"Fans have flocked to a church in Germany to hear a chord change in a musical composition that lasts for 639 years," reports the BBC. "It is the first change in the piece, As Slow As Possible, in seven years."

The Guardian reports: The performance of the composition began in September 2001 at the St Burchardi church in the eastern town of Halberstadt and is supposed to end in 2640 — if all goes well.

The music piece by the American composer John Cage is played on a special organ inside the medieval church... A compressor in the basement creates energy to blow air into the organ to create a continuous sound. When a chord change happens, it's done manually. On Saturday, soprano singer Johanna Vargas and organist Julian Lembke changed the chord.
The BBC notes the score for the 639-year composition is just eight pages long. But though the piece was written in the 1980s, it wasn't until nine years after the composer's death in 1992 that anyone dared to attempt playing it. That performance then began — with a pause that lasted nearly 18 months.

The next chord change is scheduled for February 5 of the year 2022.

CBS Sports reports: Wednesday's game between the New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays was stopped in the bottom of the first because of a "drone delay." After the second base umpire pointed to something in the sky and motioned for teams to leave the field, the cameras picked up an identifiable flying object hovering over the field during the game.
CBS reports it's the third drone delay experienced by Major League Baseball this year: The first came in a Twins-Pirates game in early August, and the second happened just a week later in a game between the Red Sox and Rays...

This move isn't just a hazard for those on the field, it's actually outright illegal. The Federal Aviation Administration's rules state that drones and other "unmanned aircraft systems" are prohibited from flying within a radius of three nautical miles of any MLB stadium starting one hour before a game's scheduled start and ending one hour after the game's end. This isn't just exclusive to baseball, as it also applies to NFL games, top-tier NCAA football games and auto racing events.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: A drone over Tel Aviv's Rabin Square dropped hundreds of bags of weed on Thursday, setting off a mad scramble by onlookers to stock up, the Jerusalem Post reported.

According to the Post, the giveaway was orchestrated by a Telegram group called Green Drone that advocates for the legalization of marijuana throughout Israel. (Medical marijuana is legal in Israel and a major export as of May; the Ministry of Security partially decriminalized recreational marijuana use in 2017 but full legalization efforts are still being negotiated.) The group told followers on Telegram that this was just the start of an ongoing "rain of cannabis...."

The Times of Israel, however, reported that the weed-dropping drone might have had more to do with viral marketing than activism: the Green Drone channel is also a marijuana delivery service. The bags dropped also contained business cards with a contact number for potential customers... Police arrested two individuals on suspicion of having operated the drone.

The seventh-wealthiest man in the world, Warren Buffett, turns 90 today. Famously the tycoon/philanthropist pledged to give away 90% of his wealth, founding with Bill and Melinda Gates "The Giving Pledge," a campaign urging the world's wealthiest individuals to dedicate the majority of their wealth to giving back. Over $1.2 trillion has now been pledged, with participants including Elon Musk, Ted Turner, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and Microsoft's other co-founder, Paul Allen.

CNN reports that Gates "offered a sweet and funny video tribute to his billionaire pal," who besides drinking six cans of Coke each day is also "a notorious dessert-a-holic." Doing his best Martha Stewart impression, and with Randy Newman's "You Got a Friend" playing in the background, Gates made a delicious-looking Oreo cake, complete with Buffett's face on the top, drawn in chocolate icing. In the end of the 60-second video, Gates cuts a slice, puts it on a plate with a fork, and leaves the message "Happy 90th birthday Warren" in Oreo dust...

The cake was a special tribute to Gates' friendship with Buffett. In 2016, Gates recounted a story on his blog about how he caught Buffett eating his favorite dessert for breakfast: Oreos. "One thing that was surprising to learn about Warren is that he has basically stuck to eating what he liked when he was six years old," Gates wrote. "I remember one of the first times he stayed at our house and he opened up a package of Oreos to eat for breakfast. Our kids immediately demanded they have some too. He may set a poor example for young people, but it's a diet that somehow works for him."
The editor of Forbes also joined the celebration: Next year will mark a decade for the Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy, our annual meeting of 150 or so of the world's biggest givers and greatest problem-solvers. The impact is enormous, and it wouldn't happen without today's birthday boy, 90-year-old Warren Buffett. In 2011, I pitched the most generous philanthropist ever the idea of turning our definitive wealth ranking from a static list into a club for good. Warren being Warren, he embraced it immediately, strategically and wholeheartedly, and the Summit was born...

The highlight each year is a talk that Warren and I have, usually during lunch... For Warren's big birthday, we dug through nine years of Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy video archives to find some of his most inspiring and obscure gems, [each] edited down to 90 seconds or so. Happy Birthday, Warren!

Slashdot reader #16,185 wrote regularly for the newsletter of a small-town computer users group. Now they've written an article for Ars Technica reminding readers that "The Homebrew Computer Club where the Apple I got its start is deservedly famous — but it's far from tech history's only community gathering centered on CPUs." Throughout the 70s and into the 90s, groups around the world helped hapless users figure out their computer systems, learn about technology trends, and discover the latest whiz-bang applications. And these groups didn't stick to Slacks, email threads, or forums; the meetings often happened in real life. But to my dismay, many young technically-inclined whippersnappers are completely unaware of computer user groups' existence and their importance in the personal computer's development. That's a damned shame... Computer groups celebrated the industry's fundamental values: a delight in technology's capabilities, a willingness to share knowledge, and a tacit understanding that we're all here to help one another...

Two things primarily made user groups disappear: first was the Internet — and the BBSes that preceded them. If you could articulate a question, you could find a website with the answer. But computers also became easier to use. Once personal computers went mainstream, troubleshooting them stopped being an esoteric endeavor.

The typical computer user group is gone now. For the exceptions, you can find an incomplete and mostly out-of-date list via the Association of PC User Groups, though online exploration may lead you to more options. For example, the Toronto PET Users Group (TPUG) is the longest continually operating Commodore user group. Washington Apple Pi is still going strong, as is the Triangle Linux Users Group. IBM's user group, SHARE, began in the 1950s and continues to support enterprise users, though it's primarily a conference these days...

Hopefully tech will continue to inspire ways to get together with other people who share your enthusiasm, whether it's Raspberry Pi meetups, Maker days, or open source conferences such as Drupalcon or PyCon. You also continue the computer user group ethos by finding ways to help other tech enthusiasts locally. For example, Hack Club aims to teach skills to high school students. Hack Clubs are already in two percent of US high schools across 35 states and 17 countries, with about 10,000 students attending clubs and hackathons each year.

So even if computer user groups largely are a thing of the past, their benefits live on. User groups were the precursor to the open source community, based on the values of sharing knowledge and helping one another. And who knows, without user groups promoting a cooperative viewpoint, the open source community might never have taken off like it did.
The article includes photographs of the OS/2 community's magazine Extended Attributes, the M.A.C.E. Journal (for Atari users), the Commodore Eight Bit Boosters newsletter, and the 1979 publication Prog/80 ("dedicated to the serious programmer.")

And it also includes video of a 1981 visit to the Boston Computer Society by a 25-year-old Bill Gates.

A reporter for Medium's tech site OneZero recently spotted an especially bizarre ad on Instagram: The ad features a GIF of a person wearing a Fitbit-style wristband, with the text "Eliminate Cravings." Across the frame from their hand sits a giant slice of cake. As the person reaches towards the cake, the wristband turns red and zaps them with electricity. You can tell it's zapping them because the whole frame vibrates, and little lightning bolts shoot out of the wristband, like in an old-school Batman movie. All that's missing is an animated "POW!"

At first, I thought it must be either a joke or a metaphor...

Nope. It turns out the Pavlok is exactly what the ad suggests: a Bluetooth-connected, wearable wristband that uses accelerometers, a connected app, and a "snap circuit" to shock its users with 450 volts of electricity when they do something undesirable. The device costs $149.99 and is available on Amazon. The company says it has over 100,000 customers who use the device to help kill food cravings, quit smoking, and to stop touching their face... I immediately saw two fundamental truths at the exact same time. Firstly, the mere existence of an automated self-flagellation wristband is proof that we've reached Peak Wearables. And second, this is the perfect device for Our Times...

Pavlok's founder says he came up with the idea for the company after paying an assistant to slap him every time he went on Facebook.... Through a Chrome extension, it can also (Doom scrollers rejoice) automatically punish actions like spending too much time on Facebook, Twitter, and other potentially time-wasting websites. It can zap you when you open too many Chrome tabs — a use case I'd love to recommend to several programmer friends... But perhaps the most relevant feature for today's world is the ability to program the device to shock you every time you touch your face. This is something which humans do alarmingly often — up to 16 times per hour. The practice has been implicated in spreading coronavirus, or at least contaminating face masks and leading to wasted PPE...

Pavlok may sound bizarre, but it's just the logical extension of an overall trend toward using tech to tweak and prod our brains into new ways of thinking... Pavlok acts as the metaphorical stick to these apps' carrots, giving you the option to beat your brain into submission instead of just tweaking it.
In 2016 Mark Cuban called Pavlok "everything but a legitimate product" in what was probably one of the least-success Shark Tank appearances ever. But Medium's reporter seems convinced it's the appropriate response to this moment in time. "I only need to look at Twitter to feel that I'm being jolted awake with a powerful electrical shock...

"The real thing feels kind of appropriate."

In 2000 Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak answered questions from Slashdot readers. More than 20 years later, CNET writes: Party on, Woz. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak turned 70 on Tuesday, and invited the world to his virtual birthday party. The event raised funds for singer Jewel's Inspiring Children Foundation, which provides mentorship and mental health resources for at-risk youth. And while the star-studded event is over, you can watch the replay online.

Wozniak and his wife, Janet, can be seen in party footage watching the event from their Northern California home. The celebration featured recorded performances and birthday greetings from such celebrities as William Shatner, Kristi Yamaguchi, Shaquille O'Neal, Chris Rick, Nancy Pelosi, Emmylou Harris and more.

There's now a three-hour-plus video of the party, complete with comments from those who already watched, available to view online. If you want it in shorter slices, Wozniak has been sharing brief videos from the party on his Twitter account...

The party may be over, but it was the kickoff event for "11 Days of Wozdom," a series of social media challenges, with prizes for some participants.
There's also a terrific biographical video on the site — plus a link to 24 special auctions supporting Woz's favority charity. Bid on a dinner with both Woz and comedian Drew Carey, a tour with Woz of comedian Jay Leno's classic car garage, or a private concert with Jewel that's hosted by Woz. (And there's also a meeting with Woz on Zoom, and a chance to have him record a personalized video message.)

It looks like everyone's celebrating. In 2010 Jonathan Mann, who writes a song a day, recorded the viral hit "That's Just the Woz" to celebrate Steve Wozniak's 60th birthday. This week -- now up to song #4,235 -- Mann recorded a follow-up song, also pointing his viewers to the URL for Woz's favorite charity.

"Instead of presents, help save and transform children's lives," Woz tweeted on Monday.

"Computer user freedom is a matter of justice," argues a new video released Friday by the Free Software Foundation: The University of Costumed Heroes is an animated video telling the story of a group of heroes falling prey to the powers of proprietary software in education. The university board acquires cutting-edge remote learning software that enables them to continue their operations online, but -- [SPOILER ALERT] -- it may sow the seeds of their downfall.

This video is the second in a series of animated videos created by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and this one is themed around our campaign against the use of proprietary remote education software. We must reverse the trend of forsaking young people's freedom, which has been accelerating as corporations try to capitalize on the need to establish new remote education practices. Free software not only protects the freedoms of your child or grandchild by allowing people to study the source code for any malicious functionalities, it also communicates important values like autonomy, sharing, social responsibility, and collaboration.
"Help give students #UserFreedom," reads a tagline below the video, which shows what happens when the university forsakes an ethical remote-learning platform that safeguards computer user freedom for a proprietary AI-powered alternative. But don't worry, the bad guys eventually learn their lesson.

"Noo!! Defeated by the Free Software Foundation once again!"

"Silicon Valley, long obsessed with computer chips, is now disrupting chocolate ones," writes the New York Post: Remy Labesque, a Los-Angeles based industrial engineer working for Elon Musk's Tesla, has re-engineered the chocolate chip for the optimization-obsessed set.

Thirty bucks gets you 17.6 ounces, or about 142, of the expertly forged chocolate geodes, which are molded to "melt at the right rate," according to Todd Masonis, co-founder of San Francisco's Dandelion Chocolate, which makes and sells the chips... Labesque's flattened pyramid-like structures feature thick middles and thinly tapered edges. A 15-degree slope, according to blueprints for the morsel, creates a glossy finish when baked.

Masonis said it took years to realize Labesque's original multifaceted mold. "We did 3-D renderings of different options for shapes, test prints of a few molds and, of course, baking tests," he said. The goal? To emphasize the complex chips' cacao bean essence, which is said to have notes of chocolate buttercream frosting and banana. "We found that if you take a huge chunk of chocolate and put it in your mouth, that taste can be overwhelming," said Masonis. "The flat shape helps slow down the experience."

The single-origin chocolate is carefully tempered — a process where chocolate is heated then cooled to create a hard shell — and is designed to melt without ruining the structural integrity of its mold-cast hard edge.

The perfect chip weight, according to the engineers, is 4.05 grams.
The primitive shape of our current chocolate chips "isn't a designed shape," Labesque tells Bloomberg. "It's a product of an industrial manufacturing process."

An anonymous reader writes: An unknown vigilante hacker has been sabotaging the operations of the recently-revived Emotet botnet by replacing Emotet payloads with animated GIFs, effectively preventing victims from getting infected. The sabotage, which started on July 21, has grown from a simple joke to a serious issue impacting a large portion of the Emotet operation, reducing the biggest malware botnet today to a quarter of its daily capabilities.

Since the attack started, the vigilante has replaced Emotet payloads with this Blink 182 "WTF" GIF, a James Franco GIF, and the Hackerman GIF from the Kung Fury movie.
The article points out this is all possible because Emotet stashes its malware on Wordpress sites they've breached with web shells — all of which have the exact same password.

Slashdot reader Charlotte Web quotes Mashable: Three years ago on this date, on July 17, 2017, McAfee, the eccentric founder of the antivirus software company bearing his name, made the bet of a lifetime. McAfee made a bet that in three years a single bitcoin (1 BTC) would be worth $500,000.

Now while most people would throw down money to make this bet, McAfee had a very different idea. "if not, I will eat my **** on national television...."

Fast forward to July 17, 2020, three years from the day McAfee made his bet. Today, a bitcoin is worth around $9,150. It's certainly up from three years ago, sure. But we're far away from $500,000. The world may be very different from the one we were living in three years ago, but a bet is a bet.

Many on Twitter reminded McAfee that it was time to make good on his bet.

McAfee's response? He appears to be chickening out... "The bet was the end 8f 2020."
McAfee also tweeted that at the end of 2020, he'd still honor the bet.

"Myself, or, perhaps, a subcontractor :)"

destinyland writes: Amber Lynn Gilles walked into a Starbucks without a mask, later complaining on Facebook about the server who'd asked her to wear one. ("Next time I will wait for cops and bring a medical exemption!") She says she's surprised by the attention "my little review" attracted. A GoFundMe campaign supporting the Starbucks barista who had to deal with her has now raised $105,450.

So she now says she wants at least half of that money, "because they're using me to get it." She complained to the New York Times that "They're using my name, they're using my face, and they're slandering me."

Meanwhile Lenin Gutierrez, the Starbucks barista, is meeting with a financial adviser to discuss the generous donations he's received from all around the world. Though he's still working at Starbucks, with these donations, he tells a local newscast, he'll now be able to go to college and pursue a degree in kinesiology (the scientific study of human movement). But he also plans to donate some of the money to charity. "I can't be grateful enough," he adds, saying he hopes to show back some of the kindness that people have shown to him.

The GoFundMe page supporting him adds, "Thank you CNN and Chris Cuomo for closing out Cuomo Prime Time with Lenin's story and the GoFundMe." And the page also calls attention to what it sees as the larger theme in this incident. "In the words of Chris Cuomo: 'This is not about your freedom. Your freedom to wear, or not wear a mask, ends where it encroaches on somebody else's freedom not to get sick from you. Surrender the me to the we.'"

"Masks are stupid and so are the people wearing them," posted one San Diego woman on Facebook (who is also an anti-vaxxer). "She has also shared previous posts expressing her refusal to wear masks, and her belief that those who wear them are 'not thinking clearly,'" reports the Washington Post.

Here's what happened next... Amber Lynn Gilles walked into a Starbucks in San Diego without a mask and was declined service, according to a Facebook post on her page. She took a photograph of the barista who didn't serve her... Her post backfired.

It quickly collected more than 100,000 reactions and comments, as well as nearly 50,000 shares. Many Facebook users defended the barista, Lenin Gutierrez, and some called Gilles a "Karen" — a name coined to describe an entitled white woman making inappropriate remarks. One Facebook user wrote: "There's no reason to publicly shame a kid who's trying to work his shift like any other day...." That's when Matt Cowan, a man who doesn't know Gutierrez but stumbled upon the post, decided to start a virtual tip jar for the barista on GoFundMe. Cowan called the donation page "Tips for Lenin Standing Up To A San Diego Karen..."

"Everybody is rallying around somebody for doing what they're supposed to do and trying to protect everyone else," Cowan said in an interview with KGTV. "It just goes to show you there are a lot of good people out there and that outweighs the bad...."
By Saturday the original Facebook post criticizing the Starbucks barista had brought him over $70,000 in donations through the GoFundMe campaign.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reports, "In an interview with KNSD-TV Channel 7 in San Diego, Gilles said she's received 'thousands' of death threats since the post went live."

A new article on The Hustle tries to explain why sports stadiums are suddenly full of fans made out of cardboard: Back in March, a German filmmaker and soccer aficionado named Ingo Müller was sitting at home, complaining to his wife about not being able to attend the matches of his favorite club team, Borussia Mönchengladbach. "She said, 'If you're really pissed about not going to the stadium, just take a photo and send it there,'" Müller tells The Hustle. So Müller contacted a local printer and a team to build a portal where fans could upload photos of themselves. For a sum of €19 ($21 USD), he'd print out each photo on a cardboard cutout and install it in the stadium, with the permission of club owners. Originally, he anticipated between 500 and 2k orders. So far, 21k+ people have purchased a cutout.

All the proceeds go back to charities associated with the team, including a portion to fans impacted by the pandemic. Now, Müller has received inquiries from sports teams in "at least 15 countries," including Sweden, Colombia, China, Russia, Serbia, and Austria, about setting up their own cardboard fan project. He's even decided to apply for a Guinness World Record. And Müller isn't the only one tapping into the trend. Cardboard fans are lining the stands at baseball games in Taiwan and South Korea, and soccer matches all over Europe. Shaquille O'Neal's cardboard likeness even turned up for a soccer match in Northampton, England. At least 8 Premiere League teams have been in talks to fill their stands with cutouts. Turkish soccer clubs are trying a model with two price tiers: 123 liras ($18) for season ticket holders and 149 liras ($22) for regular fans...

For sports teams trying to recoup ticket revenue, cardboard fans aren't the only idea in the mix. Using AR, an Iceland-based company, OzSports, is trying to project avatars of fans into seats. In Denmark, one team brought 10k fans into its stadium with Zoom. In South Korea, a soccer team filled its fan seats with actual sex dolls — a move that earned them widespread criticism and an ~$81k fine.

89-year-old Forrest Fenn had a secret, reports the Guardian. He'd hidden a treasure chest worth over $1 million somewhere in America's Rocky Mountains: For more than a decade, he packed and repacked his treasure chest, sprinkling in gold dust and adding hundreds of rare gold coins and gold nuggets. Pre-Colombian animal figures went in, along with prehistoric mirrors of hammered gold, ancient Chinese faces carved from jade and antique jewelry with rubies and emeralds.
For more than 10 years, "hundreds of thousands" of fortune-hunters searched for his hidden treasure chest, according to the Guardian (adding "Some have said it was a hoax and pursued lawsuits.") Fenn posted clues online, and included nine hints in a 24-line poem in his 2010 autobiography, The Thrill of the Chase. Many quit their jobs to dedicate themselves to the search and others depleted their life savings. At least four people are believed to have died searching for it.

Fenn, who lives in Santa Fe, said he hid his treasure as a way to tempt people to get into the wilderness and give them a chance to launch an old-fashioned adventure and expedition for riches.
"There seemed to be despair everywhere," Fenn told Business Insider in 2018. "I wanted to give people some hope and something to believe in... I hope parents will take their children camping and hiking in the Rocky Mountains. I hope they will fish, look for fossils, turn rotten logs over to see what's under them, and look for my treasure."

So where was it? "It was under a canopy of stars in the lush, forested vegetation of the Rocky Mountains," Fenn posted coyly on his web site, "and had not moved from the spot where I hid it more than 10 years ago."

"In one recent survey, 54 percent of respondents said they cook more than before the pandemic," writes a clinical associate professor at NYU's business school: 75 percent said they have become more confident in the kitchen and 51 percent said they will continue to cook more after the crisis ends. Interest in online cooking tutorials, recipe websites and food blogs has surged. Dozens of recipe writers and cookbook authors such as Alison Roman, Jet Tila, and Julia Turshen are frenetically posting ideas and answering questions on Twitter and Instagram. "I feel like this virus is a conspiracy to make me learn how to cook," Eliza Bayne, a television producer tweeted... The search term "online cooking classes" saw a fivefold increase on Google over the past four weeks, and the search title "cook with me" saw a 100 percent increase in average daily views on YouTube in the second half of March.

This surge in cooking is meaningful, as people who frequently cook meals at home eat more healthfully and consume fewer calories than those who cook less, according to multiple studies.

One of the biggest barriers to cooking frequently is that it takes practice and time to gain proficiency and ease. That initial training time has simply not been available to most Americans, as the pace of life has intensified over the decades. Nor has there been a perceived need to cook because prepared and fast foods were readily available. The pandemic has put everything on pause, and almost every "nonessential" worker, employed or unemployed, is now enrolled in a de facto home economics course... [W]e are acquiring an ancient skill that has been shown to help people live better and longer. If we apply that skill with greater frequency over the long run, it could reduce our risk of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and stroke...

Once life rebounds, we may go back to our previous ways, but our palates will have experienced a reset and our hands would have acquired an artful skill... There will be many lessons from the coronavirus pandemic, but we would be wise not to forget this one. This newfound proficiency could be lifesaving.
Of course, he also notes that sales are also up for Hamburger Helper (and other packaged good). But what's your experience been like.

Are any Slashdot readers doing more cooking?

"We don't think it's practical for us to continue waiting and hoping for the best," explains the official Burning Man site, adding "public health and the well-being of our participants, staff, and neighbors in Nevada are our highest priorities."

And thus, SFGate reports that the 2020 festival's communal creation of Black Rock City scheduled to begin August 30th "will now be built virtually after organizers decided Friday to cancel this year's Burning Man event due to the coronavirus pandemic." "After much listening, discussion, and careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision..." the organizers said in a statement online. "Given the painful reality of COVID-19, one of the greatest global challenges of our lifetimes, we believe this is the right thing to do." While building the physical city in the Nevada desert is off, the event itself is still on, with this year's "Multiverse" theme taking place online.

"On a virtual playa, there's no limit to who can participate," organizers said. "Like That Thing in The Desert, we will have costs and will need to create some kind of 'ticket.' We're working out those details and will share them as soon as we can."
The official Burning Man site seems energized by the uncertainty: We're not sure how it's going to come out; it will likely be messy and awkward with mistakes. It will also likely be engaging, connective, and fun.

Some of you who already purchased a ticket for the playa may need that money now more than ever. We're committed to providing refunds to those who need them, but we're also committed to keeping Burning Man culture alive and thriving, and to ensuring our organization stays operational into next year's event season — which will require substantial staff layoffs, pay reductions, and other belt-tightening measures. Burning Man Project's survival is going to depend on ingenuity and generosity. Luckily, our community is rich in both.

Whether you have already purchased a ticket, have been waiting for the Main Sale, or are simply supportive of our vision and mission — if you have the means, it is our sincerest hope that you will consider donating all or a portion of your ticket value, and/or making a tax-deductible donation to Burning Man Project. This is going to be a tough year for us, as we know it will be for you, but we will get through it together...

We will tackle this challenge the same way humans across the globe are doing right now — by drawing strength and inspiration from one another. We are all Burning Man."

What happens when no one shows up for a tech conference?

Fast Company's technology editor harrymcc writes: From Apple to Microsoft to Google, major tech companies have responded to the coronavirus crisis by either canceling their 2020 conference or making them purely virtual. But one well-established event — Vancouver's CanSecWest — went ahead earlier this month, with streaming as an option but not mandatory. Only three attendees showed up in the flesh. But so did security reporter Seth Rosenblatt, who wrote about the eerie experience for Fast Company.
They were outnumbed by the six staffers at the event -- "there to run the online component" -- but the article notes that the conference's organizer and founder promised all attendees "infrared body temperature checks, on-site coronavirus testing, ample supplies of disposable face masks and hand sanitizer, and restrictions on physical contact and interaction..."

"Empty hallways and escalators echoed with every footstep, and it smelled empty, the ventilation system circulating unused air. At the conference registration desk, I was offered a disposable surgical face mask and gloves."

A Portuguese historian argues that Magellan's famous trip around the world in 1522 was much harder than sending humans to Mars: Tens of guys died making this crossing; of 250 crew, only 18 returned, Henrique Leitao, a historian at the University of Lisbon, told me... [O]nce NASA or other space agencies or private entities actually launch humans on a six month trajectory to the Red planet, they will likely have mitigated the lion's share of risks to the crew. In contrast, Magellan's crew realized that at least a third of them would likely never survive their journey, says Leitao...

Is there a comparison between the Age of Discovery and drivers for the exploration and commercialization of space? One could argue that minerals on asteroids could be seen as the present-day equivalent of the Age of Discovery's highly-prized Asian spices. And that actually getting these 16th century spices back to Europe was arguably just as arduous and seemingly difficult as any initiative to return exotic materials from a near-Earth asteroid... Risk is inherent in any off-world human voyage. But when it comes to safety, today's technology and current knowledge of in situ conditions on Mars itself will arguably give future explorers an inherent edge over Magellan's generation.
The article also summarizes Leitao observation that one of the crew members who died on the trip was Magellan. "For 40 days Magellan walked around The Philippines; gets involved in a completely absurd fight with locals on a beach and is killed."

An anonymous reader quotes Rock, Paper, Shotgun: For as long as there's been Minecraft, there's been people who want to re-create the world in Minecraft. For one modder, though, it's not enough to have a to-scale replica of our pale blue dot recreated in Mojang's block-builder. A new project named Build The Earth is looking for talented builders with too much time on their hands, bringing them together to fully recreate every last man-made structure on Earth in Minecraft.

YouTuber PippinFTS unveiled the project in a YouTube video earlier this week. It's awfully dramatic, but give the guy a break — he's only trying to go and build a planet.

PippenFTS' project is building from Terra 1 to 1, a project headed up by modders orangeadam3 and shejan0. Using a few extra mods to get around the game's strict world limitations, Terra 1 to 1 uses public terrain datasets, street maps and forest databases to accurately map the earth's terrain, roads and woodland areas in Minecraft... [H]e wants to build a community that can collectively recreate thousands of years of human history by filling out every single man-made structure on Earth. His "Build The Earth" project hopes to crowdsource player-recreated cities, towns, stadiums, bridges and otherwise. PippenFTS himself will contribute with his own hometown.

"Regardless," he writes, wistful in his obligation, "I will build Seattle. Super excited."
The project already has a Patreon account -- plus 5,500 members in its subreddit.