Month: July 2023

From Susanne Rust for the Los Angeles Times: “Since mid-June, an otter has been attacking and terrorizing surfers off the Santa Cruz coastline — in at least one case, stealing a board. In recent days, the attacks have grown increasingly aggressive. “At first, we were like, ‘Look how cute?’ But then it bit down on the board and chewed off a piece, and we were like. ‘What’s going on?’” said one surfer. He said the otter jumped on his board and began biting it. He tried to flip the board, but the otter got right back on — and started lunging at him. An adult sea otter can weigh 30 to 100 pounds, and reach 5 feet in length. The force of an otter’s bite has been estimated to be 615 pounds per square inch, while a wolverine’s can reach 1,720 pounds per square inch. The average person’s bite force is about 162 pounds per square inch.”

America suffered from an opioid crisis following the end of the civil war

From Livia Gershon for JSTOR Daily: “When veterans of the US Civil War returned home, one of the barriers many faced to reintegrating into civilian life was opiate dependency. Prior to the Civil War, American doctors prescribed opiates, including opium, morphine, and laudanum, for a vast range of conditions, from painful injuries to loose bowels to fever. But doctors, and many members of the general public, were well aware of the dangers of the drugs. An 1849 article in Scientific American described addicted men as “ready to sell wife and children, body and soul for the continuance of his wretched and transient delight.” But they had little choice but to offer opiates to soldiers who otherwise would have been useless due to pain, vomiting, diarrhea, or other debilitating conditions. Some soldiers also took opiates before battle to calm their nerves.”

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Continue reading “A renegade sea otter is terrorizing California surfers”

From Erik Wills for GQ magazine: “When he first alighted on the scene, Jason Belmonte – or Belmo, as he’s known to his fans – resembled an alien species: one that bowled with two hands. And not some granny shot, to be clear, but a kickass power move in which he uses two fingers (and no thumb) on his right hand, palms the front of the ball with his left, and then, on his approach, which is marked by a distinctive shuffle step, rocks the ball back before launching it with a liquid, athletic whip, his delivery producing an eye-popping hook, his ball striking the pins like a mini mortar explosion. Not everyone welcomed his arrival. He’s been called a cheat, told to go back to his native Australia; a PBA Hall of Famer once called the two-hander a “cancer to an already diseased sport.” He’s won 15 major titles, four more than anyone else in history, and seven Player of the Year awards, tied for the most all-time.”

The Stradivarius Murders

Brent Crane writes for Bloomberg: “On October 22 of 2021, Bernard von Bredow was found lifeless in his compound in Paraguay, sprawled beside his living room table. He’d been shot in the neck, and his body bore signs of torture. Fourteen-year-old Loreena was found dead in the bathtub. She’d been shot in the abdomen. Blood was everywhere—on the carpet, in the hall, in the kitchen. Belongings had been tossed about, maybe from a struggle, a search or both. Missing from the property, the local police announced later, were four specimens of the world’s most expensive musical instrument, the Stradivarius violin. The roughly 600 remaining violins built in the 17th and 18th centuries by the Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari can fetch as much as $20 million each.”

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Continue reading “The man who broke bowling”

From Dalya Alberge for The Guardian: “A 14th-century bureaucratic document requesting time off work for a civil servant has been identified as the only surviving handwriting of Geoffrey Chaucer, revered as the father of English literature. While it was known that the individual seeking a leave of absence was the author of The Canterbury Tales – during his 12-year employment as controller of the London Wool Quay – the application was assumed to have been made on his behalf by a clerk. Now a leading scholar argues that it was actually written by Chaucer and submitted by him for King Richard II’s approval. Prof Richard Green, a Canadian academic, said: “This would be the only known example of his hand.” From 1374 to 1386, Chaucer was the king’s controller, overseeing the payment of duty on exported and imported wool, among other goods.”

This Ukrainian group is archiving Russian soldiers’ graffiti

From Lisa Korneichuk for Hyperallergic: “After the liberation of the Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson regions, Ukrainians discovered graffiti and inscriptions left by Russian soldiers on the streets and inside the buildings they had occupied. The Ukrainian cultural nonprofit Mizhvukhamy is documenting these findings in Wall Evidence, an open archive created for future research and analysis of the Russian invasion. “These writings need to be documented before people wash them away,” said Anastasia Olexii, the archive’s project manager. Olexii stayed in Kyiv during the region’s occupation and visited nearby villages as soon as the Russians retreated in early April 2022. That’s when she and her colleagues, Mizhvukhamy’s founder Pavlo Haidai and philosopher Oleksandr Filonenko, discovered the various graffiti and decided to begin documenting them.”

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Continue reading “Geoffrey Chaucer wrote a note asking his boss for time off work”

Over the past few years, officials from a number of federal agencies have met regularly with senior executives from the major social platforms to talk about foreign troll armies, the fight against disinformation, and other areas of mutual interest. Last week, such discussions suddenly became illegal as a result of an injunction imposed by Terry Doughty, a federal judge in Louisiana, who ruled that they likely constitute an attempt by the government to coerce the social platforms, and as such a violation of the First Amendment. Doughty ordered officials across large parts of the US government to (at least temporarily) stop talking to tech companies about content moderation and removal. He also prohibited officials from “collaborating, coordinating, partnering, switchboarding, and/or jointly working with” certain academics who focus on social media.

In his 155-page, forty-five-thousand–word decision, Doughty, who was appointed by Donald Trump in 2017, wrote that the lawsuit that led to his decision—which was filed last year by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri—addressed no lesser stakes than “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” The attorneys general, Doughty said, had presented evidence of “a massive effort” by the White House to “suppress speech based on its content.” He went on to list the types of speech that the government had allegedly coerced the platforms into blocking, including the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the lab-leak theory of the origins of COVID-19, the efficacy of masks and lockdowns, the efficacy of COVID vaccines, the 2020 election, the security of voting by mail, “parody content,” negative posts about the economy, and negative posts about President Biden.

A Biden administration official said after the ruling that in talking to the platforms, the government has merely been involved in efforts to promote “responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security,” and that it never coerced anyone. Either way, the ruling quickly had an effect on such talks: last Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that the State Department had canceled a meeting with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, in which they had planned to discuss foreign influence campaigns. The next day, the Justice Department asked for Doughty’s injunction to be stayed, arguing that it was “both sweeping in scope and vague in its terms.” The government also characterized the injunction as internally contradictory: it prohibits officials from speaking publicly about social media posts, but at the same time assures the government that its officials are free to exercise their own right to free speech.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “The government talking to the platforms is a First Amendment minefield. A judge just blew it up”

From Lars Wegner for VG: “On 3 June 1995, a young woman is found dead on the bed in Room 2805 of the Oslo Plaza, shot through the forehead with a Browning 9 mm pistol. She checked in as Jennifer Fergate, but the name is false. Who is this stylish woman? Why are the labels removed from her clothes? Why is she carrying 34 rounds of ammunition? Why has no one reported her missing? In 2017, in collaboration with the Oslo police, VG makes a final attempt to learn the identity of the Plaza woman. What really happened in Room 2805? Fake name, clothing labels removed, and nothing at all in the room to indicate the young woman’s identity. No passport. No wallet, no money, no credit card. No handbag, driver’s license or keys. Not even toiletries or make-up.”

The Cold War’s most important hot dog stand

From Dan Lewis at Now I Know: “The hot dog stand in the picture was located in Arlington County, Virginia, embedded inside the U.S. Department of Defense’s headquarters, better known as the Pentagon. During the Cold War, planning operations happened inside the building, of course, but the Pentagon’s design has an outdoor section as well — a courtyard in the center of the facility. And toward the center of the courtyard was the hot dog stand in question. On a nice day — and Virginia has pretty good weather — many a Pentagon employee would go to the hot dog stand (and it served more than just hot dogs) for lunch. Which is what prompted the reported confusion. Reportedly, by using satellite imagery, the Soviets could see groups of U.S. military officers entering and exiting the hot dog stand at about the same time every day. They concluded that the stand was the entrance to an underground bunker.”

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Continue reading “A mysterious death at the Oslo Plaza Hotel baffles investigators”

Rachel Nuwer writes for the BBC: “In February 2020, Harriet de Wit, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago, was running an experiment on whether the drug MDMA increased the pleasantness of social touch when Mike Bremmer, de Wit’s research assistant, appeared at her office door. The latest participant in the double-blind trial, a man named Brendan, had filled out a questionnaire and written: “This experience has helped me sort out a debilitating personal issue. Google my name. I now know what I need to do.” They googled Brendan’s name, and up popped a disturbing revelation: until just a few months before, Brendan had been the leader of the US Midwest faction of Identity Evropa, a notorious white nationalist group also known as the American Identity Movement.”

This fighter pilot turned MIT computer science professor believed the universe is a computer

Alex Williams writes for the New York Times: “Edward Fredkin, who despite never having graduated from college became an influential professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a pioneer in artificial intelligence and a maverick theorist who championed the idea that the entire universe might function like one big computer, died on June 13 in Brookline, Mass. He was 88. After serving as a fighter pilot in the Air Force in the early 1950s, Professor Fredkin became a renowned, if unconventional, scientific thinker. He was a close friend and intellectual sparring partner of the celebrated physicist Richard Feynman and the computer scientist Marvin Minsky, a trailblazer in artificial intelligence. An autodidact who left college after a year, he nonetheless became a full professor of computer science at M.I.T. at 34.” (Bonus link: Here’s an interview with Fredkin from The Atlantic in 1988).

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Continue reading “A dose of MDMA transformed a notorious white supremacist”

From Kevin Dickinson at Big Think: “Ancient Akkadian is an early Semitic language that was the mother tongue of the Akkadian Empire, which arose around 2300 B.C. through the conquests of its founder, Sargon the Great. Hundreds of thousands — by some accounts more than a million — Akkadian texts have been discovered and today lie in museums and universities. Many have even been digitized online. Each one has the potential to teach us about the life, politics, and beliefs of the first civilizations, yet this knowledge remains locked behind the time and manpower necessary to translate them. To help change that, a multidisciplinary team of archaeologists and computer scientists has developed an artificial intelligence that can translate Akkadian almost instantly and unlock the historic record preserved in these 5,000-year-old tablets.”

The most accomplished man in Europe in the 18th century was a Black man

From Bri Michele at Medium: “Chevalier, based on a true story, traces the life of Joseph Bologne, an 18th century French nobleman. Joseph was the son of a wealthy plantation owner in the French Caribbean and an enslaved Senegalese woman. After some time, Joseph’s father came back to France, and brought Joseph and his mother back with him. The movie follows Joseph’s life from the time he arrives in France. It shows the racial challenges he faced in the private music academy his father enrolled him in — and how he persevered and overcame every single one of them. He became the most accomplished violinist and composer in all of France, rivaling Mozart himself. His accomplishments were so impressive that Queen Marie Antoinette bestowed on him the title of the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, making him part of her court.”

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Continue reading “New AI translates 5,000-year-old cuneiform tablets instantly”

Last Friday, Twitter suddenly started blocking anyone not logged into a Twitter account from seeing public tweets, reversing a feature that the platform had allowed since it launched in 2007. As The Verge reported, Twitter didn’t announce any policy change, and so it was initially unclear whether the block was intentional or just the latest in a series of technical glitches to have bedeviled the platform since Musk acquired it last year. Musk eventually tweeted that the change was a “temporary emergency measure” necessitated by what he described as the rampant “scraping,” or copying, of tweets by third parties in an act that he called “data pillaging.” At time of writing, the restriction appeared to have been lifted, according to Search Engine Roundtable. The group chats breathed a sigh of relief.

This wasn’t the end of the Twitter drama, however. On Saturday, Musk announced that logged-in users would also face restrictions when viewing tweets, in the form of a “rate limit” that would be determined based on their account status. Musk said that unverified users—in other words, anyone who hasn’t paid eight dollars a month for a subscription to the Twitter Blue service, or been awarded verified status by virtue of being an advertiser or celebrity—would be able to see a maximum of six hundred posts per day; verified accounts would be capped at six thousand. Musk later added that, in the near future, the rate limits would increase to eight hundred and eight thousand tweets per day for unverified and verified users, respectively, with new unverified accounts capped at four hundred. 

As The Verge noted, Musk blamed the scraping of Twitter, in part, on companies that are trying to harvest data to train artificial-intelligence engines, but he didn’t mention that the incident might have been driven, at least in part, by his own decisions. Twitter recently imposed fees for access to its software API, which allows third-party services to pull tweets to display in their apps. And, since taking over the company, Musk has laid off more than three quarters of its staff, many of whom were involved in maintaining its technical infrastructure. Last November, an unnamed Twitter engineer told the MIT Technology Review that after watching the layoffs at the company, he was convinced that, in the future, “things will be broken more often [and] things will be broken for longer periods of time.” In March, a change by a single engineer led to an outage; two months later, the much-hyped live launch of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign via the Twitter Spaces feature was crippled by glitches. There have been other such examples.

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

Continue reading “Twitter throttles tweets as Meta launches a competitor”

Drik Schulze-Makuch writes for Big Think: “In the mid-1970s, NASA sent two Viking landers to the surface of Mars equipped with instruments that conducted the only life detection experiments ever conducted on another planet. At the time of those landings, scientists had very little understanding of the Martian environment. Since Earth is a water planet, it seemed reasonable that adding water might coax life to show itself in the extremely dry Martian environment. In hindsight, it is possible that approach was too much of a good thing. For microbes that live within salt rocks, pouring water over them might overwhelm them. In technical terms, we would say that we were hyperhydrating them, but in simple terms, it would be more like drowning them.”

What we think of as exercise now used to literally be torture

From Dan Lewis at Now I Know: “The word ‘treadmill’ first entered the English language in 1822, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. Most exercise equipment (think ‘bike’ or ‘weights’ or ‘jump rope’) describes either how to use the equipment or what makes the item useful for a workout. The word ‘treadmill’ has the ‘tread’ part, signaling that it’s used for walking, but it also has the ‘mill’ part, which suggests that it’s used for grinding something down. And while exercise can definitely be a grind, that saying wasn’t one back in the early 1800s. The early treadmills were a lot like sawmills or windmills or millstones, and the first treadmills weren’t found at your local gym — they were found in prisons. The people on them were inmates, and this was part of their sentence.”

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Continue reading “We may have accidentally killed whatever life there was on Mars”

From Bryan Burrough at Texas Monthly magazine: “They found her naked body 36 years ago now, her head sunk into a bathtub full of black water, hands tied behind her with a tank top. She had been a quiet, shy woman, five foot seven, with lustrous brown hair cascading past her shoulders and an easy smile that friends didn’t see as much as they once had. Susan was thirty years old and living alone that summer, left by a biker-ish husband who had fled the state, waiting for her divorce to go through. She was a local girl, a little lonely, a little sad, trying hard to put her life back in order. When she missed her shift at the sandpaper factory two days running, a supervisor called her father, Joe Atkins.”

Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert were bitter rivals, and then they both got cancer

From Sally Jenkins at the New York Times: “They have known each other for 50 years now, outlasting most marriages. Aside from blood kin, Navratilova points out, “I’ve known Chris longer than anybody else in my life, and so it is for her.” Lately, they have never been closer — a fact they refuse to cheapen with sentimentality. “It’s been up and down, the friendship,” Evert says. At the ages of 68 and 66, respectively, Evert and Navratilova have found themselves more intertwined than ever, by an unwelcome factor. You want to meet an opponent who draws you nearer in mutual understanding? Try having cancer at the same time. “It was like, are you kidding me?” Evert says.”

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Continue reading “Everyone in town thought they knew who killed Susan Woods”

From Tara Isabella Burton for the Smithsonian magazine: “In the autumn of 1878, Thomas Alva Edison had a problem. He hadn’t invented the light bulb—yet. Or, to put it more precisely, he had invented a light bulb, but he couldn’t keep it lit for more than a few minutes at a time. He still hadn’t figured out how to regulate the temperature of the light bulb’s internal filament, meaning the incandescent bulb would immediately overheat, and the filament would promptly melt down. Unfortunately, Edison was running out of time. All over North America and Europe, inventors like him were working on—and patenting—their own electric projects. Sooner or later, somebody would wind up harnessing electricity. Two Canadians, Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans, had already patented an inefficient design four years before.”

The Sicilian mafia got its start controlling the market for oranges and lemons

From research by Arcangelo Dimico, Alessia Isopi and Ola Olsson: “Since its first appearance in the late 1800s, the reasons behind the rise of the Sicilian mafia have remained a puzzle. We argue that the mafia arose as a response to an exogenous shock in the demand for oranges and lemons, following Lind’s discovery in the late eighteenth century that citrus fruits cured scurvy. More specifically, we claim that mafia appeared in locations where producers made high profits from citrus production for export. Operating in an environment with a weak rule of law, the mafia protected citrus production from predation and acted as intermediaries between producers and exporters. Using original data from a parliamentary inquiry in 1881–1886 on Sicilian towns, the Damiani Inquiry.”

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Continue reading “How Edison pretended that he had invented the light bulb”