From USC: Oneida. For most Americans, the name conjures up fine silverware. Few are aware that behind this secular symbol of middle-class respectability lies the story of a 19th-century religious community predicated on radical notions of equality, sex and religion. The community’s founder, John Humphrey Noyes, was the scion of a prominent Vermont family and a graduate of Yale Theological Seminary. He founded his own offshoot of Protestantism called Perfectionism. Noyes believed in the second coming and he also believed he was God’s prophet on Earth. Amid the fervor of religious revival, he attracted a group of devoted followers seeking an alternative to Puritanism. In 1848, he established a revolutionary community in rural New York that aimed to achieve a sin-free life through God’s grace, while espousing equality of the sexes and encouraging sex with multiple partners via “complex marriage.”
She was the first woman to fly rescue missions in a combat zone then became a brain surgeon
From the New York Times: “Valérie André was 10 years old in 1932 when, armed with a congratulatory bouquet, she greeted the hero aviator Maryse Hilsz at the Strasbourg airfield in France. She was already committed to becoming a doctor, an ambitious career goal for a young lady at the time. But she was so warmly received when she presented the flowers to Ms. Hilsz, who had just completed a record-breaking round-trip flight between Paris and Saigon, that she committed herself to another formidable objective: She decided to become an airplane pilot. Valérie André not only pursued both professions; she thrived in them. She became a brain surgeon, a parachutist and a helicopter pilot who was said to be the first woman to fly rescue missions in combat zones for any military force. She was also the first Frenchwoman to be named a general and was a five-time winner of the Croix de Guerre, for bravery in Indochina and Algeria.”
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Dick Van Dyke said he was saved by porpoises after floating out to sea on a surfboard
From The Guardian: “On screen, Dick Van Dyke has been rescued from untimely death by flying cars and magical nannies. Off screen, the veteran star of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins had to rely on the help of a pod of porpoises after apparently dozing off aboard his surfboard. “I’m not kidding,” he said afterwards. Van Dyke’s ordeal began during an ill-fated trip to his local beach, when he fell asleep and then awoke to find himself far away. “I woke up out of sight of land,” the 84-year-old actor told Craig Ferguson on his TV show. “I started paddling with the swells and I started seeing fins swimming around me and I thought ‘I’m dead!’” Van Dyke was wrong. “They turned out to be porpoises,” he said. “And they pushed me all the way to shore.”
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.
Wearing ridiculously long and pointed shoes was a fashion craze in Medieval times
From Open Culture: “Called poulaines, a name drawn from the French word for Poland in reference to the footwear’s supposedly Polish origin, these pointy shoes appeared around the time of Richard II’s marriage to Anne of Bohemia in 1382. Both men and women wore them, although the aristocratic men’s shoes tended to have the longest toes, sometimes as long as five inches. The toes were typically stuffed with moss, wool, or horsehair to help them hold their shape. If you’ve ever watched the first Blackadder series, know that the shoes worn by Rowan Atkinson’s hapless plotting prince may be comic, but they’re not an exaggeration. After the Great Pestilence of 1348 clerics claimed the plague was sent by God to punish Londoners for their sins, especially sexual sins. The shoes’ lascivious associations continued to draw ire. In 1362, Pope Urban V passed an edict banning them, but it didn’t really stop anybody from wearing them.”
At this German ski resort, the hills are made out of sand
From Boing Boing: “Monte Kaolino is similar to a ski resort, but instead, it is a sand resort. Located in Bavaria, this outdoor location has giant hills of sand instead of snow. There is a lift that takes you up to the top of a tall sand dune and you can ride down on a board or on sand skis. There are 35,000,000 tonnes of sand at Monte Kaolino. The sand comes from the nearby kaolinite production. This unique resort is only open in the summer. When a company called Amberger Kaoliner set up shop in Hirschau at the beginning of the 1900s with the intention to mine kaolinite, it didn’t give much thought to what to do with the sand byproduct, instead letting it pile up on the outskirts of town. By the 1950s, the hill had grown to massive proportions, and that’s when, according to locals, a dude showed up with a pair of skis. The rest is history.”
The unique nature of the number 6,174 — also known as Kaprekar’s constant
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