Space. Spaaaaaaace.

Space is a slouchy place.

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Interesting visualization:

These maps show the corporate networks of the top six banks in the USA. Each dot represents a company, and each line shows where a company controls another company. A "corporate network", therefore, is a network of control, with a single corporation at the top of the tree, ultimately controlling all the companies beneath it.

We have grouped together companies that are in the same country, in the shape of that country. This gives you an idea of the size of the corporate network, and how it is structured. By comparing different corporate networks, you can see where and how different companies operate.

If you want to understand how complex multinational companies are, consider this.

In Hong Kong, there's a company called Goldman Sachs Structured Products (Asia) Limited. It's controlled by another company called Goldman Sachs (Asia) Finance, registered in Mauritius.

That's controlled by a company in Hong Kong, which is controlled by a company in New York, which is controlled by a company in Delaware, and that company is controlled by another company in Delaware called GS Holdings (Delaware) L.L.C. II.

...Which itself is a subsidiary of the only Goldman you're likely to have heard of, The Goldman Sachs Group in New York City.

That's only one of hundreds of such chains. All told, Goldman Sachs consists of more than 4000 separate corporate entities all over the world, some of which are around ten layers of control below the New York HQ.

Of those companies approximately a third are registered in nations that might be described as tax havens.Indeed, in the world of Goldman Sachs, the Cayman Islands are bigger than South America, and Mauritius is bigger than Africa.

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Horror photography

Joshua Hoffine:

Pickman's Masterpiece is pretty fine, too.

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The Apple 'Kill List'

What Your iPhone Doesn't Want You to Type

Our analysis found over 14,000 words that are recognized as words when spelled accurately, but that won't be corrected even when they are only slightly misspelled. However, the vast majority of these words are technical or very rarely used words: "nephrotoxin," "sempstress," "sheepshank," or "Aesopian," to name a few.

But among this list as well are more frequently used (and sensitive) words such as "abortion," "abort," "rape," "bullet," "ammo," "drunken," "drunkard," "abduct," "arouse," "Aryan," "murder," and "virginity." [...] In total, our analysis found dozens of words that were not identified as jargon or technical words but nonetheless did not offer corrections -- charged words like "bigot," "cuckold," "deflower," "homoerotic," "marijuana," "pornography," "prostitute," and "suicide." [...]

To find the list of excluded words, we came up with two different misspellings for roughly 250,000 words -- including all of the ones in the internal dictionary that ships with its desktop operating system -- and wrote an iOS program that would input each misspelled variant into an iOS simulator (a computer program that mimics the behavior of a factory-condition iPhone). We then made a separate program that simulated a user selecting from the menu of suggested corrections and recorded the results. After narrowing down the list to roughly 20,000 words that looked problematic, we tested 12 more different misspelling combinations. Words that did not offer an accurate correction any of the 14 times were added to our list of banned words. [...]

An Apple spokesperson declined to comment for this article.

Apple also declined to comment on changes made to Siri regarding abortion and birth control.

Asked by The Daily Beast why Apple software won't correct "abortiom" to "abortion," Siri responded only: "I'm sorry, I don't understand."

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