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From Sherwood News: “Last year, observers detected an anomaly on the daily balance sheet of the US Treasury Department: a $7 billion estate- and gift-tax payment. John Ricco, now an analyst at Yale University’s Budget Lab, first spotted the huge receipt. “The degree by which this payment exceeds others in modern history — it’s not just, ‘Oh, this was the biggest one by 20%,’” Ricco said later. This was the biggest one by a factor of seven.  Based on estimates of the average tax rate on estates, the February 2023 payment implied the death of someone possessing a fortune between $17.5 and $40 billion. Last year, I published a brief story about the statistical mystery and had nearly forgotten about it months later when I got a phone call. The voice on the other end of the line was calling about my mysterious billionaire.”

A climber’s remains have been found 100 years after he disappeared on Everest

From National Geographic: “When they spotted it, there was no mistaking what they were looking at: a boot melting out of the ice. As they drew closer, they could tell the cracked leather was old and worn, and the sole was studded and bracketed with the diamond-patterned steel hobnails of a bygone era of climbing.  In September, on the broad expanse of the Central Rongbuk Glacier, below the north face of Mount Everest, a National Geographic documentary team that included the photographer and director Jimmy Chin, along with filmmakers and climbers Erich Roepke and Mark Fisher, examined the boot more closely. Inside, they discovered a foot, remains that they instantly recognized as belonging to Andrew Comyn Irvine, or Sandy, as he was known, who vanished 100 years ago with the famed climber George Mallory.”

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Continue reading “Who died and paid the US gov’t $7 billion in estate tax?”

From The Warzone: “Details about the weapons in America’s nuclear arsenal, especially regarding their warheads, remain some of the most secretive elements America’s nuclear weapons enterprise. There is no better example of this than a material that the US Department of Energy has used to build thermonuclear warheads, also known as hydrogen bombs, that is so secret that no one knows exactly what it does or exactly what it’s made of, and that is only ever referred to publicly by a codename, Fogbank. Experts believe that Fogbank is an aerogel, a category of ultralight gels in which a traditionally liquid component is instead a gas. Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on missiles and nuclear weapons, says the codename Fogbank might be derived from nicknames for aerogels, such as “frozen smoke” and “San Franciso fog.”

The history of orchids is also the history of colonialism

From Longreads: “Orchid mania didn’t begin with lady’s slippers. It began with exotic specimens, introduced to English gardeners and noblemen in the late 18th century. While many of them had seen botanical drawings of tropical orchids, the live specimens were something else entirely. Their strangely shaped flowers and bright colors sparked a fixation that came to exemplify the values of the period, for the heroic white adventurer who risks his life to harvest the knowledge and beauty of other lands, returning victorious to his home after striding across harsh landscapes, battling his way through jungles, and fighting man and beast to achieve his goals. The orchid stood for supremacy — of knowledge, of culture, of whiteness.” 

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Continue reading “Warheads use a secret material known only as Fogbank”

Like many, I’ve been fascinated by the speed with which artificial intelligence has taken over the spotlight as the technology that everyone is either excited by, confused by, or terrified by (or possibly all three). Part of that, I think, has to do with the speed at which the group of things we call AI have been evolving — it’s hard to believe that the term AI was mostly restricted to academic circles as recently as 2022, when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released in the wild. Then came visual AI engines like DALL-E and Midjourney, which generated some hilarious photographs and video clips, like the widely-lampooned video of an AI version of Will Smith trying to eat spaghetti, which is alternately laughable and also creepy, in a way that only AI art seems to be. ChatGPT and other AI engines based on large language models routinely generated nonsensical results — or “hallucinations,” as some call them — where they just make things up out of thin air.

Within a matter of months, however, those same AI chatbots were producing high-quality transcriptions and summaries, and the AI photo and video engines were generating incredibly lifelike pictures of things that don’t exist, and videos of people and animals that are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. I recently took a test that Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten sent to his newsletter readers, which presented them with pictures and asked which ones were generated by AI and which by humans, and I have zero confidence that I got any of them right. ChatGPT’s various iterations, meanwhile, have not only aced the Turing test (which determines whether an AI is able to mimic being human) but the LSAT and a number of other tests. It’s true that AI engines like Google’s have told people to do stupid thing like eat rocks, but the speed with which their output has become almost indistinguishable from human content is staggering.

I should mention up front that I am well aware of the controversy over where AI engines get all the information they use to generate video and photos and text — the idea that their scraping or indexing of books and news articles is theft, and they should either pay for it or be prevented from using it. If I were an artist whose name has become a prompt for generating images that look like his work, I might think differently. But for me, the act of indexing content (as I’ve argued for the Columbia Journalism Review) is not that different from what a search engine like Google does, which I believe should qualify as fair use under the law (and has in previous cases such as the Google Books case and the Perfect 10 case.) Whether the Supreme Court agrees with me remains to be seen, of course, but that is my belief. I’m not going to argue about that here, however, because that is a separate question from the one I’m interested in exploring right now.

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Continue reading “Is AI going to save us or kill us? Even the experts don’t agree”

From LitHub: “Not only was Mark Twain (née Samuel Langhorne Clemens on this day in 1835) an inventor of good stories and witty rejoinders, he was a literal inventor—of both successful and not-so-successful items. Over the course of his life, he registered three patents: the first, in 1871, was for an “Improvement in adjustable and detachable straps for garments,” meant to be an alternative to suspenders, which Clemens apparently found uncomfortable. The invention didn’t catch on for any of its intended pantaloon purposes, but as it turned out the advantages were obvious, at least for a certain item Twain didn’t even think of. “This clever invention only caught on for one snug garment: the bra,” wrote Rebecca Greenfield in The Atlantic. “A clasp is all that secures that elastic band. So not-so-dexterous ladies and gents, you can thank Mark Twain.”

Classrooms without walls: A forgotten age of open-air schools

From Messy Nessy Chic: “In the early 20th century, open air schools became fairly common in Northern Europe, originally designed to prevent and combat the widespread rise of tuberculosis that occurred in the period leading up to the Second World War. Schools were built on the concept that exposure to fresh air, good ventilation and exposure to the outside were paramount! The idea quickly became popular and an open air school movement was introduced for healthy children too, encouraging all students to be outdoors as much as possible. It all started with the creation of the Waldeschule (literally, “forest school”), built in Charlottenburg, Germany in 1904 and designed to provide its students with the most exposure to the sun. Classes were taught in the surrounding forest, which was believed to help build independence and self-esteem.”

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Continue reading “Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain invented the bra clasp”

From The Guardian: “A fugitive father and his three children have been spotted together for the first time in nearly three years, along the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island. Just before Christmas 2021, Tom Phillips fled into the Waikato wilderness with his children Ember, now 8, Maverick, now 9, and Jayda, now 11, following a dispute with their mother. Phillips has not been seen since last November after he allegedly stole a quad bike from a rural property and broke into a shop in Piopio. CCTV footage showed two figures on a street, believed to be him and one of the children. But a breakthrough in the search for the family came when the group was seen together last Thursday on Marokopa farmland, in New Zealand’s Waikato region, after a chance encounter with teenage pig hunters who pulled out their phones and began filming.”

The enduring mystery of the Loretto Chapel’s circular staircase

From Atlas Obscura: “It’s considered a miracle, an engineering marvel, and even a scientific anomaly, depending who you ask. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, the helix-shaped spiral staircase at Loretto Chapel has long puzzled visitors, including architects and physicists. There are several unknowns surrounding the staircase and its late-19th-century origins. First off: how was the 20-foot structure, which includes two 360-degree turns, built without the use of nails or other support? And how has it never wavered, despite so much use, after all these years? Also unknown is the type of wood used to build the staircase, and who built it in the first place. Neither the carpenter nor their materials have ever been identified. There are numerous conflicting theories, and roughly 250,000 visitors marvel at the chapel and its mystifyingly unsupported spirals each year.”

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Continue reading “A father is seen with his children three years after they vanished”

From the FT: “There was nothing to suggest that October 22 1966 would be anything other than a typically dismal Saturday at Wormwood Scrubs, a dingy Victorian prison in north-west London. Late that afternoon, inmate 455 told a guard that the idea of spending his free time watching TV with the other high-security prisoners in D Hall was a “farce” and he’d prefer to read in his cell. He then made his way to the second-floor landing, where he squeezed through a broken window and shimmied down the outside wall into the exercise yard between 6pm and 7pm. An accomplice waited in a hiding place on Artillery Road nearby. After a brief burst of communication over walkie-talkie, a handmade rope ladder fell into the yard as the jail settled down to a weekly film night. The most audacious prison break in British history had begun.”

Sammy Basso, the longest survivor of rapid ageing disease, dies at 28

From the CBC: “Sammy Basso lived longer than anyone else with his disease, but his death at the age 28 still came as a shock to those who knew and loved him. Basso, a molecular biologist from Italy, died on Oct. 5. He was the longest known survivor of progeria, a rare genetic disease that causes rapid aging. Many people who have it don’t make it past their teens. He dedicated his life to studying and raising awareness about progeria in the hopes that future generations would not have to go through what he did. Those who knew him say he was not only committed to the cause, but also funny and kind, a brilliant conversationalist, the life of a party, and someone who extolled the kind of joie-de-vivre that comes from knowing all too well that every second counts.”

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Continue reading “It took 25 years to solve this British prison break”

From Amusing Planet: “Joseph Pujol was born in Marseille, on the Cote d’Azur in 1857. The son of a stonemason and sculptor, Pujol discovered his unique talent when he was only ten years old. Pujol soon found that by adjusting the force with which he expelled this air, he could create musical notes of varying pitch and timbre. It was while serving in the army that Joseph Pujol was given the name “Le Pétomane”, which roughly translates as the “fart maniac”. In 1890, he took his act to Paris and persuaded Charles Zidler, founder of the newly opened Moulin Rouge, to let him perform. Pujol’s act was an immediate sensation, and for the next three years, he played to packed houses at the iconic cabaret, delighting audiences that ranged from royalty to the bourgeoisie. According to one fellow performer, Pujol was the highest-paid artist at the Moulin Rouge.”

Sixteenth-century Venice conducted its affairs in code, which was regulated by the state

From JSTOR Daily: “The secret in secretary is hidden in plain sight. In late Middle English, a secretary was literally one who kept secrets. In sixteenth-century Venice, there were professional cifrista, cipher secretaries, that is, cryptographers, writing secrets in code to secure communications from prying eyes. The Venetian city-state, which then dominated the politics and commerce of Northern Italy, the Adriatic, and the eastern Mediterranean, actively conducted its affairs in code. Cryptology was so important and widespread in Venice’s Stato de Màr (State of the Sea) it became professionalized and state controlled. Cryptology was first an intellectual pursuit that evolved into amateur use by merchants and rulers and then became professionalized in the 1500s.”

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Continue reading “The 19th-century entertainer who could fart musical notes”

From the Sunday Times: “At 18, he graduates from high school with excellent grades but is unemployable. He moves into an annexe, is looked after by a rotating team of carers and spends much of his time deeply absorbed in World of Warcraft, his right hand resting awkwardly on a custom-built keyboard, his head lolling to one side as he navigates an epic world. Robert and Trude sometimes sit with him while he plays, but after half an hour they find their attention drifting. After he passed away at the age of 20, they started getting emails expressing their sorrow at Mats’ death. The messages continued, a trickle becoming a flood as people conveyed their condolences and wrote paragraph after paragraph about Mats. He had a warm heart, people wrote. He was funny and imaginative, a good listener and generous. You should be proud of him. Robert and Trude eventually discovered that he had an online life they knew nothing about.”

Sir Rod Stewart has spent two decades building a massive model train set

From the BBC: “He’s one of rock’s biggest stars, but Sir Rod Stewart has finally revealed the fruits of his other great passion – model railways. In between making music and playing live, Sir Rod has been working on a massive, intricate model of a US city for the past 23 years. He unveiled it as part of an interview with Railway Modeller magazine. He then phoned in to Jeremy Vine’s BBC Radio 2 show to rebuff the host’s suggestion he had not built it himself. “I would say 90% of it I built myself,” he insisted. “The only thing I wasn’t very good at and still am not is the electricals, so I had someone else do that.” Sir Rod has released 13 studio albums and been on 19 tours during the time it took to build the city, which is modelled on both New York and Chicago around 1945. “A lot of people laugh at it being a silly hobby, but it’s a wonderful hobby,” he said.

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Continue reading “After their son died they found out he was a legendary gamer”

I realize that many people may not know or care who or what Matt Mullenweg and WordPress are, or why some people are upset about them, but after giving it a lot of thought (okay, about 10 minutes of thought) I decided to write about it anyway. I’m writing this newsletter in part for an audience — in other words, you the reader, and others like you — so when I’m deciding what to write about, I do try to take into account what you might be interested in reading about. But I’m also writing this newsletter for myself, and in this case what I care about trumps (sorry) what my readers may or may not be interested in. And I think this is about something important that goes beyond just WordPress.

Update: After publication, Matt sent me a message on Twitter with a link to a Google doc that lists some corrections and clarifications related to some of my comments here. My response is at the end of this post.

I care about Matt Mullenweg and WordPress for a number of reasons, some personal and some professional. On the personal side, I’ve been using WordPress to publish my blog for more than two decades now, and I’ve helped countless others with their WordPress-powered blogs and websites over the years. It has its quirks, but it is a great system. I’ve tried Drupal and Squarespace and literally everything else, and I keep coming back to WordPress. On the non-personal side, the Columbia Journalism Review — where I was the chief digital writer for about seven years, until a month or so ago — runs on WordPress, as do hundreds of thousands if not millions of other websites (WordPress likes to boast that it powers more than 40 percent of the sites on the web.)

Not long after I started using WordPress for my blog, which was in 2004 or so — after experimenting with Typepad and Blogger and other publishing systems — I cofounded a Web 2.0 conference in Toronto called Mesh, and one of the speakers we invited to the very first one was Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, who was then just 21 years old. I have a very clear memory of Matt sitting at a table with my friend Om Malik (whose Gigaom blog network I would later join) and others, while I tried to get a friend to stop using a local company’s terrible blog-publishing software and switch to WordPress.

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Continue reading “Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?”

From Science.org: “In 2016, when the U.S. Congress unleashed a flood of new funding for Alzheimer’s disease research, the National Institute on Aging (NIA) tapped veteran brain researcher Eliezer Masliah as a key leader for the effort. He took the helm at the agency’s Division of Neuroscience, whose budget—$2.6 billion in the last fiscal year—dwarfs the rest of NIA combined. His roughly 800 research papers, many on how those conditions damage synapses, the junctions between neurons, have made him one of the most cited scientists in his field. However, a Science investigation has now found that scores of his lab studies are riddled with apparently falsified images used to show the presence of proteins and micrographs of brain tissue. Numerous images seem to have been inappropriately reused within and across papers, sometimes published years apart in different journals, describing divergent experimental conditions.”

A Lego fan has made a working version of a Turing machine out of Lego

From The Register: “A working Turing Machine was submitted to Lego Ideas, consisting of approximately 2,900 parts and a bucketload of extreme cleverness. The original machine was devised by mathematician Alan Turing in 1936. Turing’s idea was a hypothetical system that could simulate any computer algorithm. The design consisted of an infinitely long tape with symbols that could be moved left and right, a ‘head’ that could read the symbols and overwrite them with new ones, a finite control that described the machine’s state, and a table to link each combination of state and symbol to an instruction for what to do next. The Lego builder first came across the concept a few years ago and, despite it being an abstract model, decided to attempt making one. In addition to the constraints of making the device, there was also the challenge of fitting into the limits imposed by Lego Ideas. At the time of submission, this was 3,000 parts.”

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Continue reading “A top US health researcher falsified Alzheimer’s data”