insults should be as accurate as possible.

🏹 TIL: "Man the hunter, woman the gatherer" was coined at a 1966 symposium at the University of Chicago. The archaeological record tells a more interesting story.

At Wilamaya Patjxa in the Peruvian Andes, archaeologists excavated a 9,000-year-old burial with a full big-game hunting toolkit: projectile points, scrapers, a knife. The first assumption was a great male chief. Bone and protein analysis showed the hunter was a 17-to-19-year-old woman.

That discovery triggered a review of early burials across the Americas. Of 27 people buried with big-game hunting tools, 11 were women and 16 were men. Statistical modeling suggests women made up 30 to 50 percent of big-game hunters in the early Americas.

Women also hunt in living foraging societies around the world, often intentionally and with a wider range of weapons and tactics than men (researchers actively debate the exact percentage). And physiologically, women may be better built for endurance hunting: estrogen and the hormone adiponectin help the body burn fat efficiently over long distances.

One more: analysis of hand stencils in European Paleolithic caves suggests around 75 percent were made by women.

Read more:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd0310
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287101
https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/women-leave-their-handprints-cave-wall

#TIL #archaeology #prehistory

A few people have asked for sources for further reading on election security concepts, like Software Independence and RLAs. Here are few to get you started:

Rivest and Wack on Software Independence: https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/RW06.pdf

Stark and Linderman, Gentle Introduction to RLAs: https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2025/03/31/A_Gentle_Introduction_to_Risk-Limiting_Audits.pdf

Here's a brief overview, by me, of election technology and risks, from a few years ago: https://georgetownlawtechreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/4.2-p505-522-Blaze.pdf

And for those who like video, here's a short talk by me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzRSA_VDsdc&list=PLltrHIXltfGLotq79TBgIK9QK4O29Z2FF

@Lunaphied @alina oofs okay yeah I didn't look at any of the other flags from that seller. hmmm. It's weird there's no trans dutch one

@catsalad @20002ist @mattblaze @paul_ipv6 @hotelzululima @SteveBellovin @wendynather @SecureOwl Surely you believe me? 🤭

OK, so Costumecon 15 was in Baltimore that weekend. I was working on the light crew. Some of the crew were splitting time between CCXV and Disclave.

Thus the mysterious meaning of the button “Costumecon 15, Techno-Fandom 0” is still clear as mud.

@jamesh train line has been there for over 100 years, the shops & town centre is relatively modern (1990s onwards)

@catsalad Meow indeed. So much meow. All the meow.

@decryption What order were things built in?

You see this sort of thing in Perth for the new train lines, where they've built where land was available rather than where it would make sense if it had been integrated from the start.

Maybe more services will be built closer to the train stations over the next 20-30 years, but maybe not.

@catsalad

Yup...

https://pixelfed.social/p/c64whiz/983164653398595953

@mattblaze I regret not visiting this a few years ago when I attended Defcon. Alas, maybe next year. Can't go this year.

But, I read through some of the exchanges you've had with people who claim the very real vulnerabilities are all lies, and I fear that this is what the GOP and the Trump Regime want out of this whole charade is FUD. Sowing doubt in the integrity of our voting systems helps them, and we're seeing their success play out here in real time.

@qdot What did they do now?

@alina @kookie oh you actually have one? ah huh. I was surprised too. The seller you link also sells some cursed flags and thus of course somehow not only do they not have a trans version of the Dutch flag, they don't even have the normal version, only the prince of orange version used mostly by fascists

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
The first method is far more difficult.
-- C.A.R. Hoare

The latter method has been automated by AI (LLMs).

Referral traffic from Google to publishers dropped by roughly a third in a single year, and some sites lost seventy, eighty, ninety percent.

Read the full article: The Super Bowl Start Time Problem
▸ https://lttr.ai/As2gx

Is there a fediverse client for a Nintendo Switch yet?

🧵 The Salad Oil Scandal of 1963 — one of the most audacious frauds in financial history.

Anthony De Angelis ran Allied Crude Vegetable Oil Refining Co. He wanted to corner the soybean oil futures market. To fund his scheme, he needed collateral. So he did something brilliant and insane: he filled massive storage tanks in Bayonne, NJ with seawater, then poured a thin layer of real vegetable oil on top.

When inspectors came to verify the inventory, they lowered measuring tapes into the tanks. The tapes showed full tanks. The oil coating made everything look legit.

De Angelis used these fake warehouse receipts to borrow $175 million against oil that mostly didn't exist. He was supposed to have 2 billion pounds of vegetable oil — more than the entire USDA's reported national inventory.

The house of cards fell in November 1963 when the Soviet wheat deal stalled, futures prices dropped, and margin calls came due. Inspectors finally found mostly seawater. Allied filed for bankruptcy on Nov 19, 1963.

The fallout was massive:
• American Express — a major victim — lost over 50% of its stock value
• Two Wall Street brokerages (Ira Haupt & Co, J.R. Williston & Beane) went bust
• The New York Produce Exchange, the primary venue for cottonseed/soybean oil futures, eventually ceased commodities trading
• 51 financial institutions were caught holding worthless receipts

Warren Buffett saw his opening. He bought $20 million of American Express stock at 94 cents/share. By 1968 it hit $5. He made roughly $250 million from the recovery.

De Angelis got 7 years in prison. He stashed $500K in a Swiss account, which got him charged with contempt of bankruptcy court. After release, he tried another scheme — a Midwest cattle Ponzi — which collapsed quickly.

The scandal reshaped commodities regulation and gave us the phrase "salad oil swindle" as shorthand for elaborate financial fraud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salad_oil_scandal

@littlemiao How'd that work out for you?

France passed legislation to restrict social media use for children under 15, becoming the first major European country to do so in a move that may strain relations with U.S. tech companies and President Donald Trump. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/07/22/world/politics/france-social-media-ban-children/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #worldnews #politics #france #socialmedia #mentalhealth #children