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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 Darger’s unpublished 15,000-page typewritten fantasy novel, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm,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”

From Scientific American: “In 2011 an anonymous poster on the now infamously controversial image board 4chan posed a mathematical puzzle about the cult classic anime series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. The first season of this anime series consists of 14 episodes that were designed so that you can watch them in any order you like. At some point in a 2011 discussion, someone asked the minimum number of episodes they would have to watch to have seen it in every possible order. This question is related to so-called superpermutations, and to this day, mathematicians are unable to fully answer the problem that the 4chan user posed. But amazingly, in that discussion, one of the anonymous users made an estimate of the minimum amount of all episodes to watch with an approach that was previously unknown to mathematicians.”

An Australian couple were forced to sit next to a dead body for hours on a plane flight

From The Guardian: “An Australian couple have criticised Qatar Airways after a blanket-draped corpse was seated next to them during a long-haul flight. Mitchell Ring said a passenger died part-way through the 14-hour flight from Melbourne to Doha last week. “They tried to wheel her up towards business class, but she was quite a large lady and they couldn’t get her through the aisle,” he told Nine News. “They looked a bit frustrated, then they just looked at me and saw seats were available beside me.” Ring said he was made to wait next to the corpse even after the plane landed. Ring and his wife, Jennifer Colin, were seated next to the corpse while travelling en-route to Venice. Ring said he was seated with the body for around four hours despite other empty seats. Qatar Airways apologised “for any inconvenience or distress this incident may have caused.”

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Continue reading “An unknown anime fan solved a long-standing math problem”

From the WSJ: “Eleanor Maguire wasn’t great at navigating the streets of London, and she started to think that the brains of the people who were expert navigators—the city’s famous cabdrivers—might actually be different than hers. She burst into her lab at University College London and told her mentor, Chris Frith, that she’d just seen a movie called “The Knowledge” about a group of would-be London cabdrivers, and that it had given her an idea for a scientific study. Frith told her to go for it. Maguire, who had cancer and died Jan. 4 at age 54, specialized in the hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in memory. In a series of studies, she demonstrated that human memories aren’t movies that we replay in our minds the way we watch movies on TV. Rather, they are imperfect scenes that we construct in our minds. When we’re thinking about where we want to go, our brains construct scenes that show us how to get there.”

The game of Ultimate Frisbee is helping to heal some of the wounds in the Middle East

From Reason: “Starting an Ultimate Frisbee league to repair a war-torn country sounds like the plot of a buddy comedy, yet it’s a reality in Iraqi Kurdistan. After German and American aid workers introduced Frisbees to the country in 2019, the sport quickly caught on. By 2023, the scrappy Duhok Shepherds team was flying to Dubai for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Ultimate Club Championship. It was the first time many team members had left Iraq. By November 2024, the team was competing in Doha, Qatar, their uniforms proudly displaying both the Iraqi national flag and the Kurdish tricolor. Invented by New Jersey high schoolers in the 1960s and popularized by hippies, the sport is now the basis of a European relief effort. Beyond those aid organizations, European players have run grassroots fundraising efforts to get the Iraqi Ultimate league off the ground.”

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Continue reading “Her research on the brains of UK cab drivers changed science”

From National Geographic: “A young woman is swept from her home into a foreign, enchanted world. Her captor is no mere mortal, but a powerful and mystical fairy or beast. So begins the odyssey of Feyre, the protagonist of Sarah J. Maas’s bestselling A Court of Thorns and Roses, a sprawling epic that currently spans five novels. The series has made Romantasy, a blending of romance and fantasy, a fixture on social media where readers gush about favorite characters and share elaborate fan theories. Fans lovingly refer to it as “faerie smut,” using Maas’s consciously archaic spelling, and it draws on centuries-old material with timeless appeal. Maas’s most notable source is The Ballad of Tam Lin, a Scottish ballad that dates to as early as the 16th century, and her most obvious nod to the ballad is in one of her main characters, a love interest named Tamlin.”

In the 19th century people in China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan used a single written language

From Wikipedia: “Literary Chinese was the medium of all formal writing in Vietnam for almost all of the country’s history until the early 20th century, when it was replaced by vernacular writing. The language was used in China, as well as in Korea and Japan, and used the same standard Chinese characters. It was used for official business, historical annals, fiction, verse, and scholarship. Literary Chinese was a style of writing modelled on the classics of the Warring States period and Han dynasty. It remained largely static while the various varieties of Chinese evolved and diverged to the point of mutual unintelligibility. The language enabled scholars from all of these countries to communicate in writing, in much the same way that Latin did in European countries.”

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Continue reading “Faerie smut is having a moment, just like it did in the 1500s”

In the old days of artificial intelligence — in other words, more than about ten years ago — one of the big debates was whether an artificial or computerized intelligence would ever be able to pass the Turing test. Designed by the pioneering computer scientist and code-breaker Alan Turing in 1949, before computers as we know them even existed, the test was designed to see whether an artificial intelligence could behave in a human-enough way to convince people that it was a person (Turing called it “the imitation test”). Whatever you think of AI engines or LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, most of them seem to be able to pass the Turing test with flying colours. They are carrying on conversations (sometimes with each other), and generating human speech and text in convincing ways, to the point where even tools that determine whether writing is AI-generated are being fooled.

At this point, it would be hard to argue that these AI engines aren’t intelligent, in some definition of that term. In addition to human-like writing, they have passed pretty much every math, science, and legal test we can design, they are designing new proteins and detecting cancer much faster and more accurately than humans can, and so on. But intelligence isn’t all there is to being human. We also believe that being human involves something called “consciousness,” which we all pretend to understand but is difficult to define. In most cases, it involves an awareness of ourselves as thinking beings — an ability to stand at a distance from ourselves, in a virtual sense, and observe ourselves thinking and behaving; in other words, an understanding that we are alive (there isn’t an approved Turing test for consciousness yet, but someone has proposed one).

The primary foundations of consciousness are the individualized experiences that we have of the world around us, which philosophers often call “qualia” — a word derived from the term “quality” (if you’re interested, there’s a long and in-depth discussion of the concept on the Astral Codex Ten blog). What is included in this term are all the ways we interact with our surroundings: the taste of foods, including the things we like or dislike; the sound of a favourite song; the feeling of different materials when we touch them; how all of these sensory experiences can make us feel psychologically, or how they can evoke a memory; the concept of certain things being “beautiful” or “ugly;” and of course our emotions — our love for a child or a partner, our anger at those who have wronged us, our joy when something good happens to someone we like.

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Continue reading “AI forces us to think about what consciousness means”

From the Wall Street Journal: “Lead pollution in ancient Rome was so high that it dropped the population’s IQ by around 3 points, if not more. Elites were exposed to lead through water pipes, cooking pots, bath tubs, cosmetics and the syrups that sweetened their wine. But the most widespread exposure for Romans came from industrial pollution caused by the mining and smelting of metals used to make money. Romans melted down galena, a lead-rich ore, to extract the silver needed for coins, and lead was a major byproduct of the process. McConnell and his colleagues examined airborne lead that drifted north from ancient Rome and was preserved in ice cores extracted from Greenland. The samples dated between 2,500 and 1,400 years ago—an era that included the rise and fall of the empire.The researchers matched the chemical fingerprint of the lead found in the cores to lead sources in the empire, according to McConnell.”

The Heslington Brain is a human specimen that is more than 2,600 years old

From Wikipedia: “The Heslington Brain is a 2,600-year-old human brain found inside a skull buried in a pit in Yorkshire by York Archaeological Trust in 2008. It is the oldest preserved brain ever found in Eurasia, and is believed to be the best-preserved ancient brain in the world. The skull was discovered during an archaeological dig commissioned by the University of York on the site of its new campus on the outskirts of the city of York. The area was found to have been the site of well-developed permanent habitation between 2,000–3,000 years before the present day. A number of possibly ritualistic objects were found to have been deposited in several pits, including the skull, which had belonged to a man probably in his 30s. He had been hanged before being decapitated with a knife and his skull appears to have been buried immediately. The rest of the body was missing. Although it is not known why he was killed, it is possible that it may have been a human sacrifice or ritual murder.”

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Continue reading “Ancient Rome was so polluted with lead people’s IQs dropped”

From Wikipedia: “Claudette Colvin is an American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and retired nurse aide. On March 2, 1955, she was arrested at the age of 15 in Alabama for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus. It occurred nine months before the similar, more widely known incident in which Rosa Parks helped spark the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Colvin was one of four plaintiffs in the first federal court case filed on February 1, 1956 to challenge bus segregation in the city. On June 13, 1956, the judges determined that the state and local laws requiring bus segregation in Alabama were unconstitutional. The case went to the United States Supreme Court, which upheld the district court’s ruling. One month later, the Supreme Court affirmed the order to the state of Alabama to end bus segregation.”

The heir to a British fortune, he died of a heroin overdose in a hotel in Afghanistan

From The Guardian: “Many people die in Peshawar, violently or otherwise. Carlos Mavroleon didn’t want to die here. Certainly not in the small, claustrophobic hotel room where they found his heroin-soaked body, on 27 August 1998. He had packed it in to his 40 years. The old Etonian heir to a £100m fortune, he had been a war correspondent, a Wall Street broker, a lover of glamorous women from glamorous political dynasties. He had been a gimlet-eyed war reporter, blowing off the tension in the bars of Notting Hill. He commanded a unit of Afghan Mujahideen against the Red Army and had been a bodyguard for a Pakistani tribal chief. And, for most of his adult life, Carlos had been a regular user of speed, coke, Ecstasy, heroin and a variety of other pharmaceutical products.”

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Continue reading “Rosa Parks was not the first to refuse to leave her seat”