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How Tom Brady’s Crypto Ambitions Collided With Reality. “The superstar quarterback is among the celebrities dealing with the fallout from the crypto crash. Others, like Taylor Swift, escaped.” (The New York Times / Erin Griffith and David Yaffe-Bellany).

Seems like Brady and other celebrities were both victimizers and victims, as is so often the case with people in pyramid schemes at any level. They’re not entirely guilty but they’re not innocent victims either.

And they’re all still rich. Maybe they lost a few millions or tens of millions, but they can afford it.

I was and am disappointed to see celebrities I liked and respected, like Matt Damon and Larry David, get caught up in this grift. I thought they had more integrity.

I remember when I did not have to spend quite so much of my life charging things and making sure that the things are charged

Threads: A mall inside the store inside the mall

I signed up for Threads. Unenthusiastically. I want to use fewer social media platforms, and concentrate my focus, rather than doing more.

Hopefully, Threads will follow through and become a full citizen of ActivityPub, and also connect to the blue Facebook platform. That will make my social media activity simpler.

Even better: Everybody needs to wake up and realize that we don’t need a platform to serve as the internet town square. The internet already is the town square.

About 7-10 years ago, JC Penny announced a bold new initiative to start opening independent shops within its stores. At first I thought that was brilliant, and then I said, “Wait a second—you want to open a mall inside the store inside the mall? How’s that going to work?”

I’m @mitchwagner on Threads. So far, my entire Threads activity consists of a single photo of the dog.

Every so often I am tempted by an Ember coffee mug and then I look at the price and I fall over unconscious.

Historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook “delve into the mysteries surrounding the Ark of the Covenant.”

The most important object in the universe, but also a somewhat invisible presence in the Bible, the Ark of the Covenant has fuelled stories for millennia… as a weapon of mass destruction, an elaborate filling cabinet for sacred laws, or as the very location where God and man meet.

The Rest is History: Raiders of the Lost Ark

Also:

The Mystery of the Holy Grail

“Who drinks the water I shall give him, will have a spring inside him welling up for eternal life.” A deeply mysterious object which doesn’t appear in the Bible, was the Holy Grail really the chalice used by Jesus during the Last Supper, and the very cup that caught his blood at the crucifixion? Or is it merely a symbol representing Christ’s bloodline? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the Holy Grail, the origin of the tradition, and the role it played within medieval Christendom.

“Why do we have so little access to what’s happening under the hood?" Neuroscientist David Eagleman discusses how almost everything we do is controlled unconsciously. Our consciousness and free will are just illusions, thinking we’re in control but really just along for the ride.

I’ve seen the metaphor elsewhere comparing consciousness and free will to a toddler riding in a car with one of those child-safety seats that has a toy dashboard and steering wheel built in. The kid thinks they’re driving, but they’re not.

I made heavy use of Google Reader, checking it several times daily every day. But I never used the social features—I barely knew about them.

Learning about them now, I think I would have loved them. Most of what I do on social media is share things I find elsewhere on the Internet, sometimes commenting on them. I’ve never found a platform where that kind of behavior was a perfect fit. Reddit comes close, but there’s a lot of overhead on Reddit finding the right community to comment in, and figuring out those communities’ sometimes esoteric rules.

Raymond Scott was one of the most famous musical composers of the 20th Century, though his name is nearly forgotten today. He was also a brilliant electronics engineer, and his life’s work was the Electronium, an automated music-composing machine. Scott came up in in the Big Band era, and later worked with Berry Gordy, who founded the Motown record later. Scott’s music appears in Looney Tunes, Ren & Stimpy, and the SImpsons cartoons.

Player Piano, an episode of the Last Archive podcast featured on 99% Invisible.