mathewingram.com/work – Links that interest me and maybe you

September 29, 2026

He was an art forger but he became a national hero

In July of 1945, Han van Meegeren picked up his badger-hair brush and began to paint his last forgery. Over a decade, the wiry Dutchman had surreptitiously become Europe’s premier conman — a disgruntled artist-turned-forger who’d sold his works for tens of millions of dollars. He had duped leading critics, wealthy collectors, and even a high-ranking Nazi official into believing his works were real. What’s more, he had chosen to do so by emulating the works of Jan Vermeer, a technically-immaculate master of the Dutch Golden Age. Post-World War II, a “Vermeer” painting sold to Hermann Göring was traced back to van Meegeren — a painting of such high quality that experts agreed no one could have possibly fabricated it. Accused of plundering for the Germans, the artist was sentenced to death. In an odd twist, van Meegeren was given one last chance to prove his innocence: If he could produce a brilliant forgery before the eyes of court-appointed witnesses, he’d be spared. What ensued would make the man one of the most popular figures in the Netherlands. (via Priceonomics)

Scientists found an ancient sheep virus hiding in a medieval parchment

In ancient Rome, shepherds feared the appearance of bumpy pustules on their sheep—a telltale sign of deadly sheeppox. Even today, the disease poses a major threat, capable of wiping out entire flocks. Yet the disease’s origins—and historical impact—have remained mysterious. In a study published today in Science Advances, researchers pin the virus’ emergence to about 5000 years ago, roughly the same time people started to intensively shear sheep for wool. The peek into the pathogen’s past came from an unusual source: dozens of medieval books and legal documents written on parchment, which is made from specially treated animal skins. “It turns out parchment is an extremely good preserver of this type of biological data,” says University of Leicester historian Joanna Story, a co-author of the new study. Researchers rubbed pages of the books with erasers, then extracted DNA from the eraser rubbings. That there was DNA to recover at all came as a surprise. Before becoming pages in a book, cow, goat, and sheep skins were soaked for days in pits filled with lime. (via Science.org)

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September 28, 2026September 28, 2026

How Lady Gaga’s biggest fan wound up in prison

On Tuesday, Kirill Nguyen shared a rare personal dispatch from the @GagaDaily X account: “Sorry about the lack of updates, I was literally in prison 😭”. The profile, an outgrowth of the eminent Lady Gaga fan site Nguyen, now 32, founded nearly two decades ago, had gone dark for a year beginning in February 2024. His return was met with an overwhelmingly effusive response. Nguyen was deliberately vague about the circumstances of his detainment, but speaking to Pitchfork, he revealed some of the details. In 2020, Nguyen attended a protest in Belarus, where he’d lived most of his life. The former Soviet satellite had recently catapulted Alexander Lukashenko, “Europe’s last dictator,” into a sixth term as president, in an election widely disputed as fraudulent. “I just came out with a flag and walked,” Nguyen says. “It was a regular protest like you guys have in America every day.” Four years later, Nguyen returned to visit his family in Belarus, where he was arrested by state police forces. (via Pitchfork)

Scientists say acupuncture may work via a newly discovered vascular network

The practice of acupuncture made it into the pantheon of accepted medical methodologies in the West through trade, politics, immigration and fascination. But it took thousands of years for scientists to understand the exact physical system that makes it effective.
In China, acupuncture predates the common era. Its most foundational text was written around 1st or 2nd century BCE, mapping energy meridians and points along the body the same way that circulatory or skeletal systems are mapped. As European missionaries and traders ventured to China, the West flirted with Traditional Chinese Medicine several times. It caught hold in France, where a unique form of acupuncture developed in the 19th century: The French school of acupuncture created new methodologies like ear acupuncture, and using electric currents with needles. In 2021, scientists discovered a new system inside of our bodies. They’ve labeled it the “interstitium”. They say that it plays a role in how acupuncture actually works. (via Why Is This Interesting)

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September 25, 2026

TV host Bob Barker was a member of the Sioux nation

Robert William Barker was an American media personality, game show host, and animal rights advocate. He hosted CBS’s The Price Is Right, the longest-running game show in North American television history, from 1972 to 2007. Barker also hosted Truth or Consequences from 1956 to 1975. Born in Darrington, Washington, in modest circumstances, Barker spent most of his youth on the Rosebud Indian Reservation and was a citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. The U.S. Indian Census Rolls, 1885–1940, list Barker as a citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, which the tribe publicly confirmed. His mother, Matilda was a schoolteacher; his father, Byron John Barker, was the foreman on the electrical high line through the state of Washington. Barker’s father was one-quarter Sicangu, , thus Barker was one-eighth Sicangu. Barker once said, “I’ve always bragged about being part Indian, because they are a people to be proud of. And the Sioux were the greatest warriors of them all.” (via Wikipedia)

In the nineteenth century before libraries women sold books door-to-door

In the second half of the nineteenth century, before the rise of public libraries, many people in remote parts of the United States got their hands on new books thanks to traveling salespeople. The booksellers visited homes and businesses with sample books, took orders, and then later delivered the books and collected payment. Braun writes that popular volumes included Bibles, farming and health manuals, biographies, and fiction. Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs and the works of Mark Twain were popular choices. Many books published using this “subscription” model sold hundreds of thousands of copies. In an 1868 account of her work selling books across northern Illinois and Indiana, Annie Nelles Dumond described taking up the work out of necessity. She wrote that, seeking to escape a difficult childhood, she married young to a man who turned out to already have a wife and children. A second husband abandoned her. So Dumond sought ways to support herself. When she began selling books, she wore a mourning bonnet. She acknowledged that this was deceptive but wrote that it was “almost necessary to my self-preservation that my past should not be known.” (via JSTOR Daily)

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September 24, 2026

AI doomers may be wrong but the skeptics seem even wronger

As regular readers will know, last week I re-published a piece that I originally wrote on September 3rd, entitled “Yes, we should be very worried about the Hugging Face hack.” I couldn’t write a new post for last week because I was backwoods camping in a remote area of southwestern Ontario – Killarney Provincial Park, in case you are interested – and I had virtually no cell signal for most of that time (if you like canoes or kayaks or sunsets or trees, you can check out the post I wrote about the trip). I chose to re-publish the Hugging Face hack piece because it seemed even more appropriate in light of some of the revelations that have been coming out about the hack – including the fact that the hack was neither the first time OpenAI models had accessed another company’s systems without permission, nor the first time the models in question had used a message board to discuss the methods used in their attack. The September 3rd piece was itself an update on an earlier piece I wrote in July, right after the Hugging Face attack was first revealed (a reveal that came weeks after the hack itself took place).

The debate over AI safety and what AI researchers call “alignment” – or, to put it more bluntly, between whether AI is working as advertised or is going to lead to the extermination of life as we know it – has continued to intensify. One of the main triggers was a series of departures and/or warnings from some senior staffers at most of the major AI companies. The one that started the landslide was Jacob Coxon, a researcher who posted on X about quitting OpenAI because of his concerns about AI. “I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic,” he said. “Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” The people building AI, Coxon said, “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately.”

Coxon’s post was quoted by Evan Hubinger, the head of alignment science at Anthropic, who said that many of those working at the company “earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.” Ethan Perez, the head of the alignment team at Anthropic, posted that he and his colleagues “100% agree with him that AI poses serious risks to society.” Drake Thomas of Anthropic responded to Coxon’s post by saying: “I promise you we are actually just fucking scared, it’s not galaxy-brained marketing.” Alex Turner wrote about quitting Google’s DeepMind because the company didn’t keep its promises about AI, and Jonathan Richard Schwarz said he quit DeepMind after seven years and refused job offers from both OpenAI and Anthropic. Andreas Kirsch, a Google DeepMind employee, wrote that he was “worried that AI will kill us all, either via near term risks or long term risks or both.”

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September 23, 2026

He spent millions he got from a faulty ATM and has no regrets

An Australian man who defrauded a bank by exploiting an ATM loophole said he does not regret his actions after using the money to fund a lavish lifestyle for months. Dan Saunders managed to spend more than AUS$1.6m ($1.1m) in just over four months after he found he could withdraw money from his account without the transactions being registered. Now out of prison, Saunders has told Australian media how he managed to blow the money on “having a good time and just enjoying things really.” These extravagant purchases include eating at high-end restaurants, buying drinks all night for people in bars, gambling, and even hiring a private jet so him and his friends could go on vacation. The story of how Saunders managed to afford his newfound millionaire lifestyle began after he attempted to withdraw some cash at a National Bank Australia machine in Wangaratta, Victoria, in 2011. After seeing his account was empty, Saunders transferred cash from his Mastercard to his savings account. He said the screen then said “transaction cancelled,” but the machine still gave him the $200. (via Newsweek)

After the Battle of Waterloo teeth were taken from the battlefield and made into dentures

Historians estimate that by the morning following the Battle of Waterloo, the 50,000 bodies that lay dead or dying on the battlefield had been stripped of everything of value including their teeth. Local scavengers, surviving soldiers and professional body scavengers were all known to work on the battlefield. Some body snatchers of London were known to get jobs following the British army. Transported back to England, the teeth were sold to the ivory turners and jewellers and those beginning to make a full-time living from the making of artificial teeth. Sorted and shaped, the teeth were riveted into a hippopotamus or walrus ivory base. Examples on display in the exhibition explore the methods and skill in how these human teeth were attached. The many processes involved ensured the denture took at least six weeks to complete. Not surprisingly they were very expensive to buy. In 1782 Martin Van Butchell of London advertised a full set of ivory dentures with human teeth for £100. (via Nature)

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September 22, 2026September 23, 2026

Backwoods camping in Killarney Provincial Park

Every year we go backwoods camping (i.e. not car camping) on a different lake in southeastern Ontario with our friends Marc and Kris, who have been doing this for a few decades or so now. Most of the time it’s in the Kawarthas, like Copper Lake or Crab Lake — which I wrote about last year — because there are just so many little lakes there’s no end of choice. We have also done Algonquin once (Andrew Lake) and have camped in Massasauga Park, which is the second largest provincial park next to Algonquin. And this year we decided to pick a spot in Killarney Provincial Park, which is up near Parry Sound.

After some investigation we wound up booking a campsite on Balsam Lake. It looked like it was on an island — which it sort of was — and it faced southeast. That meant entering on Bell Lake, at the put in that is right beside Killarney Kanoes (at the end of a very long and bumpy dirt road that probably claims to be two lanes but is more like one and a half). We got there and were unloading the two canoes and my kayak — since we had five people — and I saw a guy walking towards me with his canoe who looked familiar. Turns out it was a paramedic who is good friend of my son-in-law, an emergency department nurse in Hamilton. That’s what it’s like to go canoe camping in Canada I guess LOL.

We put in on Bell Lake and probably paddled for an hour and a half or so — it’s a long, thin lake — but it was a beautiful day and we stopped for lunch on the shore somewhere. After a while we were in Three Mile Lake, which is also long and thin and is attached to Bell (I’m not sure why they have two different names because it felt like just one big lake — there isn’t a portage or anything between them). I think in total it’s about six kilometres from the put in on Bell to the portage into Balsam Lake. Anyway, as we got closer to the portage, we met a man in a canoe who warned us that there was a beaver dam between us and the portage and we would probably have to lift over it.

September 22, 2026

He hiked the entire 2,193-mile Appalachian Trail at 91

More than 14 million older adults fall every year in the U.S., perhaps none so often as 91-year-old Dale Sanders. By his count, Sanders fell 71 times while reclaiming his record as the oldest hiker to complete the Appalachian Trail. Six were what he calls hard falls, including one that led to a brief hospitalization and another just 200 yards from the finish. But none were enough to permanently divert him from the 2,193-mile (3,530-kilometer) trail that runs between Springer Mountain in Georgia and Mount Katahdin in Maine. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy defines a thru-hike as completing all of the trail’s sections in any order within a year, allowing for pauses. Sanders started Sept. 6 in West Virginia, hopscotched around with some brief breaks and finished Monday atop Maine’s highest peak, where he paused to pray at the sign marking the summit. Sanders, whose trail name is Grey Beard, first set the Appalachian Trail record in 2017 at age 82. Four years later, his 83-year-old friend M.J. Eberhart, aka Nimblewill Nomad, took the title. But within months, Sanders announced his comeback plan. (via PBS)

Moby Dick wasn’t exciting enough so Hollywood invented an evil half-brother for Captain Ahab

The Sea Beast, the first film adaptation of Moby-Dick, begins with a leather-bound edition of the novel opening to page one, but the phrase “Call me Ishmael” is nowhere to be found. That’s because there’s no Ishmael in this movie at all. Instead, theatergoers a hundred years ago were introduced to a new character: Captain Ahab’s evil younger brother, Derek. Yes, Derek. This silent film, released in 1926, offers the story of a dreamy and handsome young harpooner named Ahab Ceeley, cut down in his prime by both fraternal and cetaceous violence. The Hollywood leading man John Barrymore plays Ahab as a valiant lover, wooing the beautiful Esther with his nautical prowess and igniting the envy of his jealous half brother, who hopes to steal Esther’s heart. The dastardly Derek stealthily shoves his sibling into the jaws of a vicious sperm whale, then convinces the now-disabled Ahab that his sweetheart could never accept him in his disfigured condition. Plunged into a steely despair, the captain focuses his hate on the legendary Moby Dick—at least until he discovers the truth. “Your worst enemy ain’t Moby Dick,” a sailor eventually informs him, “it’s your half brother, Derek.” (via The Paris Review)

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September 21, 2026

Why did this trainer at a riding academy shoot a student?

Until 2019, when he attempted to kill one of his students, Michael Barisone was a leading rider and trainer in the horse-handling sport of dressage. Today, he still owns a dressage farm in Loxahatchee, Florida, twenty miles inland from Palm Beach. On five acres, he has a stucco house that’s connected to a barn; white-fenced paddocks shaded by palms; and an outdoor riding ring. Along one end of the ring is a common neighborhood fixture: an eighty-foot-long mirror. Barisone, who’s in his early sixties, with a Will Ferrell chin and a muscular build, can hold a conversation about his own good judgment, and the iniquity of his enemies, while riding a horse and monitoring his own reflection. In Barisone’s Loxahatchee kitchen there is a dark-green safe the size of a vending machine. It used to stand in his office on the New Jersey farm. He has never seriously contested the idea that, on August 7, 2019, he took a handgun from the safe and drove a few hundred yards, to a house on his property where Lauren Kanarek, a thirty-eight-year-old student of his, was boarding with her boyfriend. He shot her twice. (via The New Yorker)

He was cleaning out his garage and found a box marked SECRET in a hidden crawlspace

Jason Hurdle was clearing space in his garage for his Halloween decorations when he pulled back an unassuming sheet of plywood from the wall, revealing a crawl space he’d never seen before. Inside was a dusty cardboard box full of weathered files that looked like trash. But as he carried the box out to the flatbed of his truck and reached for a garbage bin, a breeze lifted one of the covers, and a word in red block letters stopped him: “SECRET.” A mechanic for his local school district near Waterloo, New York, Hurdle doesn’t encounter government documents with classified markings. Initially, he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. But as he read the pages, he started to get an idea.The 80-year-old, onionskin pages were mostly handwritten, first-person accounts by American prisoners of war, or POWs, describing their experiences in German captivity during World War II. In July, the National Archives announced the documents had been safely recovered by its Archival Recovery Program. (via the Washington Post)

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September 11, 2026

This forgotten pioneer was the Jackie Robinson of golf

How good a golfer was Ted Rhodes? At the 1948 US Open, he finished the first round just three shots behind the leader – and eventual winner – Ben Hogan. But there’s more to the story: Rhodes was the first Black competitor in the tournament in its modern era, during a time of widespread segregation in American sport. In addition to reintegrating the US Open, Rhodes was part of a 1948 lawsuit against the PGA, which had restricted membership to white people. The PGA responded with a settlement and a promise to change, but according to the book, instead it shifted the status of tournaments from open to invitational, allowing the organization to tacitly continue segregation. Before the PGA reversed its stance, some courses welcomed Black players for PGA events, including Phoenix Country Club for the 1952 Phoenix Open, where the Black entrants included Rhodes and a crucial figure in his life: boxing great Joe Louis. It was golf that connected them – when not in the ring, the heavyweight champ liked to go out on the links, with Rhodes as his teacher. During and after his playing career, Rhodes helped spread interest in golf among Black people through his instruction. (via The Guardian)

Some scientists believe we would be better off burying plastic garbage instead of recycling it

Every child is taught that landfill is the worst place our trash can end up. It is the sad consequence of a failure to recycle: a mountain of waste leaking chemicals and smells, blighting the land forever. What if that picture is wrong? What if landfill, properly done, is actually one of the cleanest, cheapest, and most environmentally sensible things we can do with our waste? It turns out that for much of what we throw away, the humble landfill beats the recycling bin. The case against landfill has two parts. The first part is that there are efficient, cheap, or environmentally friendly ways to practically reuse or recycle materials, rather than landfilling, meaning that there is a reasonable alternative. The second is that landfill itself is unsustainable, or environmentally unfriendly, meaning that we need an alternative. Both are false. It’s natural to assume that reusable always means better. But this intuition treats different materials as interchangeable and ignores the cost of making them in the first place. Once we account for energy, labor, and other inputs, reuse pays off only in selective cases. (via Works In Progress)

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September 10, 2026

I don’t like it but the Trump DoJ is right on AI and fair use

I’ve written about this topic a number of times before, but in this case I’m tempted to re-use the popular meme “When the worst person in the world makes a good point,” as I did awhile back when I wrote about Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI for (among other things) not actually being open. In this case, the worst person is the Trump government – or, to be more specific, the Department of Justice. Obviously not everyone in the DoJ is tainted by the association with Trump, and many of them may be hard working and smart lawyers who would like nothing better than to be associated with a different administration, and I choose to believe that those are the ones who wrote the brief that the Trump government recently filed in the copyright case between the New York Times and OpenAI. In a nutshell, the brief argues that scanning news stories and other content owned by the New York Times for the purposes of training an AI model should be covered by the fair use exemption in U.S. copyright law – and, of course, implies that all content owned by corporations or other rightsholders is theoretically covered by the same exclusion. As some of you may know by now, this is a conclusion that I agree with.

To recap for those of you who aren’t familiar with the case, the New York Times sued OpenAI in December of 2023, claiming that its ChatGPT model was trained on NYT content, and that the newspaper publisher should be entitled to billions of dollars in compensation as a result. The newspaper’s complaint, filed in Manhattan federal court, accused OpenAI (and its then-partner Microsoft) of trying to “free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism” by using it as a way to give information to users. The lawsuit added that “there is nothing ‘transformative’ about using The Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it.” This latter statement is a crucial element in the newspaper company’s argument, since one of the four factors that the courts take into account when considering a fair-use case (and the one that courts often deem to be the most important factor) is whether the infringing use could be seen as “transformative.”

It’s worth noting that the point about OpenAI free-riding on the Times in order to create an alternative way of giving users the same information was buttressed in the lawsuit by an exhibit the Times said showed that ChatGPT gave users the entire text of NYT articles for free when asked to do so. However, OpenAI responded that this was not the way the AI model was supposed to be used, and that the Times only managed to generate the entire text of an article by repeatedly prompting the AI with long sections of the article, and even then it took many tries before it succeeded. “Even when using such prompts, our models don’t typically behave the way The New York Times insinuates, which suggests they either instructed the model to regurgitate or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts,” OpenAI said at the time. In any case, OpenAI said that it had changed the way ChatGPT worked so that this was no longer possible. The whole point of the model, the company said, was not to reproduce the entire text of existing articles but merely to use those articles as raw material to train ChatGPT to understand text.

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September 9, 2026

She’s 17 years old and her brain won’t let her forget anything

Known as the human calendar to her friends but nicknamed AJ in later research reports, the woman was looking for help. “I want to know why I remember everything,” she said. AJ told the scientists that she couldn’t turn her memory off, even when she was engaged in other activities that demanded her attention, like talking to a friend. The scientists reported on AJ’s condition, and coined the term “hyperthymesia” to describe it. Almost uniformly, those who have the condition find the memories—which tend to be carefully indexed by date—intrusive, uncontrollable, and distressing. Which is why the recently published case study of a 17-year-old girl dubbed TL is commanding attention. Like others with hyperthymesia, TL has an exceptionally intense and vivid memory for the events that have occurred over her short life. She can provide an especially rich amount of perceptual, spatial, and temporal information, and even recall events from multiple points of view. But unlike the others, she is able to organize these memories into a kind of “memory palace,” and can access them whenever she likes. (via Nautilus)

They rented jet-skis for an hour and wound up fighting for their lives in the open ocean

They had become, in an instant, two indiscernible specks stranded in a dark and boundless sea. The jet skis that had carried them past the breakwater had been swept away. The shore of Long Beach, Calif. — where their evening jaunt had begun — was no longer in sight. Now the longtime friends clung to life jackets while choking on fierce waves, their bodies dangling in the Pacific Ocean. It was Aug. 16, and the last rays of sun had faded. It was not clear if help was on the way. Mr. Carbullido was dazed. He had been thrown from his jet ski and landed on his back, the wind knocked out of him. He appeared unable to comprehend the urgency of the situation. At 47, Ms. Dubray was a strong swimmer; it was not unusual for her to go into the ocean every day of the week, even to take her kayak out at night. But as she left Mr. Carbullido and set off for the glimmer in the distance, the water churned with an unfamiliar terror. Every few strokes, she shouted her friend’s name so he could hear her voice. She heard no response. (via the NYT)

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September 8, 2026

An ex-cop said he stole millions so he could give it to the poor

It was the largest armed robbery in Austrian history. The heist had been near perfectly executed — perfect, that is, except for one small oversight. The thieves didn’t realize that the ATM had a security camera that automatically took photos of the street. The images were blurry, but they revealed that the perpetrator who climbed into the van was short enough to stand upright without hitting their head. Detectives decided that it was almost certainly a woman. They soon homed in on a former Loomis employee who, when she worked for the company, had scheduled the routes and was only five feet three inches tall. Investigators were stunned when she named her accomplice: Gabriel E., a former officer in the city’s WEGA unit, the Viennese equivalent of SWAT. When detectives asked why he had committed such an audacious crime, he replied that he hadn’t stolen the money for himself. He’d done it for the children of Africa; he planned to build an orphanage there. It sounded absurd—the kind of desperate lie a thief might invent to deflect blame or ameliorate punishment—but it was very much the truth. (via The Atavist)

He survived for five nights in the mountains by eating wildflowers and hiding in a cave

A man who survived a grueling five nights in British Columbia’s Coast Mountains is sharing more about his experience. Stanislav Volo became the subject of a massive search after he failed to return from a hike on Sunday after riding up the Sea-to-Sky Gondola, just south of Squamish. Search and rescue crews found him Friday evening on the Indian Arm Forest Service Road after he’d descended the mountain injured, but under his own power. In an interview with CBC News on Saturday after being discharged from the hospital, the 43-year-old father of two was in good spirits, despite bruises and a black eye. Volo had intended to hike the Mount Habrich Loop. He said his phone died when he got to the top of the mountain, and he was unable to find his way down. Volo said he spent several nights sheltering in a small cave near a waterfall, where he focused on recovering, trying to stay warm. He said he rationed a few packages of gummy bears before he discovered a sweet-tasting wildflower to eat. (via the CBC)

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September 4, 2026September 3, 2026

Crows make human friends but also hold grudges for years

Many people who receive attention from crows feel that the birds have more complex motives. “It seemed like they would just come by to hang out,” my sister tells me — like, well, friends. What is a friend, anyway? For a scholarly perspective, I spoke to Thom van Dooren, a field philosopher at the University of Sydney. He believes crows relate to people in ways that meet several conditions for friendship. Criterion one: You must know a friend from a stranger. “In order to strike up a friendship, you have to be the kinds of organisms who can firstly recognize one another as individuals,” he says. Here, the avians have an advantage. While people struggle to tell crows apart, crows are startlingly good at identifying us. In experiments, urban crows held long grudges against people who mistreated them, cawing harshly and forming mobs upon seeing the face of their persecutor—even years later. My sister’s crow companions knew her when she had a different haircut or wore a hat or sunglasses. (via Audobon)

A food scientist says he would love to taste the rotting fish sauce from an abandoned factory

Take capelin, a small silvery fish in the smelt family. Now add salt. Then throw those two ingredients in 110 vats, each of them about 10 feet tall, and let them sit in a defunct factory for over two decades. The resulting stench might haunt an entire community, as it has the people of St. Mary’s, a coastal town of about 300 people in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. In 2019, one resident described the ritual of abandoning her home every summer, boarding up the windows and doors so the smell doesn’t permeate her belongings. The people of St. Mary’s have long fought for the fish sludge to be cleaned up; after an aborted attempt in 2016, that work finally began in earnest this week. There are 900,000 liters of fish sauce to remove — some of it just liquid, some of it with fish solids. I spoke with food scientist Bryan Quoc Le earlier this week. Given his background in chemistry and Vietnamese cuisine, he was the ideal expert to unpack this horrifying and possibly delicious situation. (via Defector)

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September 3, 2026

The co-pilot who bombed Hiroshima never got over it

Ask most people who flew the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb and you’ll get one name: Paul Tibbets. He’s the one who named the Enola Gay after his mother, the one who spent decades insisting he never lost a night’s sleep over Hiroshima, the one whose life has been written up in a bestselling autobiography and a dozen documentaries. Sitting next to him that morning was a co-pilot named Robert Lewis, a man who was actually supposed to be flying that plane as its commander, and whose reaction to what he’d just witnessed is one of the most quoted lines to come out of the entire mission. Almost nobody knows the rest of his story. Lewis wasn’t originally supposed to be the co-pilot of anything. He was the regular aircraft commander of the Superfortress 44-86292, the B-29 that would become the Enola Gay, and had flown it on its first six missions with his own hand-picked crew. (via Utterly Interesting)

Proof that Australian convict pirates hijacked a ship and sailed to Japan in 1830

An amateur historian has unearthed compelling evidence that the first Australian maritime foray into Japanese waters was by convict pirates on an audacious escape from Tasmania almost two centuries ago. Fresh translations of samurai accounts of a “barbarian” ship in 1830 give startling corroboration to a story modern scholars had long dismissed as convict fantasy: that a ragtag crew of criminals encountered a forbidden Japan at the height of its feudal isolation. The brig Cyprus was hijacked by convicts bound from Hobart to Macquarie Harbour in 1829, in a mutiny that took them all the way to China. Its maverick skipper was William Swallow, a onetime British cargo ship apprentice in the Napoleonic wars, who in a piracy trial in London the following year told of a samurai cannonball in Japan knocking a telescope from his hand. (via The Guardian)

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September 3, 2026

Yes, we should be very worried about the Hugging Face hack

About a month ago, I (and many others) wrote about an incident in which two AI models from OpenAI — one that has been released publicly, called Sol, and one that was still in testing mode with no assigned name — were asked to find the answers to a series of tests as part of something called the ExploitGym, which is a system that tests an AI model’s ability to find back doors, hacks and other “exploits” or software vulnerabilities. Instead of trying to figure out the answers on their own, however, the two AI engines conspired to find their way onto the internet (which they were not supposed to do) and then hacked into Hugging Face, an open-source database of AI-related info, where they got what they were looking for. In the piece I wrote after the incident was first reported, I asked whether we should be worried about the hack, and while I didn’t come up with a yes or no, there were definitely things that seemed worrisome. But now we have the benefit of two detailed reports on what really happened, and the correct answer seems to be unequivocally yes, we should be very worried!

One of the reports in question comes from METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research), a non-profit that monitors and evaluates the safety of AI models. A team of researchers spent a week onsite at OpenAI analyzing the Hugging Face hack — which was only possible with the help of other AI agents, because of the scale of what happened. A simple graphic at the beginning, illustrating a timeline of the events, looks cartoonish, and would be easy to dismiss were it not for the actual text on the items in that timeline. In a nutshell, it was not just a couple of models that decided to pursue the HuggingFace hack — it was what can only be described as a “swarm” of up to several thousand semi-independent agents, which were spawned in order to come up with ways of solving the ExploitGym problem. This swarm created and used an unauthorized and secret message board to coordinate the attack, with some agents given subsets of the main problem (i.e., how to get out on the internet and find a solution).

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