From My Modern Met: “There are many stories of historical treasures hiding for decades in attics and cupboards around the world, but few match what was found in a closet in Ohio in 2012. A few months after the death of Neil Armstrong, his widow, Carol, came across a white bag in a closet. Upon closer inspection, she found tiny parts that looked like they could have belonged to a spaceship. In the end, it wasn’t just any spaceship but a collection of items from the Lunar Module Eagle of the Apollo 11 mission. The white bag, which made the trip to the Moon, contained the waist tether he used to support his feet during the only rest period he got on the Moon, utility lights and their brackets, equipment netting, a mirror made of metal, an emergency wrench, the optical sight that was mounted above Armstrong’s window and, most importantly, the 16mm data acquisition camera (DAC) that recorded the footage of the lander’s final approach.”
How could a man rob two banks at the same time? Because they were identical twins
From The Atavist: “Te light was giving way to darkness as detective Patrick Brear arrived at the CBC Bank in Heathcote, an old gold-mining town in southern Australia. The quaint two-story redbrick building had been the scene of a crime. The bandit was the state’s most wanted man, suspected in two dozen armed robberies. Brear and his partner, detective John Beever, had been hunting him for over a year. They knew his MO well. He liked to hit rural targets just before they closed for the day, then escape into the bush under cover of darkness. The timing of many of his crimes was the inspiration for his nickname. Though it pained Beever and Brear to admit it, there was something different about this criminal, almost superhuman. He was known to pull off two robberies within a half-hour of each other, in towns that were more than a dozen miles apart.”
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A half-ton piece of space junk crash-landed in the middle of a village in Kenya
From the New York Times: “A glowing ring of metal, more than eight feet in diameter and weighing more than 1,100 pounds, fell from the sky and crash landed in a remote village in Kenya this week, causing no injuries but frightening residents who feared a bomb or worse.The object turned out to be space debris — junk left over from six decades of space exploration and a growing number of commercial launches, the Kenya Space Agency said Wednesday. It identified the object as a separation ring from a launch rocket and said that it was investigating the ring’s origin and ownership. For residents of Makueni County, southeast of Kenya’s capital Nairobi, the space junk’s landing was quite a shock on an otherwise quiet Monday afternoon.”
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. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called The Torment Nexus.
Mysterious writing system from Easter Island appears to be completely unique
From Atlas Obscura: “Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, is the most remote inhabited island in the world. This dot of treeless, volcanic land is only 63 square miles wide and sits 2,400 miles off the Pacific coast of Chile. People first came to live on the island in the 12th century. Europeans landed on Rapa Nui in the 1720s, and they brought diseases that devastated the population. Then in 1863, the island was raided by enslavers from Peru, and some estimates say only 200 survived. The following year, a missionary named Eugene Eyraud found evidence of Rapa Nui’s written language, Rongorongo, which was intricately inscribed on wooden tablets. Eyraud noted these tablets were seen in every family home and claimed they numbered in the hundreds. However, when Europeans returned a few years later to collect them, only a couple dozen could be found.”
The Wright Brothers taught him how to fly and he became a five-star Air Force general
From Wikipedia: “Instructed in flying by the Wright Brothers, Arnold was one of the first military pilots worldwide, and one of the first three rated pilots in the history of the United States Air Force. He overcame a fear of flying that resulted from his experiences with early flight, supervised the expansion of the Air Service during World War I, and became a protégé of then Brigadier General (later Colonel) Billy Mitchell. Arnold rose to command the Army Air Forces immediately prior to the American entry into World War II and directed its hundred-fold expansion from an organization of little more than 20,000 men and 800 first-line combat aircraft into the largest and most powerful air force in the world. An advocate of technological research and development, his tenure saw the development of the intercontinental bomber, the jet fighter, the extensive use of radar, global airlift and atomic warfare.”
He plays the banjo and a curious fox decides to stay and listen
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
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