Month: October 2024

From the BBC: “The world’s longest treasure hunt appears to have come to an end, after an announcement in France that a buried statuette of a golden owl has finally been unearthed – after 31 years. The message was posted by Michel Becker, who illustrated the original Chouette d’Or (golden owl) book and sculpted the buried statuette in 1993. No further information about the site or the finder was available and Mr Becker was not contactable by telephone. Tens of thousands of people have taken part in the search, which has spawned a huge secondary literature in books and Internet sites. They have all been following 11 complicated puzzles set out in the first book by its creator, Max Valentin. When he died in 2009, Mr Becker took over the operation. A documentary on the treasure hunt said earlier this year that the value of the owl is estimated to be €150,000.”

Einstein invented a refrigerator with no moving parts that ran on butane

From Wikipedia: “From 1926 until 1934 Einstein and Szilárd collaborated on ways to improve home refrigeration technology. The two were motivated by contemporary newspaper reports of a Berlin family who had been killed when a seal in their refrigerator failed and leaked toxic fumes into their home. Einstein and Szilárd proposed that a device without moving parts would eliminate the potential for seal failure, and explored practical applications for different refrigeration cycles. Einstein had worked in the Swiss Patent Office, and used his experience to apply for valid patents for their inventions in several countries. The refrigerator was less efficient than existing appliances, although having no moving parts made it more reliable; the introduction of Freon made it even less attractive commercially and the Great Depression dried up funding.”

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Continue reading “The 30-year hunt for the Golden Owl treasure is finally over”

Over the past few years, it ‘s been hard to avoid the conclusion that smartphones, and in particular the use of social media such as Instagram and TikTok, have caused an epidemic of mental health and body image problems among young people, and in particular teenaged girls — problems that in some cases have led to suicide. A recent piece in The New Yorker is just the latest in a long line of such reports: in it, writer Andrew Solomon interviews distraught parents and relatives of a number of young people who have killed themselves, and in every case the culprit seems to be their excessive use of smartphones and specifically their use of social media, which many of those involved seem to believe caused or exacerbated their childrens’ anxiety and depression.

One of the girls who died by suicide spent all her time on Instagram and was convinced she was ugly and no one would ever love her, and it turned out that her feed was full of people talking about eating disorders and suicide. Her mother says that after reading about Frances Haugen, a whistleblower who leaked thousands of internal Facebook documents about the harms of social media, she became convinced that Instagram played a role in her daughter’s death, and decided to sue Meta. The article goes on to talk about rise in the rate of deaths by suicide between age 10 and age 24 in the US since 2007, and the fact that 53 percent of Americans believe that social media is responsible. And it talks about how social media produces a dopamine effect similar to nicotine or cocaine, and explains that this is why some people get addicted to using social media.

Before I go any further, there’s no question that the stories in the New Yorker piece are heart-wrenching. Solomon writes about visiting the childhood bedrooms of boys and girls in their teens or early twenties who struggled with anxiety and depression and in the end chose to kill themselves, and their parents tell him about the guilt they feel over things they could have done. Only a robot would be able to listen to those stories and not feel for those parents and those families, and I am not trying to downplay or minimize that. But after pages and pages of these stories — more than three quarters of the way through the article — comes what I think is an important point, when Solomon writes that “research has failed to demonstrate any definite causal link” between smartphone or social-media use and depression.

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Continue reading “The moral panic over social media and teen depression”

From The Smithsonian: “In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, “Wild Bill” Donovan, the leader of the Office of Strategic Services told his scientists to find a way to outfox the Axis enemies. In response, the scientists produced a number of dirty tricks, including explosive pancake mix, incendiary bombs strapped to live bats, truth drugs for eliciting information from prisoners of war, and a foul-smelling spray that mimicked the repulsive odor of fecal matter. But Operation Fantasia was the most desperate—and peculiar—of them all. Operation Fantasia was the brainchild of OSS psychological warfare strategist Ed Salinger, an eccentric businessman who had run an import/export business in Tokyo before the war. Operation Fantasia, he pitched the organization in 1943, would destroy Japanese morale by exposing soldiers and civilians to a Shinto portent of doom: kitsune, fox-shaped spirits with magical abilities.”

Two ranchers faked drought numbers to claim millions in crop insurance

From The Colorado Sun: “Into the spring of 2017, U.S. weather experts watching southeastern Colorado noticed something they’d never seen before. Storm clouds would gather over the thirsty sagebrush ranges surrounding tiny Colorado and Kansas towns like Springfield and Coolidge. On a normal day, the promising storms produced snow or rain that would fall onto a system of official weather stations at airstrips or town halls, into heated “tipping buckets.” When the teeter-totter buckets filled with a thimbleful of water, the seesaw tilted, dropping one miniature metal bucket downward to close an electrical circuit. One “tick” of the bucket, and a signal went out to National Weather Service sensors around the world that the High Plains had recorded one hundredth of an inch of water. But on many of those days, those buckets were not tipping.”

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Continue reading “The WWII plot to fight Japan with radioactive foxes”

From Scientific American: “Quantum physicists are familiar with wonky, seemingly nonsensical phenomena: atoms and molecules sometimes act as particles, sometimes as waves; particles can be connected to one another by a “spooky action at a distance,” even over great distances; and quantum objects can detach themselves from their properties like the Cheshire Cat from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland detaches itself from its grin. Now researchers led by Daniela Angulo of the University of Toronto have revealed another oddball quantum outcome: photons, wave-particles of light, can spend a negative amount of time zipping through a cloud of chilled atoms. In other words, photons can seem to exit a material before entering it.”

How North Korea’s Kim Jong-un assassinated his brother with a deadly nerve agent

From GQ: “When Kim Jong-nam was a boy, his father, the dictator of North Korea, sat him on his office chair and said, “When you grow up, this is where you’ll sit and give orders.” If the child had fulfilled that promise—if his half brother, Kim Jong-un, had not ultimately usurped his throne—he would have tyrannized 25 million people. His pudgy finger would have caressed the launch buttons of nukes. America and China would have debated how to manage him. But as Jong-nam glanced up at the departures board in the international airport of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the jostling crowd ignored him. He had become just another overweight 45-year-old, the bald spot that he usually hid with a cap showing through his remaining hair like a bull’s-eye.”

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

Continue reading “Quantum physics experiment finds evidence of negative time”