dollars were then rapidly paid by those “delinquent” nations. The Secretary General of NATO said it was AMAZING what President Trump had done. Thank you, but here we go again! The good old USA “suckers” are paying a VAST majority of the NATO bill, & outside money, going to Ukraine. VERY UNFAIR!

Ever since leaving office in disgrace — and often when he was still in there — Trump has always been Captain Bringdown, doing little but painting a dire and largely fictitious portrait of the world, then offering himself as humankind’s only hope. Given that his own party seems to be abandoning him in droves, it might not work this time, just as it didn’t work in 2020.

(Via Newsweek and Mediaite)

There are few days college football fans look forward to more than New Year’s Day — or in a year like 2023 where that happens to be on a Sunday, January 2. There are bowl games from noon throughout the evening, with the Rose Bowl as the crown jewel, but college football bettors will spray the board across the slate on the last full day of games of the season.

This year, the opener was Mississippi State-Illinois in the Reliaquest Bowl in Tampa, as the Bulldogs played to honor their late coach Mike Leach. The spread for the game closed at MSU -3/-3.5, and the Illini were never outside the number…that is until the final play of the game.

Trailing by three, Illinois executed a pretty great start to an attempted miracle on laterals, but as any bettor knows, “pitchy pitchy woo woo” is the last thing you want to see. Sure enough, eventually things broke down and desperation arrived, with Tommy DeVito chucking a ball across the field, where it bounced into the arms of Mississippi State corner Marcus Banks, who bolted 60 yards to the house to put an exclamation point on a Bulldogs win and hand Illini backers the worst bad beat of the young year.

Usually, you feel alright if the laterals are happening on that side of the 50, but as soon as the ball bounced that high and Banks got clear of the last offensive player, everyone knew what was coming. Whether you lost a push on the 3 or an outright win on 3.5, it was a painful way for the Illini to fail to cover a game they led by 7 entering the fourth quarter.

Most people are hyper-focused on the calendar turning to 2023, but 21 Savage has never been like most people. He has already made music that will endure forever, including his and Drake’s November joint album, Her Loss, which debuted at No. 1 and surpassed one billion Spotify streams. Not to mention, December 21 is now recognized as “21 Savage Day” in Georgia.

The UK-born, Atlanta-raised rapper has gotten as close to immortality as any mortal being possibly can. He’s not satisfied. He has ambitions for cryonics.

“I Just Want To Be Alive For 2121 Somebody Freeze Me Right Quick,” 21 tweeted on Saturday, December 31.

If 21 Savage finds a way to exist in 2121, whatever equivalent of memes that exist 98 years from now will surely be even better than the “Rich Flex” memes.

In addition to Her Loss, 21 Savage closed out 2022 with a (fake?) Nas beef and collaborative single with Nas. Last week, he performed a wide-ranging set for Amazon Music Live on Thursday, December 29, to close out the season for the new concert series. The following day, he helped Future throw “The Ball Drops In Brooklyn” at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. Lil’ Kim, Christian “King” Combs, and Chinese Kitty also performed. See scenes from the event below.

This article originally appeared on 10.25.16

Imagine seeing a string quartet play beautiful music.

Strings are pretty much my favorite kind of instrument; it’s hard for me to listen to a cello or violin and not feel something. And when you get four musicians all playing together? Beautiful.

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In 2015, Plymouth University’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research and the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in London teamed up to create a spectacular string quartet.

But this wasn’t your typical performance.

The musicians in this quartet all had severe motor impairments, which can affect a person’s ability to move.

Motor impairments can be caused by a number of different things, such as a motor neuron disease like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease). In severe cases, a person may not be able to move or speak at all.

For musicians like these folks, their condition would normally present a considerable barrier to being able to play music like they once did. But in this case, researchers and doctors found a way to let them play anyway.

The thought was this: If the musicians still have musical talent but simply can’t do the physical motions, we’ll just make it so they don’t need to do any physical motions.

First, researchers put stretchy, cap-like devices that can read brainwaves on the musician’s heads.

Then, during the performance, a computer screen presented the four musicians with selections of short different musical phrases.

The musicians could choose what phrase they wanted by simply looking at it. The caps then picked up these brainwaves and sent the information to four other, nearby musicians who played the music for them (so, technically, maybe this would be an octet).

The end result was brilliant — four motor-impaired musicians, picking and playing in real-time to create beautiful music, all with their brainwaves.

One of their performances was captured in this short, nine-minute documentary by Tim Grabham and professor Eduardo Reck Miranda, who spearheaded the project.

Check out their brilliant performance here:

Brain-computer interfaces have gotten us this far and are taking us further still.

We’ve already seen brain-computer interfaces that can help us control prosthetic arms with thoughts and restore senses of hearing and touch to folks without them.

There’s a lot more work to be done in these fields, of course, but one day soon, we might be hearing, seeing, and visiting a lot more performances and projects like this.

This article originally appeared on 03.03.17

Jill Pelto’s world is made up a rich blues, ochres, and a sky that looks like something out of an old mariner’s chart.

But when you start to look closer, little details start to pop out. You notice a number here or there. Or a series of points marching down the top of a glacier. Or … is that an x-axis?

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Wait, are all of these charts?! This is data! Wooah!

The artwork, you see, isn’t just beautiful. While each piece starts as a simple line graph of mass or temperature, Pelto — a graduate student at the University of Maine — transforms them into something more.

Pelto has spent the past years creating this astounding series of paintings, all based on scientific data.

She was first inspired by a research trip back in 2015.

Since she was 16, Pelto’s been going on research trips with her father, glaciologist Mauri Pelto. In 2015, she joined her father in the field to study the glaciers in Washington state’s North Cascade National Park.

On the trip, Pelto saw how the glaciers, while beautiful, had also lost much of their mass. Inspired, saddened, and packing her watercolors, Pelto decided to try to use her art to communicate what she was seeing.

The mass of glaciers in the North Cascades from 1980 to 2014. Data available here.

Since then, Pelto has continued the project, turning not just glacial mass but many other variables into brilliant works of art.

Within the deep purples and reds of a forest on fire hides a global temperatures trend.

Global temperature data, obtained from Climate Central, becomes the backdrop to an incredible forest fire. Rising temperatures and drought conditions could increase the future risk of forest fires.

Aquamarine-colored salmon intertwine with waves made from their population numbers.

Washington state has been hit by a number of droughts in the last few decades. Many rivers run low, affecting the coho salmon that spawn there.

Lifelike Arctic foxes hide amid a line graph that shows dwindling ice sheets.

The graph tracks the loss of Arctic sea ice from 1980 to the present. Arctic foxes are well-equipped to survive the chilly polar weather, but as the poles get warmer, larger species may invade and outcompete them.

This beautiful swaying reef exists in an increasingly acidic ocean.

As more carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere, the ocean is slowly becoming more acidic. Many species could be affected, including clownfish.

A tiger struggles against it’s shrinking jungle habitat.

This line graph is based on the decline in tiger habit area from 1970 to 2010.

Here, four different trends combine into a complex, ethereal landscape.

In this piece, called “Landscape of Change,” Pelto combined data on sea levels, glacial decline, temperatures, and fossil fuel usage.

Pelto plans to continue painting once she completes her master’s degree.

Science is an important tool for understanding our changing world, but even the most passionate scientist will admit it can be pretty dry at times. Getting people excited about trend lines or statistical analyses is no easy feat.

But art touches us on an emotional level. We get art. Seeing something that can combine the two disciplines, and hopefully inspire something inside us, is pretty dang cool.

You can see more of Pelto’s artwork at her website.

Finally. After years of waiting, it’s finally happening.

Blackpink’s Jisoo is set to make her solo debut some time this year, making her the last member to release a solo project. According to a report from Naver earlier today (January 2), Blackpink‘s label, YG Entertainment, revealed the singer-actress has been working on her album since last year.

“BLACKPINK’s Jisoo is currently working hard on recording her solo album,” YG Entertainment said, in a translated statement provided by Soompi. “While carrying out a busy world tour schedule since last year, she finished the album jacket photo shoot and worked on music production whenever she got the time in order to keep the promise with fans. She will greet [fans] soon with good news.”

The news confirming Jisoo’s solo debut comes hours before her birthday (January 3), where the eldest member of Blackpink opened up her own Youtube Channel called Happy Jisoo 103% but ultimately translates to “happiness index 103%” if the Korean title is taken literally.

To celebrate the opening of her YouTube channel (and her birthday), Jisoo posted her London vlog during the group’s time in the English city while on their Born Pink World Tour. Under the description of the video, it is stated that all proceeds mades from Happy Jisoo 103% will be donated.

There’ve been a lot of changes at CNN in the last year, when the news network found themselves under new management. But perhaps the most controversial decision was this: on-air talent is no longer allowed to booze it up while on television. Granted, that doesn’t come up often. The biggest time it does is on New Year’s Eve, where it’s become a tradition for Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper to knock back a few — or more than that — before the big ball drops. No more. The two had to ring in 2023 stone cold sober. And Cohen, at least, was no happy camper.

It was the first proper NYC New Year’s in three years, with packed crowds who didn’t have to worry about some deadly new COVID strain. Still, Cohen and Cooper had to report from Times Square without help from alcohol. Instead they downed mystery drinks. One was a pickle shot. Another was a glass of buttermilk. But it was a shot of apple cider vinegar that broke them, leaving them choking, miserable, and in need of a real drink.

It was Cohen that broke the hardest. “I NEED TEQUILA! HONESTLY!” he shouted after yet another unpleasurable — and unalcoholic — beverage.

The pair weren’t the only ones unhappy to celebrate New Year’s sober. At one point they were joined remotely by Kevin Hart, who felt bad for them. “I can’t believe this right now! Watching you guys, and you are completely sober! What is happening? What is happening right now?” Hart railed. “You guys can’t say anything about it, but I can! I can say things about it! This is absolute bullsh*t! I don’t like it one bit!”

Cohen and Cooper have tended to make waves with their New Year’s Eve coverage, with Cohen in particular getting tanked and spouting some very drunky things he has to apologize for later. At least he doesn’t need a drink to make news.

(Via Mediaite)

The Giants dominated the Colts on Sunday to clinch their first playoff berth since 2016, but the story coming out of the 38-10 romp of Indianapolis wasn’t so much about New York’s quality of play, but the celebration from rookie Kayvon Thibodeaux after a late second quarter sack of Nick Foles led to the veteran QB leaving the game with a rib injury.

Thibodeaux sacked Foles and began doing snow angels on the ground next to him immediately while Foles writhed in pain until the trainers came out. It was a rather incredible visual, in part because of how long Thibodeaux laid there doing snow angels (on a day where it wasn’t even snowing) next to the clearly injured Foles. Afterwards, there were plenty of people not happy with the rookie’s antics, and unsurprisingly Colts coach Jeff Saturday can be counted among those who was upset with the celebration.

On Monday, Saturday called the celebration “tasteless” and “just trash” and wished his offensive line had done more to protect and stick up for Foles (which, to be clear, should’ve started with blocking Thibodeaux).

The general consensus is that Thibodeaux’s celebration was a bit much, particularly continuing going after he seemingly glanced over and saw Foles still there in pain, but hopefully this can be the end of the discourse and all parties involved can move on (with Foles hopefully able to recover, although Sam Ehlinger will start the final game of the year for the Colts).