Month: December 2022

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

As a teenager, Judith Love Cohen went to a guidance counselor to talk about her future and professed her deep love of math. But the counselor had other advice. She said: “I think you ought to go to a nice finishing school and learn to be a lady.” Instead, Cohen pursued her dreams. She studied engineering at USC and later helped design the program that saved the Apollo 13 astronauts. In retirement, Cohen produced books encouraging young girls to follow in her footsteps. Although her son, Jack Black, is certainly the most famous of the family, his mother has a remarkable story all her own.

Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead mansion sells, but the tenants refuse to leave

The Cotswold mansion where Evelyn Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited has sold at auction for £3.16m despite buyers being warned that sitting tenants – who are paying a weekly rent of £5 a week – are refusing to leave the property. Piers Court, at Stinchcombe, a village about halfway between Bristol and Cheltenham, was sold to an unnamed bidder in an online auction on Thursday after the owner defaulted on a loan secured against the eight-bedroom, six-bathroom property. The sale went ahead despite the tenants, who described themselves as “Evelyn Waugh superfans”, refusing to vacate the property which they rent for just £250 a year in a deal with its previous owner, Jason Blain, a former BBC executive who bought the property for £2.9m in 2019.

Continue reading “How Jack Black’s mother helped save NASA’s Apollo 13 mission”

I haven’t written much about Twitter here, because it’s exhausting even trying to keep up with what’s happening, to be quite honest. I suspected that Elon’s ownership might be a train wreck, but I didn’t expect what happened — a train wreck in which each car of the train is a dumpster, and they are all on fire. And Elon is standing on top of the train, laughing maniacally and pouring gasoline everywhere. Is he a chaos agent, like Donald Trump, where he just enjoys watching things burn? Perhaps. Or it’s possible that he — like a number of tech bros, including Marc Andreessen — believes that everything, including journalism and morality, needs to be torn down and rebuilt by technology.

An Elon fanboy scoffed at criticism of his handling of Twitter recently, and said it would be easy as pie for a guy who puts rockets into space, etc. But the reality is that putting rockets into space or building an electric car is light-years easier than running a social network like Twitter, especially if you choose to rewrite the rules of public behavior and reinvent moderation at the same time as you are trying to convert the platform from advertising to subscription revenue. It’s not that it’s hard technically, but it involves all kinds of tradeoffs, and all of these have to do with human beings, the most complex mechanisms ever.

Continue reading “Has Twitter reached a turning point now that Elon has banned several journalists?”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

The Artemis I mission, an unmanned flight to the moon and back, just returned with some spectacular photos. The mission was a test to see whether NASA could get a capsule to the moon and back, before the space program tries to send astronauts back there. As veteran blogger Jason Kottke points out, visual imaging has been an integral part of even the earliest space missions — strap a camera to a spacecraft, let the people see what space looks like, and they will be inspired. And the photographs returned by Artemis I’s Orion spacecraft are certainly inspirational. So Jason picked his favorites, and I agree they are stunning.

The winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Prize for terrible writing

If you’ve never experienced the Bulwer-Lytton Ficton Contest, you are in for a real treat. As the website says, it’s the place where www stands for wretched writers welcome. Here’s the grand prize winner: “I knew she was trouble the second she walked into my 24-hour deli, laundromat, and detective agency, and after dropping a load of unmentionables in one of the heavy-duty machines (a mistake that would soon turn deadly) she turned to me, asking for two things: find her missing husband and make her a salami on rye with spicy mustard, breaking into tears when I told her I couldn’t help—I was fresh out of salami.”

Continue reading “The best images from NASA’s mission to the moon”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

It gives me great pleasure to link to this excellent piece on the underlying weirdness of Canada’s national creature, the beaver. “There is an element of the sacred in the beaver, if only in its deep weirdness. One million years ago, beavers the size of bears roamed North America. They pose an evolutionary puzzle, like the platypus, or birds, which share some DNA with dinosaurs. When they dive, they seem more like marine mammals than terrestrial species, more seal than rodent. Their dexterous forepaws look startlingly human with their five nimble fingers and naked palms. They groom their lustrous fur with catlike fastidiousness. Their mammalian beauty ends abruptly in the gooselike hind feet, each as wide as the beaver’s head. The feet are followed by a reptilian tail, which, it has been observed, looks like the result of some terrible accident, run over by a tractor tire, the treads leaving a pattern of indentations that resemble scales.”

How three women set a new climbing record

Sasha DiGiulian writes about how she and her team conquered a 16-metre big wall called Rayu, in northern Spain. “During dinner, the bartender told us that a local climber we’d been coordinating with wagered we’d need to be rescued by helicopter from the mountain within the first week of our expedition. ‘The mountain is very dangerous,’ the local climber said. ‘Maybe it would be a good idea for you to try the easier routes on the left side.’ Men have underestimated my climbing abilities for as long as I can remember. I signed my first sponsorship deal when I was 12 years old, a decade and a half ago, and I’ve been on enough trips since to anticipate that some guy is always going to assume he knows more than me, or suggest an easier climb. I’ve learned to tune it out. Yet something felt different in Posada de Valdeón.”

Continue reading “Beavers: Part bear, part bird, part monkey, part lizard”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Scientists studying fusion energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced on Tuesday that they had crossed a long-awaited milestone in reproducing the power of the sun in a laboratory. That sparked public excitement as scientists have for decades talked about how fusion, the nuclear reaction that makes stars shine, could provide a future source of bountiful energy. The result announced on Tuesday is the first fusion reaction in a laboratory setting that actually produced more energy than it took to start the reaction. “This is such a wonderful example of a possibility realized, a scientific milestone achieved, and a road ahead to the possibilities for clean energy,” said Arati Prabhakar, the White House science adviser.

My secret life as a teenaged bulletin board system operator

Benj Edwards recalls how he started a BBS – an online bulletin board system – when he was just 11 years old, and some of the lessons that he learned while running it for the next 30 years: “Thirty years ago last week, my BBS came online for the first time,” he writes. “I was only 11 years old, working from my dad’s Tandy 1800HD laptop and a 2400 baud modem. The Cave BBS soon grew into a bustling 24-hour system with over 1,000 users. After a seven-year pause between 1998 and 2005, I’ve been running it again ever since. Here’s the story of how it started and the challenges I faced along the way.”

Continue reading “Scientists report nuclear fusion breakthrough”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Sarah Marshall asks why we are so fascinated with serial killers: “How are we even to know that Samuel Little had a photographic memory if almost all the women in his drawings look so much like one another? Why did the seventy-nine-year-old man who happened to be the most prolific murderer in American history also happen to have one of the most impressive memories in American history? And if you’ve committed just a handful of murders—an unremarkable number, one that won’t even get you on the leaderboard—then wouldn’t it be, well, not a terrible idea to confess to a few dozen more? What if it makes you into something special, and helps the police close unsolved cases all over the country, and makes a great story for the people on TV, who will all want to talk to you now?”

Why did the Roman Baths disappear?

Bathing in massive public baths was once a hallmark of what it meant to be Roman. But in the late Roman Empire, many of these baths closed to the public or were turned into other structures altogether. New research by Jordan Pickett, an archaeologist and environmental historian at the University of Georgia, reveals that a combination of social, financial, and environmental challenges contributed to the decline of large public bathing complexes in Rome and elsewhere in the Empire. While popular myths for the disappearance of Roman bathing once focused on Christian opposition to nudity, his research focuses on social and environmental history as pivotal ways for understanding the decline in large-scale bathing in the late Roman Empire.

Continue reading “The serial-killer media industrial complex”

Fifty years ago this week, Apollo 17 landed on the moon — the last time human beings walked on our planet’s satellite. With Gene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt, and Ron Evans on board, this was NASA’s sixth and final spaceflight to the lunar surface.

Cernan and Schmitt spent three days on the Moon, setting records for the longest distance traversed in their rover—7.6 km—and the amount of lunar rocks returned. But today, what the mission is perhaps most remembered for is the fact that it was the last time humans landed on the Moon.

The photo of the lunar rover is from a book called Apollo Remastered, by a British photographer named Andy Saunders.

Everyone knows that there are a wide variety of citrus fruits, including limes, lemons, oranges, grapefruit, etc. But all of the citrus fruits we know were developed from just a few that occur in the wild, including citron, pomelo, and mandarin. The variety of citrus fruits we encounter at the grocery store in the winter months are mostly hybridized from those species and their descendants.

Citron (Citrus medica) is the citrus fruit that gave “citrus” its name. Records of the fruit go back thousands of years in Mesopotamia, although its origin may be India or Southeast Asia. Citron is more temperature-sensitive than other commercial citrus grown in the U.S. but flourishes in South America and the coastal areas of the Mediterranean. Americans are mostly familiar with citron as a candied ingredient in fruitcake, made from the fruit’s peel.

Continue reading “All citrus fruits are derived from three original fruits”

By now, there have been so many crypto scams and even outright fraud — like the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX and its sister trading company, Alameda — that it’s tempting to write all of cryptocurrency and the blockchain off as a snakepit of potential fraud waiting to happen. But Scott Alexander, who writes at Astral Codex Ten (an anagram of his name) says there are a few reasons why he doesn’t think we should write it off completely:

• Crypto is full of extremely clear use cases, which it already succeeds at very well, including the use of cryptocurrencies in countries such as Venezuela, Ukraine, and Vietnam:

“Vietnam uses crypto because it’s terrible at banks. 69% of Vietnamese have no bank access, the second highest in the world,” Alexander says. “I’m not sure why; articles play up rural poverty, but many nations have more rural poor than Vietnam. There’s a history of the government forcing banks to make terrible loans, and then those banks collapsing; maybe this destroyed public trust? In any case, between banklessness and remittances (eg from Vietnamese-Americans), Vietnam leads the world in crypto use.”

• Big crypto projects are rarely scams:

“I searched for articles called things like The Top Crypto Projects Of 20XX, and then I checked how many of those projects, years later, had turned out to be scams. I chose four articles for this experiment, which bBetween them described 54 different crypto projects. Looking back at these from our position in late 2022, as best I can tell zero of them have been revealed to be outright rug-pull-style scams.

A few fizzled out for lack of interest, like any business can. Two of the ten stablecoins lost their pegs, going to 70 – 80 cents instead of the expected $1¹. One exchange got in trouble for money laundering, although this didn’t negatively affect users. But overall this doesn’t seem worse than any other industry. If you split $1000 and invested it equally in all the top crypto projects of 2015, you would now have $25,400.”

• Crypto is valuable insurance against authoritarianism:

“Freedom of speech is hollow if you can’t pay the print costs for your magazine. Freedom of religion is hollow if you can’t pay the rent on your church. The freedom to protest is hollow if you can’t pay bus fare to the protest site. If the government hates Islam, it’s hard from a legal and PR perspective to imprison imams or ban the Koran. But it’s easy to subtly convey to banks that it will regulate them out of existence unless they ban transactions to imams, or to any bookstores that carry Korans. And this has pretty much the same effect. The most obvious example of this is the way Paypal bans sex workers

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

After decades of what the World Bank has called “colossal failures,” and two years of hyperinflation, Lebanon’s state-owned power supplier has collapsed, and little electricity is generated or delivered in most of the country. Except, that is, in the Chouf. Here, as part of a mandate which also includes irrigation, drinking water provision, and local economic development around its namesake river, the local river authority runs three antiquated hydro-power stations. These provide 20 hours of electricity per day to around 200 villages in the vicinity. That has made the Chouf an anomaly in an otherwise electricity-starved Lebanon — and a veritable magnet for crypto miners.

Behind the scenes at a used bookstore

Shaun Bythell writes about his experiences as a used bookseller: “There are, essentially, four or five ways people bring books to the shop. The most common is in cardboard boxes, and generally this means of conveyance will contain the best books, and in the best condition. Then there is the plastic laundry basket, which usually means that the books are the relics of a dead great-aunt’s house, from which the best have been extracted and the laundry basket is the only means of transporting the books. Finally, there’s the bundled and tied with garden string category. That’s the kind of thing you never want to see as a bookseller, particularly after the tightly pulled string has damaged the covers.

Continue reading “Lebanon’s dams power a community of crypto miners”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

On the side of Kulen Mountain, where looters stole a sandstone sculpture depicting Prajnaparamita, the goddess of transcendent wisdom. The statue — 59 inches high, 15 inches wide — is missing one arm, the other chopped off at the elbow. For more than two decades, this stolen relic sat more than 8,000 miles away in the Denver Art Museum’s collection, its journey marked by falsified documents, an elaborate laundering scheme and the assistance of a Colorado woman referred to in court records only as “The Scholar.” An investigation showed that a respected Denver Art Museum consultant named Emma Bunker helped a man accused of being one of the world’s most prolific art smugglers flourish for decades, legitimizing his looted collection through her work.

The obscure German nobleman behind the attempt to overthrow the government

The Waidmannsheil hunting lodge sits on a hill on a bend of the Saale River in the eastern German state of Thuringia. It belongs to the Reussens, a former noble family who ruled the area for 800 years. The present lord of the manor is Henry XIII. Prince Reuss, an entrepreneur who established himself in Frankfurt as a real estate mogul. Some residents of the small town had been wondering for some time what the 71-year-old was up to. Since Wednesday, it seems clear what was going on behind the massive walls. Early that morning, the GSG9, a special German police force, moved in to root out a suspected right-wing extremist terror cell. It is believed to include at least 25 members and helpers, and 29 other men and women are also under investigation.

Continue reading “The woman who helped run a global art smuggling operation”

There’s a whole Wikipedia page devoted to the topic of the numbering of the 21 or so different popes who have been named John something, with the last one being John XXIII, who reigned (or whatever they call it) from 1958 to 1963. As the article explains: “Although there have been twenty-one legitimate popes named John, the numbering has reached John XXIII because of two clerical errors that were introduced in the Middle Ages: first, antipope John XVI was kept in the numbering sequence instead of being removed; then, the number XX was skipped because pope John XXI counted John XIV twice.”

Someone created a map that positions major European cities at the same latitude as they would be if they were in North America, and it’s kind of fascinating. I’m probably not the best person to assess this kind of thing, because I am terrible at geography, but I had no idea that Paris is actually quite a significant distance north of Toronto latitude-wise, or that Toronto and Florence are about the same latitude. Lisbon and Athens are at about the same latitude as northern California and Tripoli is around San Francisco.

Note: This was originally published at the Columbia Journalism Review website, where I am the chief digital writer

In March of 2019, the company now known as Meta announced the Facebook Journalism Project, a plan to spend $300 million over three years “supporting local journalists and newsrooms with their newsgathering needs in the immediate future, and helping local news organizations build sustainable business models.” At an event in Denver that same month, called the Accelerate: Local Media Summit, Facebook’s news partnerships team insisted their commitment to helping journalism was genuine, and that this commitment was shared at the highest levels of the company, including the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. “This is something Mark cares about,” one staffer said.

If that was true, it doesn’t seem to be the case any more, as Meta has spent the past year cutting funding for and downsizing most of its journalism efforts. Last month, it laid off a number of the staffers in charge of its journalism programs, including several who were in charge of local news partnerships, as well as Meta’s director of international news partnerships, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Campbell Brown, who was previously in charge of news partnerships for Meta, was recently moved into a role handling partnerships with everyone from entertainment companies to sports teams.

In June, the Wall Street Journal said Meta was “reconsidering” its payments to publishers as part of the Facebook News program, which featured news stories from certain outlets in a special News tab. The company reportedly paid annual fees of more than $15 million to the Washington Post, just over $20 million to the New York Times, and more than $10 million to The Journal. Those payments have since been halted and are not expected to resume.

Continue reading “Facebook falls out of love with journalism”