From Techspot: “The long-running saga of James Howells’ bid to retrieve a hard drive containing 7,500 Bitcoin that was accidentally thrown into a landfill in 2013 has taken a new turn. He now says he has a “finely tuned plan” to recover the component, and that its position has been narrowed down to a small area. In 2013, Howells had two 2.5-inch hard drives stored in a drawer, one of which he intended to get rid of and another that had a digital wallet with Bitcoin worth the equivalent of around $771 million today. Howells put the drive containing the Bitcoin in a black trash bag and his partner took the bag to the local landfill. Howells has been unsuccessfully trying to persuade the council of Newport, Wales, to allow him to dig for the drive for years now.”
Researchers say people like AI-generated poetry better than the human kind
From Nature: “As AI-generated text continues to evolve, distinguishing it from human-authored content has become increasingly difficult. This study examined whether non-expert readers could reliably differentiate between AI-generated poems and those written by well-known human poets. We conducted two experiments with non-expert poetry readers and found that most participants were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as human-authored than the actual human-authored poems. We found that AI-generated poems were also rated more favorably in qualities such as rhythm and beauty, and that this contributed to their mistaken identification as human-authored. It seems the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry.”
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.
French officials in the Central African Republic are accused of stealing genitals
From The Nation: “For months now, rumors of missing male genitals have been stirring up the public in the Central African Republic. The first reports of missing organs came in 2022 from Ndélé, Bamingui-Bangoran prefecture. Then the phenomenon spread to Bambari and now has reached Bangui and spread throughout the country. The media, the government and doctors neglect the cases of genitals evaporation, because of the unproven nature of the phenomenon. There are various versions about the circumstances of the disappearance of penises. Some say that the penis disappears completely, while others note that it only shrinks. There are rumors about a mysterious witch doctor capable of conducting such a horrifying and inhuman ritual.”
Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. And I appreciate it, believe me!
Someone took over a radio station in 1977 claiming to be from Galactic Command
From Wikipedia: “The Southern Television broadcast interruption was a broadcast signal intrusion that occurred on 26 November 1977 in parts of southern England in the United Kingdom. The audio of a Southern Television broadcast was replaced by a voice claiming to represent the “Ashtar Galactic Command”, delivering a message instructing humanity to abandon its weapons so it could participate in a “future awakening” and “achieve a higher state of evolution”. After six minutes, the broadcast returned to its scheduled programme. The event prompted hundreds of telephone calls from concerned members of the public, and was widely reported in British and American newspapers.”
Thousands of Japanese people disappear every year and are called “evaporators”
From the New York Post: “Of the many oddities that are culturally specific to Japan — from cat cafés to graveyard eviction notices to the infamous Suicide Forest, where an estimated 100 people per year take their own lives — perhaps none is as little known, and curious, as “the evaporated people.” Since the mid-1990s, it’s estimated that at least 100,000 Japanese men and women vanish annually. They are the architects of their own disappearances, banishing themselves over indignities large and small: divorce, debt, job loss, failing an exam. These lost souls, it turns out, live in lost cities of their own making. The city of Sanya isn’t on any map. The evaporated live in tiny, squalid hotel rooms, often without internet or private toilets.”
This is what happens when the catnip starts to kick in
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
Keep a backup of all your trash. 😁