Pickin' up a signal

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today: Is the economy K-shaped or C-shaped? Depends where and when you’re looking; a look at how experiencing art affects your whole body; and Nikki Sixx laments the demise of the album…

Let’s get into it!

Art isn’t just seen or heard—it’s felt, and in ways that scientists were able to measure during a study conducted by psychologist Wolfgang Tschacher and colleagues from institutes in Switzerland and Germany.

Tschacher and team recruited 373 participants to attend an art museum wearing a glove that could wirelessly track their movements, heart rate, and skin conductance.

Skin conductance refers to changes in a person’s skin activated by the parasympathetic nervous system, which is in charge of “fight or flight” instincts. In other words, sweat glands activate, goosebumps can form, and body hair can tingle and straighten.

The participants were tracked while navigating the museum, and were asked a series of questions afterwards about the three exhibits they spent the most time at, including about the exhibit’s beauty, dominance, humor, and negativity (if applicable).

The researchers found, on average, three of these four psychological reactions were measurable in relation to the person’s experience of the artwork.

Beautiful works and funny works caused greater variability in heart rate; dominance/powerfulness caused greater variability in skin conductance, and—perhaps strangely—lowered heart rates.

“An idiosyncratically human property, finding aesthetic pleasure in viewing artistic artifacts, is linked to biological markers,” the team concluded.

Some may call it the Diet Coke of Catch Me If You Can.

A former Toronto flight attendant forged a pilot’s ID in a scheme that started and ended with him posing as a pilot to convince three U.S. airlines to allow him to fly for free under their courtesy policies. He successfully took over 200 flights over four years before being caught.

Like Frank Abagnale, Dallas Pokornik possesses some forging skills that allowed him to create a piece of identification that convinced multiple major airlines he was a pilot. Unlike Abagnale, he was too vain for his level (or lack) of intelligence, and left a trail of confessions scattered throughout his social media timelines, where he posted dozens of travel vlogs chronicling his stolen escapades from Los Angeles to Thailand.

His forged ID was ultimately flagged at a Panama airport in October. He was extradited to Hawaii, and charged with multiple counts of fraud, wire fraud, and others.

“According to court documents, Pokornik, a former flight attendant for a commercial airline in Canada, admitted to falsely posing as a commercial pilot to get hundreds of free flights on three different airlines,” said a news release from the Hawaii Attorney General’s office.

In order for any meaningful mission to take place in another star system, a spacecraft would have to be able to reach near-relativistic speeds. The technology available up until this point hasn’t been able to make shuttle-sized objects travel anywhere close to a fraction of the speed of light.

Modern vehicles also must carry their own fuel, and there isn’t enough fuel on Earth to get even a fraction of the way to the nearest star outside our solar system.

Scientists at Breakthrough Starshot are trying to solve both problems, and solar sails (or light sails) may be the answer.

These sails are ultra-thin veils of material that reflect light like a mirror, which—in a vacuum—actually pushes the mirror. Photons are both light particles and light waves; they’re the only known material in the universe that possess both properties, and because they also have wavelengths, they hit things with momentum. Solar sails can actually be propelled forward by light from the Sun.

Using miniaturized light sails, Breakthrough Starshot believes it can accelerate the objects to between 10% and 20% of the speed of light in minutes. Unfortunately, this would likely require dozens of gigawatts (enough energy to power tens of millions of homes).

Star Trek is still science fiction, but it could conceivably come to life during the next generation. 🤯

Nikki Sixx recently conceded the album as an artform is somewhat of a relic, not because artists aren’t capable, but because of the way people consume music today and the lack of incentive to invest the time and money in making one.

“I know fans don’t want to hear this, but I don’t believe in making full-length records anymore at this time,” Sixx told podcast host Joann Butler in a recent interview.

“If you’re doing 10 songs…you gotta write 20. And you better hope five of them are stellar. It’s a lot of lyrics, a lot of notes, a lot of chord changes, a lot of time in the studio,” he said.

“[W]hat I don’t like is that when people hear one song, and you recorded 10 or you recorded 20…they only hear one. Radio’s changed; streaming is changing and evolving as we go.”

Instead, the focus for Motley Crüe today, he said, is “having a song and a whole team behind a song and being able to get the fans to really understand what the song is about.

First in line

From Eddie Murphy films, to classic adventure flicks and more, we’re testing your knowledge of which movie came first, with today’s trivia 🎥 🤓