From Sherwood News: “Last year, observers detected an anomaly on the daily balance sheet of the US Treasury Department: a $7 billion estate- and gift-tax payment. John Ricco, now an analyst at Yale University’s Budget Lab, first spotted the huge receipt. “The degree by which this payment exceeds others in modern history — it’s not just, ‘Oh, this was the biggest one by 20%,’” Ricco said later. This was the biggest one by a factor of seven. Based on estimates of the average tax rate on estates, the February 2023 payment implied the death of someone possessing a fortune between $17.5 and $40 billion. Last year, I published a brief story about the statistical mystery and had nearly forgotten about it months later when I got a phone call. The voice on the other end of the line was calling about my mysterious billionaire.”
A climber’s remains have been found 100 years after he disappeared on Everest
From National Geographic: “When they spotted it, there was no mistaking what they were looking at: a boot melting out of the ice. As they drew closer, they could tell the cracked leather was old and worn, and the sole was studded and bracketed with the diamond-patterned steel hobnails of a bygone era of climbing. In September, on the broad expanse of the Central Rongbuk Glacier, below the north face of Mount Everest, a National Geographic documentary team that included the photographer and director Jimmy Chin, along with filmmakers and climbers Erich Roepke and Mark Fisher, examined the boot more closely. Inside, they discovered a foot, remains that they instantly recognized as belonging to Andrew Comyn Irvine, or Sandy, as he was known, who vanished 100 years ago with the famed climber George Mallory.”
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The director who made the movie Tár also helped invent Big League Chew gum
From Wikipedia: “Todd Field is an American filmmaker and actor. He is known for directing In the Bedroom, Little Children, and Tár, which were nominated for a combined fourteen Academy Awards. As a child in Portland, Field was a batboy for the Portland Mavericks, a single A independent minor league baseball team owned by Hollywood actor Bing Russell, father of Kurt Russell. Field and Mavericks pitching coach Rob Nelson created the first batch of Big League Chew in the Field family kitchen. In 1980, Nelson and former New York Yankees all-star Jim Bouton sold the idea to the Wrigley Company. Since that time more than a billion pouches have been sold worldwide.”
Hackers can send AI chatbots secret messages using invisible text
From Ars Technica: “What if there was a way to sneak malicious instructions into Claude, Copilot, or other top-name AI chatbots and get confidential data out of them by using characters large language models can recognize and their human users can’t? As it turns out, there is. The invisible characters, the result of a quirk in the Unicode text encoding standard, create an ideal covert channel that can make it easier for attackers to conceal malicious payloads fed into an LLM. The hidden text can similarly obfuscate the exfiltration of passwords, financial information, or other secrets out of the same AI-powered bots. Because the hidden text can be combined with normal text, users can unwittingly paste it into prompts or chatbot output.”
Fritz Haber invented modern agriculture and also chemical warfare
From the Smithsonian: “In 1918, Haber would be awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work in developing a method of synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen in the air—the process that enabled the production of fertilizer in quantities that revolutionized agriculture worldwide. For his efforts directing a team of scientists on the front lines in World War I, he would also become known as the father of chemical warfare. Haber discovered a way to convert the nitrogen gas in the earth’s atmosphere into a compound that could be used in fertilizer. Many believe that the Haber–Bosch process of synthesizing and manufacturing ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen was likely the most important technological innovation of the 20th century.”
Inside the nightly cleaning of the 9/11 memorial reflecting pools
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com