Timothy W. Martin wrote about the rise of GPS art runs:

• An increasing number of exercise enthusiasts are mapping out their trails with the aim of having their route create an image or phrase.
• You can get a sense of where the art was made by the GPS “brush-strokes”. American cities are usually laid out in a grid so the art tends to be blocky.
• Meanwhile European cities tend to have longer, more flowing lines.
• The image created by runners is usually very different from that created by bikers.
• Some then frame the print outs of their route and depict them at galleries.
• Running crazed couples have planned runs where the end result spells out a proposal.
• Casual runners say that it helps break up the monotony of running and encourages them to get out more.
• Things like cloudy weather, low batteries, and signal blocking skyscrapers can have the unfortunate effect of ruining a meticulously planned piece art run.

Read more here.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

The Economist wrote about how the presence of a First Class section on an airplane affects passengers:

• According to a study passengers are 3.8 times more likely to have incidents of “air-rage” if they’re on a flight with a first-class section.
• That proportion doubles if they have to walk through the first class section to find their seat.
• This is broadly in line with other findings that show that seeing your own income increase doesn’t make you happy – unless other people’s income decreases.
• What this means for broader society and economic policy as a whole – that wealth satisfaction isn’t about needs but, instead, about comparative position – remains an open question.

Read more here.

Source: The Economist

Facebook has a trending news section that shows users the stories that are generating a lot of discussion. It’s a big driver of traffic to web pages and, according to Michael Nunez, it’s being censored:

• The trending news isn’t just an algorithm. Humans see what stories are doing well and then decide what to call ‘trending’.
• However, the people who have made those decisions in the past have often been liberal in their political outlook and have suppressed conservative news stories.
• Facebook says that this isn’t a directive from them, and that they were unaware of this practice.
• What does seem to be an official practice, however, is to tell trending news curators to promote certain stories – even if they aren’t actually trending.
• This is because sometimes major stories – like the Syrian civil war – don’t see a lot of discussion on Facebook, but the company wanted to be taken seriously as a news source. Such stories are thus artificially promoted it as ‘trending’.
• Facebook also officially suppresses any trending stories that report on Facebook itself.

After this article was published it became a trending topic on Facebook so there’s…that. Read more about what this says about Facebook as a media company, and Facebook’s official response over here.

Source: Gizmodo

Going to the dentist ranks moderately above meeting your executioner and a little below dealing with a home foreclosure agent. Chloe Pantazi wrote about a service that tries to change this:

• Your Dentist is a luxury dental services clinic for the rich and wealthy.
• Patients are ferried to and from one of the the company’s 13 UK locations in private Bentleys.
• Once at the clinic they wait in a decadent lounge (pictured) furnished with movie theater arm chairs.
• While they wait they can enjoy a glass of champagne or choose from a selection of fine teas.

Read about what you pay for all of this, and see other photos here.

Source: Business Insider

Via: Marginal Revolution

The Economist had a piece on a new fighting sport that aims to take advantages of the innovation we’ve seen in the 21^st century:

• United Weapons Master is a new sport that clads its fighters in modern day Kevlar reinforced carbon-fiber composites (actual gear pictured).
• While the armor is tough it’s also lightweight enough that a fighter could plan to do cartwheels.
• Once the fighting begins the warriors let loose on each other. The armor is strong enough that fighters can hit each other with weapons that could kill a person if they were unprotected.
• 52 sensors that make 10,000 measurements a second then calculate the fractures that each blow would have done if the person subject to them didn’t have their armor.
• At the end the computer uses these measurements to declares the winner – creating a far more objective scoring system than anything related to referees or judges.
• Of course it’s been a while since humans flung throwing stars at arteries. The creators of the tournament will experiment with attacking pig cadavers so computers have more data about how much damage various attacks do.
• The first battles are expected to be televised this year. There will be a bit of nationalistic pride as fighters will be able to draw upon various ancient martial arts if they choose – and find out if Chinese Kung Fu can take on Japanese Swordsmanship.

Read more about military interest in the armor suits, how the fighters will be cooled, and other details here.

Source: The Economist

Christopher Groskopf reported on the relationship between governance and traffic fatalities:

• A statistical analysis found that the more corrupt a country is, the greater the number of road accidents it has.
• This is driven in part by corrupt governments being more likely to siphon infrastructure funds away for other purposes.
• Corrupt countries might also have corrupt traffic police that take bribes instead of punishing people for traffic violations.
• And there is a relationship between income and corruption. Traffic fatalities began to go down once a people’s income increases above $10,000 per capita. It’s usually uncorrupt governments that are able to manage this.

See a visualization of the data and read more about the study here.

Source: Quartz

If you see a stork carrying a bag home you can’t just assume anymore that it’s a family being blessed with a newborn, according to the experts at the University of East Anglia. It could well be a take-out order:

• Instead of heading over to countries in Africa from Spain and Portugal for the winter, storks have decided to stay put.
• They do this because they’ve discovered the wonders of junk food. They now just raid open landfill sites for food rather than make the arduous journey south.
• Storks now invest in finding prime nest building spots which they defend year-round.
• The convenience maybe responsible for the explosion in the population of the species – in the past 20 years their numbers have grown 10-fold.
• Alas they may pay a price for their laziness. EU directives will soon require open land-fill sites to be shut down. Hopefully the birds haven’t entirely forgotten how to make it south to find food.

Read more about the study here.

Source: Phys

Via: Marginal Revolution

Zusha Elinson wondered if the key to understanding the short-term future of the tech industry was to look at sales of ping-pong tables:

• For tech companies having ping-pong tables is a sign that they are a different and distinct place to work.
• When companies struggle to find funding or are uncertain about their future, it makes sense that expenditures on the tables – which can be very expensive and have little resale value – fall.
• The ping-pong table industry saw a 50% drop in sales in Q1 2016. Over the same quarter startup funding decreased by 25%.
• Until 2014 Twitter was a big purchaser of ping-pong tables. Since then the company has run into financial trouble.
• Intel stopped buying the tables last year. Last month 12,000 employees were laid off.
• No one really remembers when perennially crisis-ridden Yahoo last purchased a ping-pong table.
• Google, on the other hand, which saw an increase in profits in the latest quarter, recently made a big order for them.
• The tables will probably only work as a financial indicator in the short-term. During the previous tech-bubble it was pool, not ping-pong tables, that startups kept around for their employees.
• They seem to have realized, however, that not only are ping-pong tables cheaper, they can also double as meeting tables in a pinch.

Read what ping-pong table manufacturers think about all this, and other details here.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Zero Hedge covered one of the many alarming elements of Venezuela’s ongoing financial crisis:

• Hyperinflation in Venezuela has caused a financing crisis for the government – with public servants being required to take five day “weekends” in order to save money.
• The government has been trying to print money to make its payments – further fueling inflation and driving a vicious cycle.
• Venezuela has struggled to print the money itself – partly because the country has a shortage of the security paper, and metallic ink required to pump out the currency.
• So it has outsourced currency printing to other international vendors – who have been delivering bank notes by the 747 plane-load.
• Recently, however, it has emerged that the government has missed $71 million worth of payments to one of its vendors, and it’s unclear if the government will ever make that payment.
• It doesn’t help that the largest denomination note is for a mere 100 Bolivars – about ten American cents on the black market.
• The administration of Nicolás Maduro, the President, could save a lot of money by releasing higher denomination notes that it wouldn’t have to print as many of.
• However, the government fears that this will contribute to inflation – right now, at least, prices are limited by the amount of notes that can be carried in a wheelbarrow.
• As it is Maduro’s government has stopped printing denominations of 20 Bolivars and below because they cost more to produce than they are worth.

Read the full saga over here.

Source: Zero Hedge

Geoff Manaughmarch mused about the things he learned while he was flying around in Los Angeles’ police helicopters:

• A city’s infrastructure shapes the kind of crimes it has to deal with. The soft sedimentary rocks of Los Angeles mean that crimes committed through tunnels are far more common than in the granite New York City.
• Los Angeles’ extensive freeways also make bank jobs more lucrative as thieves have an easy route to make a quick get-away.
• Police choppers can’t get too close to airports because of the restricted airspace, meaning that get-away drivers are increasingly learning to lose heat in and around airports.
• Right now police copters are hindered by their inability to pinpoint exact addresses they can direct ground forces towards. As aerial policing – through things such as drones – becomes more common, expect to see a push to paint street addresses on rooftops.

Read more about what the police see from their eyes in the skies, and how predictive policing could change the role that helicopters have to play over here.

Source: The New York Times

Via: Marginal Revolution