A health-insurance company has announced a large-scale experiment involving consciousness. This is the experiment: if any particular surgical procedure lasted too many minutes, the insurance company will refuse to pay for anesthesia. The company is Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield. On November 1, 2024, the company announced: “Beginning with claims processed on or after February […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: Money reunited — Chung To Kong found a way, in the spirit of unboiling an egg (Feedback, 10 September 2022), to make banknotes from shredded banknote pieces…. The big bite — Highly educated humans are trying to […]
This is the first study to investigate the investment properties of LEGO as an alternative asset class from micro- and macro-financial perspectives that overcomes many survivorship bias limitations prevalent in earlier research. Explains author Savva Shanaev of Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK, in a 2020 paper for the Journal of Risk Finance, Volume 21 Issue 5. The […]
A notedly bacteria-friendly currency was targeted by counterfeiters who themselves were targeted by Romanian government officials. “Romanian officials shut down largest counterfeiter of polymer notes” trumpets a headline in Coin World, on July 13, 2020. The report goes on to say: “Romania’s Directorate for Combating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) released the news… Raids on […]
