From The Daily Mail: “Aristocrat Unity Mitford’s leather-bound journal reveals fresh insights into the dictator widely reviled as the most evil man in history – whom she worshipped. One of the famous Mitford sisters, Unity gushed about the Nazi monster in her flowing handwriting. The young upper-class beauty scandalised British society by fawning over Hitler and becoming closer to him than any other Briton. She confided secrets of their extraordinary liaisons to her daily diary over five years running up to the Second World War. While plotting global carnage, Hitler was said to have ‘behaved as a 17-year-old’ around the 6ft statuesque blonde beauty. Unseen for 80 years, Unity’s diaries span 1935 to 1939 and chronicle an extraordinary 139 meetings with Hitler.”
They want to get to the top of Everest faster so they are going to inhale some xenon
From Why Is This Interesting: “Traditionally, climbing Everest requires a long, 18-day hike to Base Camp, which is an often challenging start to the trip, due to thin air and exertion. This acclimatization trek is considered a rite of passage, and those who bypass it by taking a chopper to Base Camp are typically given some side eye from the climbing community. But the FT outlines a radically different approach: Early this May, an airline pilot, two entrepreneurs and a government minister will wait for the call to mobilise. They will then take a taxi straight to a health clinic. For 30 minutes, each adventurer will wear a mask attached to a ventilator for administering xenon, a rare noble gas more often used as an anaesthetic and a rocket propellant. The men will fly by helicopter to base camp. After no more than two hours, they will begin their ascent.”
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How a clock that is built to run for 10,000 years became a reality
From Asterisk: “The clock isn’t open to outsiders yet, but an enterprising trespasser could conceivably check it out now, based solely on public information. It’s about eight miles due west from the Blue Origin landing pad that Bezos once used for a suborbital flight on one of his own rockets. The easiest approach would be to fly into El Paso, rent a car, and head off before sunrise. After driving a couple of hours east on I-10, get on Highway 54 in the nondescript town of Van Horn and continue north for thirty minutes. As you proceed into the desert, keep an eye out on your left for a white gate leading to a side road. Pull over when you see a notice reading “Private Property — No Trespassing”. A small red “2” on the gate is the only indication of the owner’s identity. If you like, you could go up the highway to the nearby headquarters of the Figure 2 Ranch.”
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.
What it’s like to spend the weekend at a convention of ventriloquists
From n+1: “A half-nude, three-foot figure called me to a table just beside the vending machines. His T-shirt and shoes were miniature; his legs — kielbasa-shaped, cotton-stuffed — were fixed to a flat pubis. “I’m Dicky!” he squeaked. Dicky’s daddy’s hand was shoved somewhere near Dicky’s brain stem. My throat was in my stomach. Their hearts were in vaudeville. But we were all in Kentucky. Side by side by side, we stood near the entrance of the Vent Haven Ventriloquist ConVENTion — the annual international hajj for ventriloquists — where dummies condomed nearly every right arm. Dummies were rising from zippered suitcases, lifted from velvet-lined trunks, coffined on banquettes with protective canvas bags on their heads, like prisoners expecting execution. Dummies congested every visible cranny of the Erlanger Holiday Inn in a huge interspecies fiesta of dwarves, worms, baboons, children, et cetera.”
Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke inspired satellites, space elevators, and Star Trek
From Nature: “The first commercial communications satellite, Telstar I, was built by Bell Telephone Laboratories and launched in 1962. The first to be geostationary, the Hughes Aircraft Company’s Intelsat I (‘Early Bird’), went up in 1965. Both launched on conventional rockets, and operated with transistors and without human maintenance. The two US engineers chiefly responsible — John Pierce for Telstar and Harold Rosen for Intelsat — saw Clarke as the father of satellite communications. Astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan recalled Interplanetary Flight as “a turning point in my scientific development”. NASA rocket designer Wernher von Braun used The Exploration of Space (1951) to convince US President John F. Kennedy that Americans should and could go to the Moon. Profiles of the Future (1962), with its chapter on teleportation, inspired Gene Roddenberry to create Star Trek’s futuristic advances.”
How the Cajuns in Louisiana are handling the snow-covered roads
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