Category Archives: Futurism

$200 for a Walkman!?Hard Pressed

Artists releasing albums via NFTs must be a thing of the past because musician Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, told fans via Instagram on Thursday that his new album Donda 2 will only be available via a small proprietary contraption called the Stem Player.

After deleting everything from his Instagram profile over feedback about his disturbing posts about his ex-wife Kim Kardashian, West went on a 16-hour-long tirade, stretched over 14 new Instagram posts promoting the new album.

The Stem Player made its debut last year, according to The Verge, and reportedly works pretty well despite its unusual appearance. About that: the player itself is rounded and looks a bit like squashed smoke detector, a stark departure from conventional music hardware.

Colored light sliders move in four directions as music plays and thats not even the strangest thing about the gadget.

The simple website for the album includes a few more details. The player will ship with Donda 2 locally stored. According to The Verge, the device has a measly eight gigabytes of storage, a USB-C port, Bluetooth, a headphone jack, and a surprisingly powerful speaker.

The most interesting aspect is probably that itll allow users to customize the mix of each song, whichll be broken down into component tracks like drums, bass, and vocals.

On the one hand, thats a pretty bold vision for the future of consumer music. On the other, though, its moderately ridiculous to think fans will have to carry the 21st century equivalent of a HitClips audio player from the 1990s with them to listen to the album.

The Stem Player might be a fun gadget if it wasnt the only way listeners could get to listen to the new album. According to West, Donda 2 will not be released via Spotify or Apple Music, because the billionaire wouldnt get a high enough percentage of the profits.

Today artists get just 12% of the money the industry makes, he wrote in a post on Instagram. Its time to free music from this oppressive system. Its time to take control and build our own.

Oh, and did we mention that the tiny device costs $200?

All told, well probably pass, especially given the recent recent and serious allegations of abusive behavior by West.

Maybe another artist will do something cool with a similar device in the future. In the meantime, it looks like plenty of people plan to pirate the new album instead of paying up anyway.

More on pop culture weirdness: In Bizarre Ad, Facebook Imagines Its Users As Robot Dogs Stuffed Into Trash Compactors

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Kanye West Says His Next Album Will Only Be Available on a Strange, Orb-Shaped Device - Futurism

That... can't be good.Coming Up Aces

A giant cargo ship carrying luxury cars including numerous Porches is now adrift in the Atlantic Ocean, burningafter its crew evacuated, according to the Associated Press, which reports that 22 crew members were evacuated on Wednesday and the ship is now just kind of floating and on fire.Which is relatable, frankly.

We are aware of an incident today involving a cargo ship transporting Volkswagen Group vehicles across the Atlantic, a spokesperson told the AP via email. At this time, we are not aware of any injuries. We are working with local authorities and the shipping company to investigate the cause of the incident.

The AP says the ship is carrying nearly 4,000 cars that were meant to go on sale in North America, the New York Times reported. Their fate is now unclear, since finding a boat big enough to tug the Felicity Ace to port is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Just this week, Fox Businessreported on soaring prices in the used car market for 2022, due in large part to demand for new and used cars outpacing supply. Its hard to get new cars because of supply chain shortages that have made it hard for manufacturers to get the parts they need, which is in turn increasing demand and prices for used ones.

Porsche majority shareholder Volkswagen declined to speculate to the AP how this fire and a potential several-thousand-car-loss will impact customers and the car market, but its almostcertainly not good news. In addition, its not clear whether the Ace will sink or cause pollution, although the AP says a Portuguese navy ship has been charged with finding out.

Wed tell you to hold out hope the ship wont cause a pollution-and-price double whammy, butat this point its a little hard to imagine much going right in 2022.

More on sinking ships: Woman Notices Sinking Boat During Zoom Call, Saves Crew

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Fire Engulfs Cargo Ship Carrying Thousands of Luxury Cars - Futurism

According to Wikipedia A metaverse is a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection. In futurism and science fiction, it is often described as a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal virtual world that is facilitated using virtual and augmented reality headsets. Author Neal Stephenson is credited with coining the term metaverse in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, in which he envisioned lifelike avatars who meet in realistic 3D buildings and other virtual reality environments.

And Wikipedia says Maya, literally illusion or magic has multiple meanings in Indian philosophies depending on the context. In later Vedic texts, My connotes a magic show, an illusion where things appear to be present but are not what they seem the principle which shows attributeless Absolute as having attributes.

As you can see the virtual is very close to illusion and augmented reality is another word for where things appear to be present. So, the question is does metaverse provide solutions to real world problems and create opportunities for businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs or is it all a maya? The truth is you already live in the virtual world where you care more about what you look like on Instagram and Facebook than in real life.

Most people think the metaverse is a virtual place. Like in the movie Ready Player One or a virtual world, like Minecraft, Roblox. I say the metaverse is the moment in time where our digital life is worth more to us than our physical life. This is not an overnight shift but a gradual change thats been happening for the last decade or two. Every important part of our life is going digital. Work moved from factories to laptops. boardrooms to zooms. Friends moved from neighbors to followers. Where do you find like-minded people? WhatsApp. Twitter. Reddit. etc. And more kids play Fortnite than basketball and football combined.

Now shifting from personal to business, the pandemic accelerated a transition in our organizational reality that may have already been in motion a shift from single-location corporate campuses to more geographically distributed teams and organizations. As a critical mass of people work from wherever they work best, they will choose to spend more time with any technology that makes their preferred work experience possible. And, if this critical mass has the skills and knowledge the world needs, the people still working from the main office will, in turn, adapt.

Luxury brands are getting in on the action. As Vogue Business notes, Gucci was quick off the mark in May when 20 million users visited its virtual Gucci Garden on the Roblox platform. In just two weeks, hundreds of thousands of users bought multiple limited-edition avatar items from the gardens virtual store.

Guccis Dionysus bags even sold for more than the usual price of the physical equivalent. Vogue Business found that users who bought these virtual Gucci items wore them five hours longer than other accessories.

Fashion house Balenciaga teamed up with Epic Games to debut its autumn/winter 2021 collection in VR, offering a special line of in-game outfits and accessories, as well as physical merchandise sold via the game. Balenciaga also released its spring/summer 2022 collection as a video using only one model and a computer-generated image (CGI) audience.

Businesses that want to stay competitive should make plans for how they are going to engage with customers, find new advertising opportunities, and bring in sponsorships in the metaverse. The metaverse is less about becoming immersed in a fantasy world of unicorns and dragons and more about escaping physical limits to spend time in a virtual space thats a version of, or extension of, real life. Instead of only reaching your physical store to get a try or test with the first new product, your customers can join or visit the exclusive launch party no matter where they are in the world. They can have the feeling, sense, and experience they can in the virtual world.

BMW is already building a digital twin a digital representation of a physical asset, system, or process for its factory using Nvidias metaverse platform Omniverse. Microsoft says that it will build its enterprise metaverse with Mesh, a mixed-reality, cloud-based meeting app that can teleport a person digitally to a remote location for shared experiences.

While the road to the metaverse is still being mapped, technology that makes real-world, physical scenarios available virtually and enhances enterprise offerings will play a role. Metaverse may start slow as the technology remains in a nascent stage, market competition will intensify as the tech titans battle for market dominance and non-tech brands track their progress for potential revenue and operational improvements.

So, whether you acknowledge or not, this is also about taking advantage of what you know and understand and applying emerging technology to new context. For example, business should look at metaverse to:

Ultimately, beyond business adoption, metaverse consumer platforms will transform how people play, shop, access media, and interact. The metaverses future will be interesting to watch unfold. I have more questions than answers on what it will ultimately become, but we can be certain that even if seems like maya for now, meta is real as in having attributes.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

END OF ARTICLE

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Meta: Is it all a Maya? - The Times of India Blog

Identical twin sisters Brittany and Briana told the U.S. Sun that they have experienced most of their lives together. That includes the moment they married identical twinbrothersJosh and Jeremy Salyers in a joint ceremony.

Now, the twin couples are experiencing parenthood together, and their children share a unique bond.

The Salyers family went viral after social media caught on to the fact that bothcouples recentlygave birth to sons.

Of course, little Jax and Jett Salyers are cousins. However, the young boys have even more in common. No, we're not just talking about the fact that their names both start with theletter "J."

As the children of two sets of identical twins, they're also genetically brothers. The happy parents (all four of them) explained the situation in a post on their shared Instagram account.

"Cousins, Genetic Brothers, and Quaternary Twins," they wrote alongside a photo of the young boys (who, unsurprisingly, look very similar). Check it out below:

You may be wondering how cousinscould qualify as genetic brothers. Why doJett and Jax have a better claim tobeing brothers from another mother than most?

According to Futurism, it all stems from the fact that both sets of parents are identical twins. Whenthe Salyers twins got married, they had what is referred to as a "quaternary marriage."

Time fora science lesson: Identical twins come from the exact same sperm and egg. That means that the siblings' DNA is, you guessed it, identical.

In quaternary marriages, both couples have the exact same DNA. Thus, their children also have very similar DNA.

Futurism notes that, based on a DNA panel, itwould be almost impossible to tell kids like Jett and Jax apart.

Right now the Salyers family and their "twinsane life" is getting plenty of attention on social media. It probably doesn't hurt that they reportedly live in the same house, which makes their situation even more... unique.

In an interview on TLC, Brittany and Briana revealed that they even worked together.

Watch them chat about meeting and marrying their identical Prince Charmings below:

The Salyers' unconventional parenting situation has turned them into internet celebrities. However, it's worth pointing out that their case is not unique. There are other examples ofquaternary marriages.

In 2014, identical twin sisters Keyolla and Teyolla Loux married identical twin brothers Eric and Shawn Crow in a similar joint ceremony. Keyolla even wrote an essay about the wedding.

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Twin Brothers Marry Twin Sisters, Have Babies Who Are Genetically Brothers - PopCrush

Image by Getty Images/Futurism

The reality TV show Dr. Phil is being accused of a rash of abusive and unethical behavior on its set by current and former employees including an grim instance in which workers were allegedly instructed to withhold medication from a guest on the show to play up the entertainment value of a segment.

A dozen current and former employees accused Phil McGraw, the eponymous host of Dr. Phil, of enabling a toxic and abusive workplace, Buzzfeed News reports. The employees say they were frequently berated by producers,sometimes in a racist manner, and even instructed to perpetuate racist stereotypes onscreen.

There also were instances in which employees say they were ordered to participate in unethical and abusive behavior involving the shows guests. On one occasion, a former employee was allegedly instructed to make sure a guest didnt take her prescribed psychiatric medication in order to create more sensational television.

We were specifically instructed, Make sure that she doesnt take her medication before she goes onstage, because they wanted her to look unstable and quote-unquote, crazy, for lack of a better term, the employee told BuzzFeed.

Luckily, the woman was able to take her medication before an employee reached her. Still, it sounds indicative of a type of behavior that put messy television above the actual mental health needs of guests.

Thats all for the sake of TV, thesame employee later added. Obviously this girl should be on her medication and thats what were trying to get her help for, but for the sake of TV they wanted her to look off the rails.

The employees specifically accused executive producer Carla Pennington of frequently screaming at and berating staff members. While none of the workers say they witnessed this type of behavior from McGraw himself, they say he nonetheless turned a blind eye to it.

The work environment was so bad, in fact, that the employees said that their own mental health was damaged due to on-set behavior.

Everyone was just pretty miserable, another former employee told BuzzFeed. You would walk into the building and there was just a palpable dread and anxiety. Dr. Phil the show about mental health where everybody who works on it has terrible mental health because our work conditions were really bad.

Lawyers for McGraw have denied the allegations and insist that the workplace is not abusive, racist, and toxic.

Dr. McGraw categorically denies racist conduct and CBS does not tolerate racist conduct, H. Patrick Morris, McGraws attorney, told BuzzFeed News.

Of course, these are all just accusations but it would really be no surprise that a reality TV mental health show would turn a blind eye to abusive and unethical behavior to create sensational televised drivel.

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Dr. Phil Accused of Withholding Guest's Medication to Make Her Seem "Crazy" - Futurism

What a sight.Full Stack

SpaceX has successfully stacked its orbital-class Starship prototype, dubbed Ship 20, on top of its Super Heavy booster a picturesque momentthat takes us one step closer to the space companys first Starship launch into space.

It also happens to be the worlds largest rocket ever assembled, as Teslarati points out. The next tallest rocket ever built was the Saturn V, standing at 363 feet. Together with its Booster, Starship stands at just shy of 400 feet tall.

Its the second time a Starship prototype has been stacked on top of a booster. But its the first time the company used the chopstick arms of its Mechazilla launch tower to hoist the spacecraft prototype over two hundred feet into the air to set it down on top of the booster.

The stack will likely form the backdrop of a presentation given by CEO Elon Musk later today. Images shared by Musk on Twitter show the robotic chopstick arms slowly lifting the 160-foot spacecraft against the night sky. A drone video also shared by Musk shows the spacecraft in motion.

The space company has been working towards this moment for a while now, first constructing the massive 469-foot launch tower, then putting it to the test with the use of water ballasts.

While its an exciting moment and a sight to behold, we still dont know when SpaceX will be ready for countdown. According to a filing submitted to the Federal Communications Commission in May 2021, the plan is to send the 400-foot Starship and booster into orbit and have it make a powered, targeted landing about 62 miles off the northwest coast of Kauai in the ocean.

The Booster stage will separate approximately 170 seconds into flight, the document reads. The Booster will then perform a partial return and land in the Gulf of Mexico approximately 20 miles from the shore.

Well hear more from Musk at tonights presentation, where we might even get a date for Starships inaugural flight to orbit.

READ MORE: SpaceX assembles worlds largest rocket with giant robot arms

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SpaceX Stacks Orbital-Class Starship on Booster, Hoists It With Mechazilla - Futurism

Okay, that's pretty dark.Snow Worries

The slopes around northwest Beijing are too dry and warm to create any snow for the Winter Olympics, so its all human-made for the first time in the games history. In other words, according to CNN, climate change and variability mean that were watching the first Winter Olympics with 100 percent artificial snow.

Thats not an outlier. In fact, a study published late last year in the journal Current Issues in Tourismfound that just one of the 21 cities that hosted the Winter Olympics in the last half-century will have a climate suitable for winter sports by the end of this century if we dont get fossil fuels under control.

Italian based snow-creation startup TechnoAlpin says theyre providing the required 350 snow producers, seven machine rooms, and pump stations housing 51 high-pressure pumps and nine cooling towers for the games. Theyve been working on the set up for nearly three years.

We are very proud to say that we are the only company providing the snow-making systems for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, TechnoAlpin Asia area manager Michael Mayr told CNN in an interview this week.

There are multiple problems with artificial snow, including the fact that its staggeringly energy-intensive to create. The International Olympic Committee estimated that 49 million gallons of water will be used to create all the snow, which according to CNN is a days worth of drinking water for nearly 100 million people. Thats a lot of water in world where so many are forced to go without.

Fake snow is also not as safe, according to leading athletes and a new report titled Slippery Slopes: How Climate Change is threatening the 2022 Winter Olympics, published by the Sport Ecology Group, Loughborough University London, and Protect Our Winters earlier in January.

[If] freestyle super pipes are formed from snowmaking machines in a poor season, the walls of the pipe are solid, vertical ice and the pipe floor is solid ice, Scottish freestyle skier Laura Donaldson warned in the report. This is dangerous for athletes. Some have died.

If the snow is expensive, uses valuable drinking water and isnt as safe as natural snow for the athletes its been created for, is it really worth it? Why arent we just hosting the games in places with lots of snow, or switching up which events are held at the games?

Holding private corporations accountable for climate change will be much more effective than asking individuals to make small, personal contributions like recycling. Shouldnt we hold the International Olympic Committee to the same standard?

More on manmade solutions to manmade problems: Scientists Propose Creating Mechanical Trees to Suck Up Evil Carbon Dioxide

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All the Snow at the Beijing Winter Olympics Is Artificially Made - Futurism

Image by Limor Zellermeyer / Futurism

The next time your gym bro asks you about your sick gains, you can tell em that youre only pumping iron for three seconds per day.

If it sounds too good to be true, just wait your new muscular mentorship comes courtesy of scientists who released a study last week in the Scandanavian Journal of Medicine & Science In Sportsdemonstrating that even just three seconds of lifting every day is enough toincrease muscle strength and thickness.

The researchers, who come from Niigata University of Health and Welfare in Japan and Edith Cowan University in Australia, asked college students who dont normally exercise to perform one muscle contraction at maximum effort for three seconds per day, for five days a week over four weeks, according to an Edith Cowan writeup about the study.

The study results suggest that a very small amount of exercise stimulus even 60 seconds in four weeks can increase muscle strength, lead researcher Professor Ken Nosaka said in the writeup. Many people think you have to spend a lot of time exercising, but its not the case. Short, good quality exercise can still be good for your body and every muscle contraction counts.

Of the three weight lifting techniques the researchers tried, ECU reports that lowering a weight creates an eccentric contraction and was the most effective. The group using only eccentric contractions saw overall muscle strength improved by almost 12 percent.Which is pretty good for a fraction of a minute of effort!

Although the mechanisms underpinning eccentric contractions potent effects are not clear yet, the fact only a three-second maximal eccentric contraction a day improves muscle strength in a relatively short period is important for health and fitness, Professor Nosaka said.

You can do anything for three seconds, so Nosakas right. Its a good reminder that our mental health and bodies are worth investing in, and any good gym bro will tell you its better to show up and do a short workout than never lift at home at all.

Will this study change the problematic, diet-culture loving fitness industry? Probably not, but with knowledge comes power, and you have the power to positively impact your body every day.

More on getting healthy: Experts Propose Slapping Photos of Diseased Organs On Sugary Drinks

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Scientists Find That Lifting Weights for Just Three Seconds Is Quite Good for You - Futurism

"It didnt have to be like this!"The Tea

A 24-year-old man from Bethesda, Maryland took extreme measures to get his hands on his fathers cryptocurrency holdings,which were worth $400,000 at the time.

In a shocking fit of desperation, Liam Ghershony, who was struggling with drug abuse at the time, decided to poison his father with depressants so he could gain access to daddys funds via his cellphone, The Washington Post reports.

Its a grim story that shows drug abuse and obsessing over cryptocurrencies can create a lethal mix. In fact, a number of rehab clinics are starting to offer addicts a way to control their obsession with cryptocurrencies specifically.

It didnt have to be like this! Ghershony wrote in a note he left behind, according to WaPo, after dosing his fathers tea with a benzodiazepine, a class of drugs related to tranquilizers and Xanax. Im gonna give you the best retirement.

Fortunately, first responders found his father collapsed on the floor two days later. He later recovered after a four-day stint in the hospital.

The junior Ghershony and his father were able to cash in $350,000 after tax through a crypto investment account back in 2018. But his problematic use of drugs started to take off afterward.

While ingesting copious amounts of benzodiazepines, Adderrall, and cocaine, Ghershony started to become increasingly paranoid about the joint crypto holdings. His father recalled to WaPothat Ghershony used to tell him that he needed to sell.

The 24-year-old realized far too late that his own tolerance to benzos was a whole lot higher than his fathers. He was only aiming to knock his father out to sleep not to hospitalize him, he later told the Post.

Ghershony, who had no prior criminal record, pleaded guilty to a first-degree assault charge after reaching an agreement. He spent 125 days in jail, according to the newspaper, and two subsequent months in drug and mental health rehab.

READ MORE: He spiked his fathers tea to access $400,000 in cryptocurrency. His dad awoke two days later. [The Washington Post]

More on cryptocurrencies: Facebook Is Reportedly Trying to Sell Off Its Botched Cryptocurrency

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Man Drugs His Father's Tea to Steal $400,000 in Crypto - Futurism

Uh, what's going on, Mark?Meta-Terse

During a pivotal post-stock selloff meeting, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a very bizarre reason for looking like he was,well, about to cry on camera.

AsBloombergreports, a red-eyed Zuckerberg told employees on a company-wide video meeting responding to the companys huge stock drop that if he began crying, it was because hed scratched his cornea.

The strange claim, which may or may not have been an attempt at humor, came amid a historic drop in the companys stock value, which lost a quarter of its value this week due to both a shrinking userbase and a giant projected loss of revenue, prompting investors to sell off their holdings en mass.

Indeed, the current situation at the company formerly known as Facebook seems quite grim with the Meta stock dropping more than $250 billion or 26.4 percent in market value, which is the greatest loss the company has ever seen and the greatest single-day dive in the history of the stock market to boot.

In the face of it all, Zuckerberg implored his employees during the meeting to focus more energy on Instagram Reels to try to respond to the unprecedented level of competition posed by TikTok,Bloomberg reports per an anonymous source.

Facebook has, of course, tried and spectacularly failed to pivot to video before, and its tempting to analyze this advice from Zuckerberg as an attempt to lay blame not on the CEOs poor business decisions but instead on the people who work for him.

Those same employees are often compensated with stock options, so the quarter drop in Metas stock and the massive sell-off could lead to valuable employees leaving the company, another anonymous source toldBloomberg.

Zuckerberg himself also experienced a net worth loss of an eye-reddening $31 billion, theBBC reports though given that hes still one of the worlds richest men and worth a cool $90 billion after the drop, the situation is a lot more dire for his employees than for him personally.

We wont know exactly how bad this is for Facebook or its nascent Metaverse is until the dust settles, but given how much energy and money Zuckerbergs put into this moonshot, lets just say the optics arent great.

READ MORE: Zuckerberg Tells Staff to Focus on Video Products as Metas Stock Plunges [Bloomberg]

More on Meta:Facebooks Top VR Expert Seems Pretty Annoyed by Metaverse Push

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Mark Zuckerberg Reportedly Had Red Eyes and a Weird Excuse at Company-Wide Meeting - Futurism