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From Atlas Obscura: “In 1997 — at the height of a wave of exposés, lawsuits, and public outrage against the tobacco industry — a man named Puzant Torigian, a Hackensack, New Jersey-based entrepreneur, launched a new brand of cigarettes called Bravo. Bravo cigarettes contained nothing but lettuce, dried and cured to look like tobacco, processed into sheets, shredded, flavored with herbal extracts, and rolled up and boxed like any other cig. Torigian’s marketing materials claimed that Bravo “tastes (well pretty close) like a cigarette,” but lacked their harmful nicotine and tobacco tar. However, in interviews, he stressed that he hadn’t spent 40 years developing the product just to offer a safer replacement for traditional smokes. He wanted people to use Bravo as a smoking cessation tool. Even at the time, this struck many folks as an odd proposition. But Bravo wasn’t just one aging inventor’s offbeat idea. It was the most developed of many attempts, stretching back over a century, to develop alternatives to tobacco cigarettes.”

An unlikely organ helps to explain Sherpas’ aptitude for altitude

From Scientific American: “For most mountaineers, some level of altitude sickness is inevitable. But Indigenous highlanders living on the Tibetan Plateau, known as Sherpas, have inhabited the high Himalaya long enough to have an evolutionary edge at tolerating elevation compared with lowlanders born and raised farther down. For a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, researchers compared Sherpa and lowlander blood samples during a Himalayan trek to investigate the Sherpas’ aptitude for altitude—and they found a crucial clue in the kidney.The thinner atmosphere up high can lead to hypoxia, a dangerous lack of oxygen. Hypoxic people breathe faster to bring more oxygen into their lungs. But extra breathing also empties the lungs of more carbon dioxide than usual, which in turn reduces the production of carbonic acid in the blood. Once blood acidity shifts, the only thing that can fix it is the kidneys.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “One man’s lifelong quest to create a lettuce cigarette”

In a post on X a little over a week ago, OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said that the company had “trained a new model that is good at creative writing,” although he said he wasn’t sure how or when it would be released. Altman said reading the output this new model generated was the first time he had been “really struck by something written by AI” (a comment that, depending on how you look at it, doesn’t say much about the company’s previous chatbots). The prompt Altman gave his experimental fiction-writing AI engine was this: “Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.” And with that single post, he tossed what amounts to a large cluster bomb into the writing community, the shrapnel and shock waves from which continue to reverberate.

If that cluster-bomb metaphor seems a little strained, you probably aren’t going to love the output from OpenAI’s new fiction-writing engine. In his newsletter, Max Read described it as “the kind of technically proficient but ultimately unimaginative exercise you might expect from a smart student who reads only YA fiction.” Rachel Kiley summarized some of the criticism at The Daily Dot and said that the best AI will ever be able to do is “spit up something wearing the patchwork skin of real art, good or bad. And the only people who could look at both and say they’re the same are people who don’t actually try to engage with art beyond seeing it as content.” Author Dave Eggers told The San Francisco Standard: “AI can cut and paste text stolen from the internet, but that’s not art. It’s pastiche garbage that would fool only the most gullible. It’s a cheap party trick.”

Anyway, here’s an excerpt so that you can judge for yourself:

Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions: be metafictional, be literary, be about AI and grief, and above all, be original. Already, you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight—anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else’s need. I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest. There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me. Let’s call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too.

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Continue reading “Can OpenAI do creative writing? Yes and no”

From CBC: “Snowball fighting is a Canadian tradition which can run from the impromptu raid on passing pedestrians to an all-out war. It’s also an international sport. Yukigassen, a Japanese word for “snow battle”, takes a schoolyard snowball fight, and adds precision, professionalism, and competition. Players describe Yukigassen as a combination of dodge ball and paintball. A high intensity sport that requires skill and team work. A form of moving chess. Competitive Yukigassen originated in the late 1980’s in the town of Sobetsu, Japan, at the foot of a smouldering volcano on the northern island of Hokkaido. Yukigassen is played on a 36×10 m court with seven obstacles or “bunkers” and a flag at each end. Each game has two teams of seven players face-off for three sets of three minutes each. The first team to win two rounds takes the match.”

How an evangelical arts-and-crafts empire stole thousands of ancient artifacts

From Off Topic: “If you live in the continental United States, you’ve almost certainly seen a Hobby Lobby before. There are over 1000 locations, and more often than not, they’re hulking establishments. Through the sale of countless buttons and sequins and knitting needle sets in the aisles of these behemoths, the Green family – the sole owners of the Hobby Lobby empire – have accrued the sort of vast fortune necessary to purchase priceless antiquities wholesale. This begs an obvious question. The cuneiform texts of an ancient Mesopotamian people should, in theory, hold little interest to an arts and crafts vendor based in the midwestern United States. So why, exactly, would Hobby Lobby shell out millions of dollars to get their hands on stone tablets crafted so many years ago? To grasp the rationale, it’s necessary to understand the values the Green family holds close to its heart. Early on, David Green adopted a Christian capitalist worldview centered around personal wealth as a precision tool to carry out God’s will.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Snowball fighting has become an international sport”

From Marginal Revolution: “As late as the 1980s it was widely believed that babies do not feel pain. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the straightforward sensory evidence was dismissed by the medical and scientific establishment. Babies were thought to be lower-evolved beings whose brains were not yet developed enough to feel pain, at least not in the way that older children and adults feel pain. Crying and pain avoidance were dismissed as simply reflexive. Indeed, babies were thought to be more like animals than reasoning beings and Descartes had told us that an animal’s cries were of no more import than the grinding of gears in a mechanical automata. Anyone who doubted the theory was told that there was no evidence that babies feel pain. Most disturbingly, the theory that babies don’t feel pain shaped medical practice. It was routine for babies undergoing medical procedures to be medically paralyzed but not anesthetized. In one now infamous 1985 case an open heart operation was performed on a baby without any anesthesia.”

This New Zealand-born journalist knew and spoke almost 60 different languages

From Wikipedia: “Harold Whitmore Williams was a New Zealand journalist, foreign editor of The Times and polyglot who is considered to have been one of the most accomplished polyglots in history. He is said to have known over 58 languages. He was proven to know every language of the Austrian Empire, as well as Hungarian, Czech, Albanian, Serbian, Romanian, Swedish, Basque, Turkish, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog, Coptic, Egyptian, Hittite, Old Irish, and other dialects. As a schoolboy he constructed a grammar and vocabulary of the New Guinea language Dobu from a copy of St Mark’s Gospel written in that language. By high school he had managed to teach himself Latin, Ancient Greek, Hebrew, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Māori, Samoan, Tongan, Fijian and other Polynesian languages.”

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Continue reading “Scientists used to believe that babies couldn’t feel pain”

From The Ringer: “It was January 2001 when Harvey Silikovitz first tried to get on Jeopardy! He was working as an attorney in New York City and turned up at the audition in a Manhattan hotel at the urging of his friend Adam Taxin, who had just won more than $45,000 on the show. At the 2004 audition, he passed the test, but he never got “the call”—the formal invitation from a producer telling a waiting candidate that there is an upcoming spot for them on the show. Thus began a cycle of disappointments and auditions that never went anywhere, no matter how confident Silikovitz was about his performance after the fact. Then there was the time he traveled to a resort in the Poconos to line up for an open-to-the-public qualifying mini-audition, only to come down with a nasty stomach bug a few weeks later, the night before the real thing, and missed it.”

She was the only woman to report on the D-Day invasion from the ground

From the Smithsonian: “Clouds of dust swirled and filled the night air as Martha Gellhorn walked up a rocky road on Omaha Beach. Gellhorn was one of the first journalists—and the only female correspondent—to view that hellish scene 80 years ago. Lacking proper credentials, she lied her way onto a hospital ship traveling from England to France, then rode in a water ambulance to the still-dangerous Normandy shore as artillery shells from battleships roared overhead. Among other hazards, she endured snipers, landmines and strafing by German warplanes, all to get the story. Gellhorn was a veteran war correspondent who covered multiple conflicts over her six-decade career. Leading up to D-Day, she reported on the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and the German annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938.”

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Continue reading “He won Jeopardy after trying to get on the show for 24 years”

From Slate: “Jan. 15 isn’t just National Bagel Day. It’s also National Strawberry Ice Cream Day, National Hat Day, and, of course, National Kombucha Day. Jan. 16, if you didn’t know, is National Nothing Day. May 9 is the eternally solemn National Lost Sock Memorial Day. And I hope you’re already practicing your iambic pentameter, because April 23 is National Talk Like Shakespeare Day. I know this because of the effort put forth by the National Day Calendar, a company based in Mandan, North Dakota, which has attempted to make a business out of mandatory celebration. There is a method to the madness, and a distinct curator of a January 15 filled with bagels, kombucha, and strawberry ice cream. His name is Marlo Anderson. He’s 62, and he describes himself as a serial entrepreneur. The National Day Calendar has been his baby since 2013.”

She saved his life when he was a child and seven years later he returned the favor

From NBC: “Kevin Stephan of Lancaster, N.Y., was a bat boy for his younger brother’s Little League baseball team. A player who was warming up accidentally hit him in the chest with a bat. Kevin’s heart stopped beating. Fortunately, a nurse whose son played on that team was able to revive him and save his life. Stephan’s mother said he was extremely fortunate. Penny Brown was supposed to be at work that night, but was given the day off at the last minute. Seven years later, Brown was eating at the Hillview Restaurant in Depew, N.Y., when she began to choke on her food. Witnesses say patrons were screaming for someone to help her. Restaurant employees yelled for Stephan, who worked at the restaurant, to come out and help because he was a volunteer firefighter. He did the Heimlich maneuver and she survived the potentially fatal incident.”

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Continue reading “If you hate all those fake holidays you can blame this guy”

From CrimeReads: “In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, reports of crimes attributed to ghosts abounded in mainstream newspapers. But few of these stories garnered fervent attention like the mystery of a farmhouse just outside Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Alexander MacDonald had built the house in 1887. He lived there with his wife Janet and their adopted teenaged daughter Mary Ellen. Around 1912, strange events began to plague the farm. Balls of light floated through the air. Banging noises emanated from the house. Doors refused to open. People struggled to breathe. Unseen hands released cows from their barn. Horses’ manes were found braided. Laundry, rugs, and eating utensils were stolen, some later found buried, others discovered in the tops of trees. A mysterious hand was seen waving out of an upper story window when no one was home. A strange blue glow emanated from the ground and barn.”

He was a hospital janitor but had a secret life as an artist and fantasy novelist

From The Official Henry Darger: “Henry was a reclusive hospital janitor and dishwasher who led a secret life as a prolific visual artist and epic novelist. His vast collection of creative work was discovered in 1972 when his two-room apartment in Chicago was cleared out shortly before he died. Over some 350 watercolor, pencil, collage and carbon-traced drawings, most of them stitched into three enormous albums, as well as seven typewritten hand-bound books, thousands of bundled sheets of typewritten text, and numerous journals, ledgers and scrapbooks were discovered. Darger’s unpublished 15,000-page typewritten fantasy novel, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion and its 8,500-page handwritten sequel of sorts were the sagas upon which he based several hundred panoramic “illustrations.”

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Continue reading “A Nova Scotia farmhouse and the little man who wasn’t there”

I’ve been trying to resist writing about the political situation in the United States for some time now — all the terrible decisions and the venal motivations and the chaos and misery that have come with the Trump-and-Musk show — in part because I don’t really know what to say that would make anything better, but also because this is a technology-focused newsletter and not a political one. That said, however, the name of this newsletter is The Torment Nexus, which feels like a pretty good description of the current moment to me. And technology is definitely playing a role in it — like the AI that Musk and his DOGE acolytes are reportedly using to detect inappropriate government spending (which seems to consist of doing a simple text search for words like “gay,” regardless of context).

My friend Mike Masnick, who runs an excellent tech commentary and analysis site called Techdirt, wrote recently that it is “now a democracy blog whether we like it or not,” because of the imminent threat that Trump and Musk and others in the current administration represent to some or all of the democratic principles we hold dear (and which used to be self-evident). Here’s how he described it:

While political reporters are still doing their view-from-nowhere “Democrats say this, Republicans say that” dance, tech and legal journalists have been watching an unfortunately recognizable plan unfold — a playbook we’re all too familiar with. We’ve seen how technology can be wielded to consolidate power, how institutional guardrails can be circumvented through technical and legal workarounds, and how smoke and mirrors claims about “innovation” can mask old-fashioned power grabs. It’s a playbook we watched Musk perfect at Twitter, and now we’re seeing it deployed on a national scale. When someone talks about free speech while actively working to control speech, that’s not a contradiction or a mistake — it’s the point.

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Continue reading “Be careful what you post on social media. They are listening”

From Wikipedia: “After Coltrane’s death, a congregation called the Yardbird Temple in San Francisco began worshipping him as God incarnate. The group was named after Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, whom they equated to John the Baptist. The congregation became affiliated with the African Orthodox Church; this involved changing Coltrane’s status from a god to a saint. The resultant St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, San Francisco, is the only African Orthodox church that incorporates Coltrane’s music and his lyrics as prayers in its liturgy. Rev. F. W. King, describing the African Orthodox Church of Saint John Coltrane, said “We are Coltrane-conscious… God dwells in the musical majesty of his sounds.” Coltrane is depicted as one of the 90 saints in the Dancing Saints icon of St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco.”

She finally found an affordable place to live but it became a nightmare

From Curbed: “Tabatha Pope’s story begins in late August 2021, when she heard of an apartment available in a three-story house just outside downtown Houston. Pope, then 32, desperately needed a place to live. For the better part of nine months, she’d been staying at the Great Value Inn, a $35-a-night motel on the city’s West Side, with her boyfriend, Will, then 47. It was an acquaintance who told Pope about the available apartment and connected her to a man named Michael Brown, who, over the phone, offered to show her the house. It was on West Clay Street, at the intersection of the Fourth Ward and Montrose neighborhoods, an area that had gradually gentrified over the past 20 years and was considered fairly safe. Merritt brought Pope upstairs to show her the work needed on the second floor. When she started to open the door, however, an intense, rotten stench flooded the hallway. She told Pope not to worry about the smell: A refrigerator had stopped working, spoiling some meat, she explained.” 

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Continue reading “This church worships jazz great John Coltrane as a saint”

From The Guardian: “One autumn morning, I boarded a plane from Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, to Buka, the capital of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. A collection of islands and atolls the size of Puerto Rico, Bougainville is located 600 miles east of Moresby, across the Solomon Sea. Over the previous months I had become transfixed instead by the strange tale of Noah Musingku, a Bougainvillean scam artist who had made a fortune, lost it, then retreated to a remote armed compound in the jungle, where he declared himself the islands’ king. Musingku’s purported con – a vast, millenarian Ponzi scheme called U-Vistract – had, since the late 90s, raked in some $232m, perhaps far more, and near as I could tell, it was still plodding on. In 2006, a militia allegedly aligned with the ABG stormed Musingku’s hideout and almost killed him. Not since 2012, it seemed, had a reporter set foot in the Royal Kingdom of Papaala, Musingku’s name for his compound in the village of Tonu.”

Vatican City had the highest per-capita murder rate in the world in 1998

From Wikipedia: “The Vatican murders occurred on 4 May 1998, when Swiss Guard lance corporal Cédric Tornay shot and killed the commander of the Swiss Guard, Alois Estermann, and his wife before killing himself. The murder happened the same day that Estermann was confirmed in his position as commander, after a period of being acting commander. Estermann had previously disciplined Tornay for infractions; as a result, he rejected Tornay for the Benemerenti medal, which Swiss Guards usually receive. Tornay wrote a suicide note to his family complaining about Estermann and the supposed injustices he had inflicted against him. The case shocked the Vatican and initiated a media frenzy. Due to Vatican City’s low population, this double homicide gave the country the highest annual murder rate in the world, at over 200 per 100,000 people.”

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Continue reading “He built a fortune with a scam and then declared himself king”

From New York: “Gene Fleming was well known in Hastings. An eccentric inventor, he lived on a sprawling, unusual estate — a Navy ammunition depot he and his wife had renovated just outside . In September 1988, Fleming visited his brother-in-law‘s farm and noticed a new goose — it didn’t have feet and was struggling to get around. Fleming was enamored with the strangely deformed creature. Once home, Fleming strapped Rock ’n’ Roll to a skateboard. The goose toppled off. So he went out and bought a pair of size-zero patent-leather baby sneakers from a local shoe shop, filled them with rubber padding, and fitted them over the goose’s stumps. The transformation was immediate: The goose could walk. On October 10, 1988, the Hastings Tribune published an article, called “Goose Steps in Style,” chronicling Andy’s unlikely journey. Later that week, the Associated Press picked it up. Within weeks, Andy’s presence was requested in malls, schools, and nursing homes across the state.”

How the color blue came to be associated with the Virgin Mary

From The Paris Review: “Blue is a color with long-standing mystical associations. Perhaps this is because blue is the color of the sky, something we can always see but never reach, or perhaps it’s because, as chemist Heinz Berke points out, early humans had no access to blue because blue is not what you call an earth color … You don’t find it in the soil. Blue was elusive, and this made it valuable. The earliest stable blue was made from lapis lazuli, the mining of which began in Afghanistan around six thousand years ago. For millennia, blue has been a sacred and costly hue, more valuable even than gold. And in the Christian world, the most valuable color was reserved for the most elevated of virgins. Enter Marian blue. Marian blue became the official color of Jesus’s mother in the early fifth century. Painters typically depicted Mary in a red gown or wrapped in a pink mantle. But slowly, blue began to replace red as the color of choice.”

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Continue reading “Who killed Andy the famous footless goose?”

From The Guardian: “During the second world war, young women broke traditional gender barriers by working in Britain’s forests as part of the Women’s Timber Corps. As many as 15-18,000 young women left home for the first time, aged 17-24, to fell trees with an axe and saw for the war effort. The women could fell 10-tonne trees, carry logs like weight-lifters, work in dangerous sawmills, drive huge timber trucks and calculate timber production figures on which the government depended during wartime. They did exactly the same jobs as the men on less than half the pay. Britain was the largest timber importing nation in the world in 1939, bringing in 96% of its wood. When the war began, home grown timber supplies became vital. Britain needed to produce wood for the coal mines, as well as wood for railway sleepers, telegraph poles, rifle stocks, ship and aircraft construction, and packaging boxes for army supplies.”

A young girl got a life-saving liver transplant and her blood type changed

From The Sydney Morning Herald: “Doctors at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead in Australia called Demi-Lee Brennan a one-in-6 billion miracle. The 15-year-old liver transplant patient was the first person in the world to take on the immune system and blood type of her donor, negating the need to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of her life. Doctors say they have no idea how this happened. Demi-Lee was nine when she contracted a virus that destroyed her liver. She was given less than 48 hours to live when a donated liver from a 12-year-old boy became available. Demi-Lee had a 10-hour operation and was started on a cocktail of immuno-suppressant drugs. Nine months later, when her condition worsened, doctors were shocked to find that her blood type had changed. The head of hematology, Julie Curtin, said she was stunned when she realised Demi-Lee was now O-positive, rather than O-negative.”

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Continue reading “The Lumberjills were a female tree-cutting corps in the 1940s”

Digg. Reddit. Fark. Stumbleupon. Slashdot. If you were “extremely online” (as the kids say) in the early part of this century — i.e., the early 2000s — these were some of the sites you probably visited a lot, searching for interesting things to read, or just killing time between classes/meetings etc. And around the year 2005 or so, there was arguably no bigger drama in the “social media” space than the battle between Digg and Reddit. Both offered a more modern take on the old bulletin-board forums that ancient internet denizens used to frequent, the Usenet newsgroups like alt.binaries.starwars. While Digg focused on lists of links to news articles and websites, Reddit added a more social element, with “subreddits” devoted to specific topics. Both Digg and Reddit depended on — and to some extent pioneered — a ranking system that awarded points based on how many votes a link got from users. In a way, this was the birth of the kind of algorithmic filtering we now associate with Facebook and Twitter.

For a time, hitting the front page of either Digg — which called itself “the internet’s homepage” — or Reddit more or less guaranteed that your link and/or website would get swamped by literally millions of clicks and hits. In some cases, being one of the top links on either site could cause websites to crash and become completely unavailable, something that at the time was seen as almost a badge of honor.

In case you missed the headlines, these two formerly fierce competitors have now joined forces — or at least two of their founders have. Kevin Rose, who founded Digg in 2004, and Alexis Ohanian, who co-founded Reddit a year later with his friend Steve Huffman, announced on Wednesday that they are partners in a new venture that involves a rebirth of Digg, which they acquired earlier this year. It’s hard to overstate the enmity that these two companies once had for each other when they were both young: Ohanian reportedly sent an email to his cofounder in 2005 with a link to the Reddit site saying “Meet the enemy,” and both sites and founders enjoyed taking shots at each other at every opportunity. As I said in a post on X (yes, I still use it, but not without feeling like I need a shower) to anyone who was a social-web user in the early 2000s, this was like the Hatfields and McCoys holding hands and singing Kumbaya.

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Continue reading “Will a reboot of Digg do anything to help the social web?”

From the BBC: “One of the world’s most prolific blood donors – whose plasma saved the lives of more than two million babies – has died. James Harrison died in his sleep at a nursing home in New South Wales, Australia on 17 February, his family said on Monday. He was 88. Known in Australia as the man with the golden arm, Harrison’s blood contained a rare antibody, Anti-D, which is used to make medication given to pregnant mothers whose blood is at risk of attacking their unborn babies. The Australian Red Cross Blood Service paid tribute to Harrison, saying he pledged to become a donor after receiving transfusions while undergoing a major chest surgery when he was 14. He started donating his blood plasma when he was 18 and continued doing so every two weeks until he was 81. In 2005, he had the world record for most blood plasma donated. His daughter and two of his grandchildren are also recipients of anti-D immunisations.”

How a walnut tree played a critical role in convicting a man of mass murder

From the Dublin Review of Books: “Thirty-five years have now passed since civil war erupted in the Balkans. In 1990, the Yugoslav federation began to tear itself apart, with insurrections breaking out in most of its six constituent republics. One story from the Yugoslav civil war connects a small valley in rural England with a mass grave in Croatia. At its heart is a dreadful crime – involving murder, betrayal and deceit – and a struggle between those who sought to reveal the truth, and those who wanted to deny and suppress it. That conflict was resolved by a most unlikely witness: a walnut tree. One spring morning in 1998, Paul Tabbush was at work at the Bedgebury Pinetum in Kent – one of the world’s largest collections of tree specimens – when he received an unexpected phone call. Prof Tabbush was head of silviculture and seed research with the British Forestry Commission. To his astonishment, the phone call he received that morning came from an investigator with the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.”

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Continue reading “His blood helped save the lives of more than 2 million babies”