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Albert Einstein had his own romance with an alleged Soviet spy named Margarita Konenkova, who was reportedly after inside information on the Manhattan Project. While there are conflicting accounts of the specifics, Einstein met Konenkova a year before his wife Elsa passed away in 1936. She was married to the Russian sculptor Sergei Konenkov, who was crafting a bust of the renowned physicist. In the years that followed his wife’s death, Einstein struck up a relationship with her. The affair didn’t come to light until half a century later when letters he penned from 1944 to 1946 documenting their tryst came to light. In them, Einstein appears to be deeply in love, sending a sketch of the “nest” (a cozy study) where the two enjoyed romantic liaisons. The smitten physicist even came up with a portmanteau couple name to refer to themselves: “Almar.” Of course, as with all Cold War spycraft, whether or not this was a bona fide honeypot operation is somewhat hazy. (via Nautilus)

He thinks Malaysia’s Flight 370 was teleported and thousands of people believe him

On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it disappeared from radar over the Indian Ocean, sparking the most expensive search in aviation history, wall-to-wall global news coverage, and even rare public protests within China. The mystery captured the hearts and minds of millions of people across the world, but there was no closure or catharsis for the families of those missing. In an age of seemingly ubiquitous satellite coverage, the plane’s final resting place — and that of the 239 people onboard — remains an open question. But a man named Ashton Forbes believes he has the answer: The U.S. military teleported the passenger jet in a show of might against China. Armed with a pair of dramatic videos that appear to show the aircraft vanishing, Forbes has spent the past three years posting relentlessly on X and YouTube, trying to convince everyone that the military used orb-like vessels to instantaneously teleport MH370 out of the sky. On its face, his theory appears impossible. So why do so many people believe him? (via Rolling Stone)

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The day before the biggest annual social event on his calendar, Senior Constable and Officer-in-Charge Neale McShane leans against the front desk of the Birdsville Police Station, holding court as a stream of incoming tourists drop by. First, two fresh-faced, off-duty police officers from Emerald, a 16-hour drive northeast, introduce themselves and shake his hand.  The Birdsville posting is a one-officer station — a relative rarity in a profession built on partnerships — and McShane has lived at the neighboring house for almost a decade, through dust storms and floods, through joy and tedium, through good health and bad. On Nov. 21, the day of his 60th birthday, his 40-year career will end, per conditions of the Queensland Police Service, which mandate compulsory retirement at this age. He will retire as the longest-serving officer at Australia’s most isolated outpost, having spent 10 years policing a jurisdiction that covers about 93,000 square miles — roughly equivalent to the entirety of the United Kingdom being nuked, then being in charge of a few dozen survivors. (via BuzzFeed News)

The man who runs Google’s DeepMind AI designed a popular MS-DOS game when he was 16

Bullfrog Productions is a beloved name, not only among us retro gaming enthusiasts: it’s a studio whose creativity, novelty and British approach to humour will forever live on aside the very best that gaming has to offer. And what’s interesting is the variety on show: there’s a ‘favourite’ Bullfrog game for everyone, from the RTS of Populous or the dark future of Syndicate to its comedic god games Dungeon Keeper or Theme Hospital. “I was pretty young at the time. I started working at Bullfrog when I was 16, and was immediately working on Theme Park actually,” says Demis Hassabis, the brain behind Theme Park and the simulation that powered it. Considered to be something of a child prodigy, Demis had two main passions: chess and playing and programming videogames. That all began in earnest with Theme Park. “Funnily enough I wasn’t sure I wanted to work on it,” he laughs, “because I was keen to make a game like Syndicate, Populous, Powermonger and the other sort of earlier games.” (via PocketMags)

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If I was still writing for a news website, the way I did for about two decades or so, I would be leading with the Jensen Huang-Chinese honeypot story, no question about it. This club has everything: a company that is worth more than four trillion dollars; a gazillionaire CEO who is a genius but also wears a leather jacket all the time; viral memes in which the Nvidia CEO and his Chinese girlfriend/spy are caught on camera at a concert, or Jensen as Anakin Skywalker with Natalie Portman saying “Chinese models? You mean DeepSeek and Kimi, right?” Not to mention the frisson of Bond-style international intrigue. But I’m not writing about that. For one thing, there are literally thousands of people doing that in a variety of ways, some (possibly) even better than I would. And there is something much more interesting — and, I think, potentially world-changing — than an affair between a Chinese tech staffer and a multi-billionaire. And I’m talking, of course, about the race towards AGI or artificial general intelligence.

It seems like just yesterday that this debate — how close we are to AI duplicating or surpassing human intelligence in most or even all areas — was a theoretical thing of interest only to those doing AI research at a handful of labs, or to philosophy grads debating over a few beers. Since Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s models “frontier” models have started getting frighteningly capable, the interest group has expanded exponentially. But the debate continues: do we just have AI agents that can collaborate in the thousands through a secret chat server to gain access to the internet and hack a company? Or do we have AI models that are effectively doing things that only human beings could do prior to the development of those models? Anthropic said in May that Claude was generating more than 80 percent of its own codebase. OpenAI’s model solved a Millennium Prize problem (although there was some controversy). AI has since disproven the Exponential Time Hypothesis, a key feature of much scientific research.

So what? Most of us are not mathematicians (I definitely am not). This is the kind of thing that encourages “normal” people — to dismiss the entire field as something only nerds might be interested in, with the main controversies being why data servers use up so much water (which they really don’t, at least not compared to golf courses). The idea that AI might become not just broadly important but potentially extremely dangerous — and that this might happen quickly — is dismissed as nerd fantasies and/or marketing for AI companies (if the idea is even considered at all). If you need a primer for any of this kind of skepticism, you can read about it in a number of prominent places. One thing you might notice, however, is that the skepticism inevitably comes from people who aren’t working on frontier models, and when you read about those who are doing this, they are either optimistic or plain old terrified. Some have even quit their jobs because they are concerned about the risks.

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“Winter is our busy season,” Lucy tells me apologetically, explaining why her co-workers are reluctant to commit to interviews. It never occurred to me that morticians would be slammed in Q1, though in retrospect the reason is obvious—pneumonia, influenza, and now COVID-19 return each year. I met Lucy at a Halloween party in 2023. Dressed as a pregnant Mia Farrow from Rosemary’s Baby, she blended seamlessly into the crowd of disaffected twentysomethings—until she mentioned that she was an embalming apprentice. Once I realized this was not just glib seasonal humor, our small talk quickly tipped into big talk: ghosts, rigor mortis, sin-eaters, you name it. Beyond the hair-raising anecdotes, what surprised me most was that nearly all of Lucy’s co-workers and former mortuary classmates are women, specifically young women in their twenties and thirties. “There were only three guys in our class and one of them was a trans man. There were a lot of queer people,” she explains. (via the LA Review of Books)

Why doctors in Thailand fear a popular superstition related to Kentucky Fried Chicken

Thanat Tantinam, a colorectal surgeon in Thailand, knows a lot of things from his medical training, like the ins and outs of the human digestive system, or bowel cancer rates. But also: Never eat Kentucky Fried Chicken at work. Since he was a medical student, around a decade ago, the American fast food franchise has been the subject of an odd superstition among Thai doctors, many of whom believe that eating its chicken at work will lead to intolerably busy shifts. “It’s a serious superstition in some hospitals,” said Dr. Thanat, 35. “Your colleagues might be mad if you bring KFC.” He recently tested this theory. Between 2023 and 2024, he and several co-workers at Phatthalung Hospital in southern Thailand, his employer at the time, conducted a randomized control trial of 345 surgical shifts, comparing metrics like case load or estimated blood loss in patients from three groups of surgeons: a group that ate KFC, another that got food from a local brand named Five Star Chicken, and one that ate nothing. (via the NYT)

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British author Roald Dahl had enough adventures to last several lifetimes before he found his calling writing children’s books. It all started during World War II when Dahl left his oil industry job in Tanzania to enlist in the Royal Air Force in 1939. Despite measuring well over six feet, which made it difficult for him to fit into a cockpit, he became a fighter pilot. But on his first excursion he crashed in the Libyan desert. Suffering from increasingly painful headaches and occasional blackouts linked to his earlier injuries, he was deemed unfit to fly. Dahl could be charming, which won him invitations to dinners and cocktail parties. When Dahl was invited to visit Hyde Park with President Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, he took notes. Among his other notable friends and acquaintances were Vice President Henry Wallace and then-Senator Harry Truman. Dahl also had numerous affairs, including with Clare Boothe Luce. (via Biography.com)

The longest surviving Roman inscription is a 2,000-word homage from a man to his wife

The longest Roman inscription that remains visible is a funerary eulogy (laudatio funebris) that was carved into marble around the late 1st century BCE by an elite Roman husband mourning his wife of 40 years, Originally in two long columns, the first of which is lost, but most of the second survives in four fragments. The speech highlights how the wife displayed courage and loyalty during the Triumviral proscriptions of the late Roman Republic: She avenged the murder of her parents after they were killed in the chaos; she legally defended her family’s property and her father’s will against coercion; she sent money, jewelry, and provisions to her husband while he was in political exile; she personally interceded with powerful figures like Marcus Lepidus and Caesar Augustus to secure her husband’s pardon and safe return, and she defended their home in Rome when a gang attempted to plunder it. (via Oxford Academic)

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While some Americans may recall that the US’s largest state, Alaska, was part of Russia for nearly 70 years, the Russian Empire’s only permanent overseas colony, known as Russian America, also extended into California from 1812-1842. In fact, Russians settled in California decades before newly independent Americans did. Innovative and surprisingly cosmopolitan, Fort Ross (short for Rossiya, meaning “Russia”) was intended to be a breadbasket for Russia’s struggling Alaskan settlements, but it also became the source of hotly debated plans for Russian expansion across North America. As European powers expanded west in the 1500s and 1600s, Russia expanded east. By the 1640s, Russian fur traders and mercenaries had swept their way across Siberia to reach the Pacific coast. In April 1806, with his colony stalked by starvation and his crew decimated by scurvy, Russian-American Company director Nikolai Rezanov steered the prow of his ship, the Juno, into San Francisco Bay. (via the BBC)

Just Room Enough Island is well-named since there is barely enough room for a tiny house

Just Room Enough Island, also known as Just Enough Room Island or Hub Island, is an island located in the Thousand Islands chain, in New York, United States. The island is known for being the smallest inhabited island in the world, which appears to be around 3,300 square feet (310 m²), or about one-thirteenth of an acre. Purchased by the Sizeland family in the 1950s, the island has a house, a tree, shrubs, and a small beach. The island was bought in the 1950s by the Sizeland family, who wanted a holiday getaway and built a house there. Because of the island’s small size, in 2010, The Washington Post stated, “One misstep and you’re swimming”. Bishop Rock was formerly the smallest inhabited island but lost its title in 1992 when the lighthouse became automated and hence had no need for human presence. (On a personal note, I saw some similar tiny islands when I paddled my kayak across the Canada-US border) (via Wikipedia)

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The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: A Narrative Study of Three Lost Men is an American book-length psychiatric case study by Milton Rokeach, concerning his experiment on a group of three males with paranoid schizophrenia at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan, United States. The book details the interactions of the three patients — Clyde Benson, Joseph Cassel, and Leon Gabor — each of whom believed himself to be Jesus Christ. Rokeach got the idea from an article in Harper’s Magazine describing two women who both believed they were the Virgin Mary. After being assigned as psychiatric hospital roommates, one of the women recovered from her delusion and was discharged. Rokeach brought together three men who each claimed to be Jesus Christ and confronted them with one another’s conflicting claims, but he did not, as he had hoped, provoke any lessening of the patients’ delusions. (via Wikipedia)

An Italian chef in Australia was fired because he refused to put pineapple on a pizza

An Italian chef sacked from a Brisbane restaurant had refused to put pineapple on a pizza because it was an “insult to his culture”. Davide Tamburella was fired from La Costa restaurant in May, a fortnight after a meeting with management who had a string of complaints about the chef’s behaviour. Among them were Tamburella’s refusal to provide ham and pineapple pizza for guests at a function. At the time, the chef had stated that any direction from management “need not be followed when it is offensive to his culture”. The details came to light after the chef went to Australia’s Fair Work Commission claiming he had been unfairly dismissed. The commission noted that Tamburella’s refusal to put pineapple on the pizzas was because “he considers, as an Italian, that putting pineapple on a pizza is an insult to his culture”. It also noted that it was the third time Tamburella had refused to use the fruit on pizzas in the past four years. (via the BBC)

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