For the past two months, Katie Holliday has been cooped up alone in her Brooklyn apartment thinking longingly about an unlikely erogenous zone: the lower half of a stranger’s face. 

“I remember joking to my friend before all of this started, ‘Imagine if someone’s face becomes their most coveted body part?’” Holliday, who is 31, told The Daily Beast. “‘When someone removes their mask, is it a sign of trust? Is it like letting someone see you naked?’ I was kidding back then, but now it’s reality.”

Holliday doesn’t know exactly when it will be safe to start seeing people like she did before the pandemic began, but she’ll return to a singles scene unlike any other in history. “I’m picturing walking into a bar where everyone’s wearing masks,” she said. “I’ll meet someone whose face is covered. Are they cute or not? I don’t know!” 

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Campaigns and consultants have spent the last four years worrying about the Trump campaign’s digital operation. Even before COVID-19 upended the election and forced candidates online, the Trump campaign was geofencing campaign rallies, micro-targeting digital ads, and amplifying deepfake videos.

And now, as both the crisis and the general election enter their third month, panic is beginning to set in about the startling digital gap between the two parties, amplified by the recent Trump campaign announcement of both a new app experience and the start of a $10 million digital push against Joe Biden. 

President Trump’s campaign manager has called what he’s built a “juggernaut” and is likening his digital infrastructure to a Death Star. In reality, what he's built is a trap.  

Read more at The Daily Beast.

On Tuesday the president took his first trip since the coronavirus grounded the country, to a Honeywell factory in battleground state Arizona. This particular Honeywell factory produces N95 masks. Pictures of the trip immediately surfaced on the internet, and they showed a president sporting his usual mango-tinted, ever-tan skin, his usual topiary-structured hair tinted a baffling yellowish, and a pair of clear safety goggles.

But what was missing? What we did not see on the president’s face was a mask. While the rest of us cover our faces as recommended by the CDC, the president does not. In fact, we have never seen a mask on the president, despite the president’s love of masking himself when it comes to his tax returns, his sexual assault allegations, and his financial dealings.   

On Wednesday, when pressed on his decision not to wear a mask at a mask factory, the president responded with the very fishy, “I had a mask on for a period of time, I had it on back, backstage. But they said you didn’t need it, so, I didn’t need it. And by the way, if you noticed, nobody else had it on that was in the group.” Okay. Whatever you say. 

Read more at The Daily Beast.

It’s not going out on much of a limb to say that the single greatest line in any rock and roll song—shall we double down and say all music ever?—is “A-wop-bom-a-loo-mop-a-lomp-bom-bom!!”

Surely that says it all.

As with any truly oracular pronouncement, it inspires consternation in the first-time listener, and the second-time listener, and the third, the fourth, and on and on. The mystery never diminishes.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

THE CORONAVIRUS lockdown is now causing serious damage to the UK's economy, Tory MP Steve Baker has warned - stressing he was now "gravely concerned" at the situation

BRITAIN'S summer holiday destinations will face some of the biggest economic hits of the coronavirus pandemic with fears of massive job losses in coastal communities, a study has claimed.

Saudi Aramco’s IPO saga has turned into “A Tale of Two Princes.” As Saudi Arabia’s day-to-day ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has guided the IPO far from public view, his half-brother Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman stepped onto center stage in Vienna last week, presiding over a crucial gathering of OPEC and its oil-producing allies […]

Rafael Nadal revealed this week he was doubtful there will be further tennis in 2020.

The Milky Way ate another galaxy called Gaia-Enceladus, and the waves passing through a star have shown us that it happened at most 11.6 billion years ago

Stars that are similar to the sun in every way we can measure are mostly more active than the sun, which hints that the sun’s activity may ramp up someday, risking solar eruptions

About 80 per cent of stars in the Milky Way’s central bulge have relatively close encounters with another star, which can fling off any planets orbiting them

फर्रुखाबाद जिले में पहला कोरोना पॉजिटिव मामला सामने आया है। शमसाबाद कस्बा के मोहल्ला मीरादरवाजा निवासी युवक मुम्बई में एक शॉपिंग स्टोर में काम करता था। वह 7 मई को टेंपो से वापस आया था।

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Get ready for the first scored event in DARPA's latest Grand Challenge

Roboticists share what they've learned so far from DARPA's Subterranean Challenge, and how they readied their bots for the next event—the Tunnel Circuit

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How autonomous robots in the underground scavenger hunt pick up points for their teams

Supporting long-range communications inside of a mine is extremely difficult, so DARPA SubT teams are trying out some creative approaches

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It's about more than just first place as teams look toward more competitions in 2020

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Rigid IT departments and job-hopping data scientists are just two of the challenges that make implementing machine learning harder than you might think

Skydio crams all its autonomous magic into a sleek consumer drone that costs under $1k

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A startup led by robotics veterans is announcing a pre-seed funding round with participation from Amazon's Alexa Fund and iRobot Ventures

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The topography and bathymetry payload for UAV

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Long before NLP became a hot field in AI, people devised rules and machines to manipulate language

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Janelle Shane talks about the absurdity, perils, and limits of AI

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Cassie may not have any arms to work with, but that doesn’t keep it from juggling a ball on its head

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The bot learned language from people on Twitter—but it also learned values

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Temuera Morrison is appearing on the next season of the show.

In there's no way Vader signed off on this news, this is the 'Nino Star Products Pool Float Black Outdoor' available from Amazon. It costs around $25, kinda looks like a Darth Vader a kid drew, and I can't imagine Darth doesn't wish they all melted in the destruction of the first Death Star. "What am I, a joke to you?!" I imagine him demanding as he Force-chokes the commander who signed off on using his likeness for a cartoony pool float as the other who signed off on the line of upcoming Vader sex toys casually backs out of the room intending to catch the first dropship to Tatooine. Keep going for one more shot of Vader at his most humiliated.