Kickstarter for the blackest black paint in the world

You may have heard that artist Anish Kapoor has an exclusive license to produce art using Vantablack, a pigment made from carbon nanotubes that absorbs up to 99.96% of visible light. Covering an object with Vantablack makes it look like the object, and everything behind it, has been removed from the universe.

Artists who are not Anish Kapoor are understandably upset that Kapoor has a lock on Vantablack. Many people have tried to create pigments as dark as Vantablack, and the person with the most success so far is Stuart Semple. He created Black 2.0 a few years ago, and now he is Kickstarted a new formulation, Black 3.0, which absorbs between 98 and 99% of visible light.

The Kickstarter includes the following caution: "By backing this project you confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not backing this on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor. To the best of your knowledge, information and belief this material will not make its way into the hands of Anish Kapoor."

Grade school children explain climate change to Trump

We have a president who has a hard time understanding the difference between weather and climate. Science is a tough subject for the man. On Monday he proved once again just how ignorant he is with this tweet:

In the beautiful Midwest, windchill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming? Please come back fast, we need you!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2019

So Jimmy Kimmel kindly invited a couple of grade school children to try to help Trump out with this basic climate change tutorial. Mr. Trump, please listen and learn.

Facebook cancels its all-spying, secret "research" program, Apple cancels Facebook's developer account

Yesterday, Techcruch published a deeply reported account of Facebook's "Project Atlas,", a "research" app whose users were paid up to $20/month (plus affiliate fees) to install on Ios devices, which exploited third parties with access to Apple's developer program to install a man-in-the-middle certificate that allowed Facebook to harvest every conceivable kind of data from its users' Iphones and other Ios devices.

The reaction was swift: Apple has terminated Facebook's developer certificate, meaning it can no longer sideload apps into Ios devices by signing them as "experimental" or "beta" apps. In its statement, Apple confirmed Techcrunch's accusations that Facebook had abused the developer certificate, saying that the Enterprise Developer Program was "solely for the internal distribution of apps," and that Facebook had violated its agreement with Apple by "using their membership to distribute a data-collecting app to consumers."

Apple previously removed Facebook's Onavo app, another fake VPN that was designed to gather data on its users, and Techcrunch speculated that the "Facebook Research"/Project Atlas app was intended as a replacement for Onavo's data.

However, Facebook disputes this. In an announcement that it is cancelling the "Facebook Research" program, the company says it has been unfairly maligned, that the 13-25-year-olds it recruited for the program were duly informed of the app's surveillance activities, and that the project was unrelated to Onavo.

“Key facts about this market research program are being ignored,” the company said. “Despite early reports, there was nothing ‘secret’ about this; it was literally called the Facebook Research App. It wasn’t ‘spying’ as all of the people who signed up to participate went through a clear on-boarding process asking for their permission and were paid to participate. Finally, less than 5 percent of the people who chose to participate in this market research program were teens. All of them with signed parental consent forms.”

Facebook will shut down its controversial market research app for iOS [Casey Newton/The Verge]

NEW: Apple now says it has revoked Facebook’s iOS developer certificate, which Apple intends to be used for a company’s employees to sideload apps without needing the App Store, not for the purpose FB used.

Apple’s statement: pic.twitter.com/IvFHUfOZPq

— Alex Heath (@alexeheath) January 30, 2019

Lego bricks are a better investment than gold bricks

"We find that LEGO investments outperform large stocks, bonds, gold and other alternative investments, yielding the average return of at least 11% (8% in real terms) in the sample period 1987-2015," write the authors of a study titled LEGO - The Toy of Smart Investors. "Small and huge sets, as well as seasonal, architectural and movie-based sets, deliver higher returns. LEGO returns are not exposed to market, value, momentum and volatility risk factors, but have an almost unit exposure to the size factor. A positive multifactor alpha of 4-5%, a Sharpe ratio of 0.4, a positive return skewness and a low exposure to standard risk factors make the LEGO toy an attractive alternative investment with a good diversification potential."

[via Bonnie Burton's article, "Lego bricks outshine gold bars as investments, study finds" from CNet, January 28, 2019]

Image: 299 Warm Gold, Drum Lacquered/Gold Metalized/Gold Laquered / Metallic Gold, by Ryan H./Twitter. Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)