Month: September 2021

• 

  Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stars as Anthony McCoy, a visual artist who moves into the gentrified Cabrini-Green neighborhood in Chicago. [credit: YouTube/Universal Pictures ]

With thought-provoking films like Get Out and Us, writer/director Jordan Peele has already cemented his status as a master of smart, socially relevant modern horror. His influence is even broader as a producer, bringing fresh voices, directorial visions, and diverse perspectives to a genre badly in need of all three. His latest production is Candyman, director Nia DaCosta's imaginative sequel (of sorts) to the 1992 horror classic Candyman. This is only DaCosta's second feature film, yet she handles the material deftly and transforms the singular slasher known as Candyman into an ageless malevolence whose curse reverberates through time.

(Spoilers for the 1992 film below; mostly mild spoilers for the new film.)

As I've written previously, the original 1992 Candyman was based on the Clive Barker short story "The Forbidden." The film starred Virginia Madsen as a Chicago graduate student in sociology/semiotics whose thesis deals with urban legends. She hears about a series of brutal murders in the Cabrini-Green public housing project. The killer is rumored to be the ghost of a late 19th-century artist named Daniel Robitaille (Tony Todd) who was lynched because he fathered an illegitimate child with a white woman. The mob cut off his right hand and smeared him with honey to attract bees to sting him to death before burning his corpse and scattering his ashes over what is now the project's grounds. 

Enlarge (credit: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/trader-works-in-front-of-a-board-displaying-germanys-share-news-photo/1234893457?adppopup=true)

There's extensive academic literature on the risks faced by investors who are overly confident of their ability to beat the market. They tend to trade more often, even if they're losing money doing so. They take on too much debt and don't diversify their holdings. When the market makes a sudden lurch, they tend to overreact to it. Yet, despite all that evidence, there's no hard data on what makes investors overconfident in the first place.

With the cost of going wrong, you'd think that people who risk money in stocks would learn from their past mistakes. But a new study suggests that our memory's tendency to take an optimistic past gets in the way, with people inflating their gains and forgetting their losses.

Selective memory

The lack of real-world data is a bit surprising, considering there are a number of reasons to suspect a happy nostalgia might be involved here. There's previous research that shows college students remember their grades as being better than they actually were. Other research shows that people quickly forget their actual cholesterol levels and remember tests as indicating a healthier one.

Enlarge / Behold: It is both desk and bike. (credit: Corey Gaskin)

If you work from home, it's a good idea to spice up the home office from time to time. Some of us have been living the telecommuting life for longer than others, and while we at Ars have some extensive experience (and an equally comprehensive guide on the best gear for home offices), we still like to periodically change things up to meet our dynamic needs. That's how I found the Desk Bike.

Well, that, and I'm recovering from a foot injury that recently got me into biking as a mode of low-impact exercise. Nevertheless, Flexispot's V9 Desk Bike now sits in my room and gets consistent use. You (or your kids) might have seen this very bike make waves on TikTok recently—Flexispot's ad campaign proved a savvy and fruitful move, garnering over 2.5 million likes and coverage from many media outlets.

It's well-known that exercise, even in the form of a 30-minute daily walk, produces a wide range of positive impacts on physical and mental health. But as of 2018, 80% of American adults don't meet that daily threshold. It can be hard to peel ourselves away from the computer and actually move our bodies, but not doing so is literally killing us. The Desk Bike isn't a magic bullet for healthy living, but it can help you be more active and get out pent-up, fidgety energy during the day.

Enlarge / A Philips Wiz bulb and a Raspberry Pi running Homebridge. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

The house where my family currently lives is lit primarily by a bunch of ceiling-mounted recessed bulbs. From top to bottom, counting bathroom fixtures, we have something like 40 lightbulbs in the entire house. And when we moved in, every single one of those lightbulbs was a hot, power-sucking incandescent bulb. Replacing those bulbs with cooler, more-efficient LEDs was one of the low-hanging home improvement projects I took on after we moved in.

As part of that project, I lit a couple of rooms with Philips Hue smartbulbs, which did a ton to popularize and simplify customizable LED lighting when they first came out back in 2012. These bulbs plus an Ecobee thermostat formed the foundation of a HomeKit setup, chosen because my wife and I are both iPhone users and we didn't own an Echo or any Google or Nest products at the time. Since then, our smart home has grown in fits and starts, accruing different gadgets here and there and aiming for HomeKit compatibility when we can get it. (I assume lots of smart home setups are like this—stumbled into over time, made up of a patchwork of products that either came with the house or were all bought individually to fill some specific need, all strapped together after the fact by Google, Amazon, or Apple, depending on which of the tech giants has you captured most firmly in its tendrils at the time.)

Fast-forward five years, and I was ready to add smart lighting to more rooms in the house. However, I didn't want to pay Hue prices, especially for the multicolor bulbs—a 60W equivalent white Hue bulb normally runs about $15, and a full-color bulb costs between $30 and $50 a pop. A company called meross makes an appealing HomeKit-compatible multicolor bulb for around $15, but middling customer reviews (and a dearth of professional reviews) made me hesitate.

Enlarge / Gah, don't you miss unstressed travel? (credit: Klaus Vedfelt / Getty Images)

On the Friday heading into Memorial Day weekend this year, it was meat processing giant JBS. On the Friday before the Fourth of July, it was IT management software company Kaseya and, by extension, over a thousand businesses of varying size. It remains to be seen whether Labor Day will see a high-profile ransomware meltdown as well, but one thing is clear: Hackers love holidays.

Really, ransomware hackers love regular weekends, too. But a long one? When everyone’s off carousing with family and friends and studiously avoiding anything remotely office-related? That’s the good stuff. And while the trend isn’t new, a joint warning issued this week by the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency underscores how serious the threat has become.

The appeal to attackers is pretty straightforward. Ransomware can take time to propagate throughout a network, as hackers work to escalate privileges for maximum control over the most systems. The longer it takes for anyone to notice, the more damage they can do. “Generally speaking, the threat actors deploy their ransomware when there is less likelihood of people being around to start pulling plugs,” says Brett Callow, threat analyst at antivirus company Emsisoft. “The less chance of the attack being detected and interrupted.”