Author: Mathew Ingram

With the outbreak of the First World War, the British people grew paranoid that undercover German agents were infiltrating the nation, and the notion that artists might be spies drew some of its credence from none other than Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the scouting movement. Baden-Powell revealed how he and other British spies on the continent had posed as artists and disguised their plans of forts, harbours and industrial areas as innocent sketches of stained glass windows or ivy leaves. With the declaration of war in August 1914, the Defence of the Realm Act made it illegal to make “any photograph, sketch, plan, model, or other representation of any naval or military work, or of any dock or harbour, or with the intent to assist the enemy, of any other place or thing.” The society painter and Royal Academician John Lavery was arrested for painting the Fleet at the Forth Bridge. (via Cambridge University)

He solved a famous math problem, turned down a $1 million prize and then disappeared

On a cold day in November, a man living quietly in Russia posted a paper to a public server that was the foundation for one of the most important math proofs in over a century. The paper was the first of three published over the next year solving the long-standing Poincaré conjecture, a hypothesis posed nearly a century earlier by Henri Poincaré. In 2006, mathematicians John Morgan and Gang Tian published a 473-page paper showing that Perelman’s work did in fact prove the elusive conjecture. Perelman was offered the prestigious Fields Medal and the Clay Millennium math prize, which came with a $1-million award. He turned them down, resigned from his position at the Steklov Institute in 2005 and has since ferociously avoided the limelight. It’s unclear whether he is still working on math in his St. Petersburg apartment, where as of the early 2010s, his neighbors said he was caring for his elderly mother. (via LiveScience)

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Continue reading “During World War I the UK banned landscape painting”

In a recent edition of The Torment Nexus, I wrote about Wikipedia, which I argued was one of the best things the internet ever created (or that we all created with the help of the internet). In my opinion, there is another thing that ranks right up there with Wikipedia on the list of great things, and that is the Internet Archive. Just as Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia as a crowdsourced repository of information, Brewster Kahle created the Internet Archive as a repository for as much of the internet as he could save. Want to find the original Google.com page from 1998? Or a version of the Apple website from 1996? Or the original version of Wikipedia from 2001? The archive’s Wayback Machine can find it. And much like Wikipedia – which has come under fire from Elon Musk’s competing Grokipedia and others who dislike the truth and want to replace it with their preferred version – the Internet Archive has been and continues to be under attack on a variety of fronts, mostly from commercial interests who dislike free information.

There’s a conventional wisdom that “the internet never forgets,” and therefore anything that has been posted will survive forever, but the internet and the web forget things all the time. This was one of the reasons why Kahle and others decided to create the Internet Archive in 1996 – because of what became known as “link rot,” where websites disappear for one reason or another, and then everyone who linked to them is left with a dead link where that information used to be. I’ve had to deal with this on a more personal level multiple times, when companies I worked for removed their archives and articles I worked on disappeared instantly – which is why I use a service called Authory, so I have a personal archive of everything I’ve published. Here’s how Kahle described the rationale behind the Archive in a piece for Scientific American in 1997:

The early manuscripts at the Library of Alexandria were burned, much of early printing was not saved, and many early films were recycled for their silver content. While the Internet’s World Wide Web is unprecedented in spreading the popular voice of millions that would never have been published before, no one recorded these documents and images from 1 year ago. The history of early materials of each medium is one of loss and eventual partial reconstruction through fragments. Even though the documents on the Internet are the easy documents to collect and archive, the average lifetime of a document is 75 days and then it is gone. While the changing nature of the Internet brings a freshness and vitality, it also creates problems for historians and users alike.

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Continue reading “The Internet Archive should be protected not attacked”

As the Cold War simmered between the US and the Soviet Union, both nations proposed some pretty outlandish ideas, but one of the most mind-boggling was the once-classified plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon. After the USSR made cosmic history by sending the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, to space in 1957, the U.S. hoped to follow up with an unprecedented display of power. “Specific positive effects would accrue to the nation first performing such a feat,” according to a 1959 report that was declassified in 2000. These bizarre plans might have remained under wraps to this day if not for Carl Sagan, the celebrated astronomer. At the time a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, Sagan was recruited by renowned Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper to help spearhead what became known as Project A119. (via Nautilus)

Inside a cave in the Balkans scientists found the world’s largest spider web

Even in a pitch-black cave, what appears to be the world’s largest spider web is hard to miss.It stretches for about 1,140 square feet, about the size of a small home, hanging in a low and narrow passage in a cave spanning the border between Albania and Greece.But what scientists recently found in Sulfur Cave, a network of rooms and passages carved from limestone by the Sarantaporos River, surprised them even more than the size of the web. Inside the spider metropolis — population 111,000 — were two species that had not been known to live together harmoniously, mainly because one species tends to eat the other.The team of scientists discovered that 69,000 Tegenaria domestica, known as the barn funnel weaver, were living with about 42,000 Prinerigone vagans, which inhabit wet places. Usually the barn funnel weavers prey on P. vagans, which are smaller. The cave itself was hollowed out by sulfuric acid formed from the oxidation of hydrogen sulfide in the groundwater. (via the NYT)

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Continue reading “The US planned to detonate an atomic bomb on the moon”

It was the morning of November 1, 1918, and the end of his reign was nigh – that much was clear to Austria’s final emperor. He turned to a loyal servant, Lord High Steward Leopold Count Berchtold and put him in charge of a sensitive mission: to secret the Habsburg family jewels out of the country. Among the pieces was the diamond crown of Empress Elisabeth and the legendary Florentine Diamond, a glorious, walnut-sized gemstone said to glow yellow. At 137 carats, it was said to be the fourth-largest diamond in the world. The only existing photograph of the diamond, a black-and-white image taken before 1918, shows it as part of a hat brooch. Only three years after the clandestine operation, the treasure vanished without a trace. Since then, myths and conspiracy theories have swirled around its fate. Now, though, those rumors can be put to rest. (via Der Spiegel)

Ryan Bogwardt disappeared while fishing from his kayak in Wisconsin. Or did he?

Detective Sergeant Josh Ward sat in his car near the water and called the kayaker’s wife, Emily Borgwardt. She answered quickly, sounding worried. Emily told the detective that Ryan had left their home in Watertown, about an hour from Big Green Lake, at around 4:45 p.m. the previous afternoon. He’d driven the family minivan to a friend’s house to pick up wood pellets for his stove. Before setting off, he’d mentioned that he might drop the kayak in the water somewhere on his way home, and attached an enclosed trailer with the kayak. He’d told Emily over the weekend that he wanted to fish on Big Green Lake, which would be roughly on his way. As Ward updated Emily throughout the day, he could tell she was struggling to get her mind around the idea that she’d be raising three children alone. And then the detective shared something with her: they were convinced that Ryan wasn’t in the lake – he was still alive. (via The Atlantic)

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Continue reading “Austrian crown jewels found in a Canadian safe deposit box”

The year was 1939. In an otherwise unoccupied auditorium, a man knelt on hands and knees chiseling a square hole into a large stone pillar. The man had wrapped his chisel in cloth to quiet his hammer strikes. Whenever there was some unexpected sound, he froze. The man working there was a 36-year-old German handyman named Georg Elser. In his three and a half decades he had cultivated many skills, including clock making, cabinet building, master carpentry, and stone quarrying. And the task at hand required all of his diverse expertise. The box contained a delicately assembled clock of his own design. Two clocks, actually. The clocks were unusual in that they were designed to run backwards. The inside of the box was lined with sheets of cork. Also inside was an assortment of keepsakes Elser had purloined: blasting caps from the rock quarry, and multiple packets of gunpowder from the armament factory. (via Damn Interesting)

He was digging a swimming pool in France and found almost $1 million in gold

A man discovered a gold treasure worth $800,000 while digging a swimming pool in his garden in France, local officials have said. The man informed the local authorities after he made the discovery in May, and they allowed him to keep the gold as it did not come from an archeological site. He found five gold bars and many coins buried in plastic bags, according to a report in a local newspaper. Police found that the gold had been acquired legally and had been melted down some 15 or 20 years ago at a nearby refinery. Because the gold bars had unique numbers that could be traced, police were able to determine that they had not been stolen. France’s 19th century civil code defines treasure as any hidden or buried thing over which no one can prove their ownership, and which is discovered purely by chance. The previous owner of the garden has died, and how the gold ended up there remains a mystery. (via CBS News)

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Continue reading “The German clockmaker who almost killed Adolf Hitler”

During his student days, Sam started to experiment with the idea of an artistic alter ego – a character to accompany his work. He turned up to give a third-year presentation in a fully doodled suit, replete with doodled accessories (fedora, briefcase), announcing he was The Doodle Man from Doodle Land. Then, in 2017, a passerby filmed him at work. That recording ended up going viral on Facebook, and his online influence started to snowball: hundreds of thousands of followers flocked to his accounts. Lucrative brand collaborations followed. That’s when he got the keys to this house, and filled it with doodles – on the walls, the ceilings, the floors, everywhere. And then it all fell apart. At the hospital where he was eventually committed, he was convinced that people were trying to kill him and was running around shouting: ‘I’m Mr Doodle, and I need help.’ He was diagnosed as having a psychotic episode. (via The Guardian)

The unkillable soldier fought in three wars, lost an eye and a hand and died in his 80s

Carton de Wiart served in the Boer War, World War One and World War Two. In the process he was shot in the face, losing his left eye, and was also shot through the skull, hip, leg, ankle and ear. Despite being one of the most battle-scarred soldiers in the history of the British Army, he wrote in his autobiography: “Frankly, I had enjoyed the war.” In WW1 he was severely wounded on eight occasions and mentioned in despatches six times. Having previously lost an eye and a hand in battle, Carton de Wiart, as commanding officer, was seen by his men pulling the pins of grenades out with his teeth and hurling them with his one good arm during the Battle of the Somme. In 1899 he saw the opportunity to experience his first taste of war. Abandoning his studies, he left for South Africa to serve as a trooper in the British Army during the second Boer War. As he was under military age, wasn’t a British subject and didn’t have his father’s consent, he pretended to be 25 and signed up under a pseudonym. (via the BBC)

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Continue reading “His doodles made him famous then put him in the psych ward”

A computer game-style drone attack system has gone viral among Ukrainian military units and is being extended to reconnaissance, artillery and logistics operations, the nation’s first deputy prime minister has told the Guardian. Drone teams competing for points under the Army of Drones Bonus System killed or wounded 18,000 Russian soldiers in September, with 400 drone units now taking part in the competition, up from 95 in August, Ukrainian officials said. The system, which launched more than a year ago, rewards soldiers who achieve strikes with points that can be exchanged to buy more weapons in an “Amazon-for-war” online store called Brave1 filled with more than 100 different drones, autonomous vehicles and other drone war material. It has a leaderboard topped by teams with names such as Achilles and Phoenix. (via The Guardian)

This restaurant serves excellent food but there’s one catch: It’s in a prison

Prison food and high cuisine simply don’t belong in the same sentence. Unless you’re going to the Clink. The Clink is a restaurant group based in the UK, not a prison. Their restaurants serve high-end fare — the one in Brixton, London, features a £48.50 gourmet menu (about $63) that features an amuse bouche, a choice of salads, a soup of the day, and entrees ranging from a chargrilled pork chop to a BBQ jerk monkfish. Reservations are hard to come by but if you land one, the experience is generally worth the wait; in 2024, a reporter for Business Insider described it as “delicious and reasonably priced for London.” It has more than a thousand reviews on TripAdvisor, averaging 4.8 stars, which puts it in the top 100 of all London restaurants. But there’s a catch: The Clink is situated inside a prison. And the people making your food, serving you your meal, and bussing your dishes? They’re all prisoners. (via Now I Know)

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Continue reading “Ukrainian drone operators win points they can use for weapons”

I’ve used this analogy before in other contexts, but the way we respond to or think about artificial intelligence reminds me of the old parable – first recorded in a Buddhist text from about 500 BCE – about the blind men who encountered an elephant for the first time. The man near the trunk thought it was a kind of snake, and the one near its legs thought it was a kind of tree; the man near the tusks thought it was a kind of spear, and so on. Casual users of OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude or Google’s Gemini probably have one vision of what AI is or can do – it can answer simple questions. University students probably see it as a way to write term papers more quickly. Others who use tools like OpenAI’s Sora video-generation engine have a different idea: they might see it as a tool much like Adobe’s Photoshop or Apple’s iMovie, but one that can create things that don’t exist. And those using AI tools in the lab might see it as a kind of supercomputer that can detect cancers or fold complex proteins.

All of these things are applications of current AI engines – so-called large-language models, or generative pre-trained transformers (which is what the GPT in ChatGPT stands for). In a sense, they are just tools, like a slide rule or a personal computer, or a steam-powered locomotive. But in the aggregate, all of these tools – and newer ones that are still being developed – look a lot like a tidal wave of disruption that could sweep through virtually every industry. In other words, AI looks a lot more like the Industrial Revolution, where mechanical processes took over a host of different industries, leading to the extinction of some jobs and the creation of others – new tasks that no one had even thought of before the machines came. In economic terms, it’s a classic example of what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” in which new innovations replace and make obsolete older innovations. So electricity replaces fire, cars replace horse-drawn carriages, and refrigeration replaces ice harvesting.

In their book AI Snake Oil, Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan and PhD student Sayash Kapoor argue (among other things) that the blanket term AI covers a wide range of different technologies and methods, some reliable and others not. It’s as if we didn’t have terms for different forms of transportation, they write – all we have is the word “vehicle.” In such a world, they say, there would be “furious debates about whether or not vehicles are environmentally friendly, even though no one realizes that one side of the debate is talking about bikes and the other side is talking about trucks.” Someone who only uses ChatGPT to generate grocery lists or recipes probably thinks all the talk of an AI-powered apocalypse is nonsensical, because they may be unaware that modern LLMs have been shown to fabricate lies about both their behavior and their motivation, especially if they have been given an incentive, which we know because Anthropic continues to do research in an attempt to understand why Claude does what it does.

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Continue reading “Is AI like the slide rule or is it the Industrial Revolution?”

MaryBeth was 25 when she married a pilot named Bob Lewis. The couple had five daughters. When the girls neared adulthood and empty-nest syndrome kicked in, MaryBeth wanted more children. In her late 40s, she used in vitro fertilization to give birth to twin girls. And she wasn’t done. Despite medical mishaps, miscarriages and raised eyebrows from friends, she kept going, and going, eventually giving birth to her 13th child at the remarkable age of 62. But to bring this last set of twins into the world, MaryBeth went further — she tricked an I.V.F. clinic, a judge and even her own husband. These deceptions left MaryBeth, who is now 68, potentially facing a yearslong prison sentence. She has lost her job and is barred from her children’s school. She has dropped nearly 70 pounds from the stress and cries herself to sleep at night. Over two years, MaryBeth has spent more than $500,000 fighting for her freedom and for custody of the twins who she maintains are her 14th and 15th children. (via NYT)

There’s an orchestra in Boston that consists of people typing on manual typewriters

One night in 2004, Boston-area artist Tim Devin was presented with the gift of a child’s typewriter at a bar. His typing eventually annoyed the waitress who asked him to stop, whereupon he responded “It’s OK, ma’am. I’m the conductor of the Boston Typewriter Orchestra.” Thinking there was something to the idea, he assembled a group of interested performers on the night of October 20th, 2004 in Somerville, Massachusetts. An office setting was quickly decided upon as an overarching theme for live performances. The members (usually numbering between four and eight people) perform wearing white shirts and neckties, engage in typical workplace banter and write office-themed lyrics to satirical or comedic effect. The typewriters are utilized in a rhythmic fashion while melodic elements are supplied by the vocalists. The group uses several varieties of manual typewriters from such manufacturers as Underwood, Smith Corona, Hermes, Remington and Royal. (via Wikipedia)

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Continue reading “She wanted a 15th child and then came the felony charges”

A once in a century discovery of a cache of long-lost letters has revealed how the English poet WH Auden developed a deep and lasting friendship with a Viennese sex worker and car mechanic after the latter burgled the Funeral Blues author’s home and was put on trial. Auden, a prominent member of a generation of 1930s writers that also included Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, described his unconventional arrangement with the man he affectionally called Hugerl in the posthumously published poem Glad. “Our life-paths crossed,” it reads, “At a moment when / You were in need of money / And I wanted sex”. But little was known about the life and full criminal history of Hugo Kurka until Auden scholar Helmut Neundlinger mentioned his name in an Austrian TV programme occasioned by the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death in 2023. The next morning, Neundlinger received an email from a woman who had grown close to Kurka and his wife after they settled in the Austrian countryside in the 1990s and inherited their belongings after they died of cancer. (via The Guardian)

A 77-year-old cyclist survived for three days after a crash by drinking red wine

A French cyclist survived for three days after a horrendous 130-foot fall into a ravine, kept alive by the bottles of red wine he had in his shopping bag, police said. The 77-year-old missed a bend on his bike on his way home from the supermarket on a lonely road in the mountainous Cevennes region, careening down a rocky slope and into the ravine near Saint-Julien-des-Points. Unable to climb out, the man tried to shout every time a vehicle passed. But no one heard his cries. As the hours turned into days, he was sustained by the bottles of wine he was taking home to his caravan, rescuers said. Finally, passing roadworkers heard him yelling and spotted the twisted frame of his bicycle. A helicopter airlifted him to hospital, with rescue doctor calling his survival “a miracle … given the cold and the rain, with almost nothing to eat or drink” other than the wine. (via CBS News)

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Continue reading “Poet W.H. Auden’s lover was a sex worker who stole from him”

The second time I met Rodney Alcala was on March 23, 2013. We were inside one of the North Infirmary Command buildings on Rikers Island, two months after he’d been sentenced for raping and murdering Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Jane Hover, both women in their early 20s and living in New York City, in the 1970s. He was trailed by a prison guard, his baggy dove-gray jumpsuit hung loosely around his bony frame. His once black hair had turned the color of steel wool, still in greasy ringlets streaming past his shoulders. He was so much shorter than I remembered. Glasses that had been round wires were now rectangular. As he stiffly shuffled toward me, I felt stage fright — then a surge of real fright when I realized he wasn’t handcuffed. The first time was in April 1969, on a wet day on St. Marks Place in the East Village. He introduced himself as Jon Burger; I was 14 years old and he was 25. Four-decades-plus later, I learned his real name when it flashed across a television screen beneath his face: “Rodney Alcala, The Dating Game Serial Killer, Sentenced to Death.”(via The Cut)

Japan’s new prime minister is an Iron Maiden fan and former heavy metal drummer

Speaking on Japanese radio station Tokyo FM’s “BABYMETAL” podcast in August, Sanae Takaichi confirmed a longtime affinity for the iconic British heavy metal band Iron Maiden, but said her favorite artist was Japanese drummer Yoshiki, of the X JAPAN rock band from Chiba. Yoshiki is one of the founding members of the group, which has been around since the early 1980s, and Takaichi said she admired both his drumming and his piano playing, which she called “absolutely wonderful — technically brilliant and beautiful.” She also told Tokyo FM that she still listens to the heavy metal band Iron Maiden regularly. Takaichi’s passion for guitar-driven loud music doesn’t stop at fandom. She rocks. Since her days as a student she’s played both the drums and guitar, and says it’s that parallel that makes her such a fan of Yoshiki. (via CBS News)

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Continue reading “She survived an encounter with the Dating Game serial killer”

James Joyce would rise late, after an inebriated evening spent belting out songs at the local boozer, and get his writing done in the early afternoon. Cheever did much the same, but got out of bed earlier.  Hemingway would stay up boozing but be at his typewriter by six the following morning. He famously wrote standing up because his leg had been injured in the war, he said, but also to stop himself drifting off. Francis Bacon used to paint hungover, though not because his mind was sufficiently numb to be able to concentrate, but because it was revved up: ‘I often like working with a hangover,’ he said, ‘because my mind is crackling with energy and I can think very clearly.’ Patricia Highsmith would hit the vodka before starting work, not to perk her up but to reduce her energy levels, which veered toward the manic. She also surrounded herself with pet snails, in the hope that some of the slowness would rub off. (via LitHub)

These 7,000-year-old mummies don’t share any DNA with modern homo sapiens

Between 14,800 and 5,500 years ago, during what is known as the African Humid Period, the Sahara Desert – known for being one of the driest places on Earth – actually had enough water to support life. Back then, it was a savannah that early human populations settled in to take advantage of the favorable conditions. Among them was a mysterious people who lived in what is now southwestern Libya and should have been genetically Sub-Saharan — except, upon a modern analysis, their genes didn’t reflect that. Led by archaeogeneticist Nada Salem from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, a team of researchers analyzed the genes of two 7,000-year-old naturally preserved mummies of Neolithic female herders from the Takarkori rock shelter. Though genetic material does not preserve well in arid climates, which is why much about ancient human populations in the Sahara remains a mystery, there was enough fragmented  DNA to give insights into their past. (via Popular Mechanics)

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Continue reading “These authors liked to write while they were hungover”