From The Smithsonian: “On the flat top of a steep hill in a distant corner of northern Japan lies the tomb of an itinerant shepherd who, two millennia ago, settled down there to grow garlic. He fell in love with a farmer’s daughter named Miyuko, fathered three kids and died at the ripe old age of 106. In the mountain hamlet of Shingo, he’s remembered by the name Daitenku Taro Jurai. The rest of the world knows him as Jesus Christ. It turns out that Jesus of Nazareth did not die on the cross at Calvary, as widely reported. According to local folklore, that was his kid brother, Isukiri. A bucolic backwater with only one Christian resident and no church within 30 miles, Shingo nevertheless bills itself as Kirisuto no Sato or Christ’s Hometown. Every year 20,000 or so pilgrims and pagans visit the site, which is maintained by a nearby yogurt factory.”
Scientists may have solved the infamous ‘move a couch around a corner’ problem
From Scientific American: “For those who have wrestled a bulky couch around a tight corner and lamented, “Will this even fit?” mathematicians have heard your pleas. Geometry’s “moving sofa problem” asks for the largest shape that can turn a right angle in a narrow corridor without getting stuck. The problem sat unsolved for nearly 60 years until Jineon Baek, a postdoc at Yonsei University in Seoul, posted a paper online claiming to resolve it. Baek’s proof has yet to undergo thorough peer review, but initial passes from mathematicians who know Baek and the moving sofa problem seem optimistic. The rules of the problem, which Canadian mathematician Leo Moser first formally posed in 1966, involve a rigid shape turning a right angle in a hallway. Both the shape and the hallway are two-dimensional. Imagine the sofa weighs too much to lift.”
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February has 28 days because the Romans were afraid of even numbers
From Britannica: “The Gregorian calendar had a glaring difference in structure from its later variants: it consisted of 10 months rather than 12. In order to fully sync the calendar with the lunar year, the Roman king Numa Pompilius added January and February to the original 10 months. The previous calendar had had 6 months of 30 days and 4 months of 31, for a total of 304 days. However, Numa wanted to avoid having even numbers in his calendar, as Roman superstition at the time held that even numbers were unlucky. So he subtracted a day from each of the 30-day months to make them 29. The lunar year consists of 355 days, which meant that he now had 56 days left to work with. In the end, at least 1 month out of the 12 needed to contain an even number of days, and he chose February, the month that hosted Roman rituals honoring the dead.
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.
Brain implant lets man with paralysis fly a virtual drone with just his thoughts
From New Scientist: “A man with paralysis who had electrodes implanted in his brain can pilot a virtual drone through an obstacle course simply by imagining moving his fingers. Matthew Willsey at the University of Michigan and his colleagues created an algorithm that allows a user to trigger four discrete signals by imagining moving their fingers and thumb. The anonymous man who tried the technology has tetraplegia due to a spinal cord injury. He had already been fitted with an implant in the area of the brain that controls hand motion. An AI model was used to map the complex neural signals received by the electrodes to the user’s thoughts. The participant learned how to think of the first two fingers of one hand moving, creating an electrical signal. Another signal was generated by the second two fingers and another two by the thumb.”
Plant poaching: A craze for succulents is driving a new illegal trade
From the Financial Times: “The shopkeeper would like to begin by assuring you he never did touch one of those plants. He is not a thief and he is not a liar. He is not sure, in fact, whether you are not some kind of double agent? Sent by the Chinese, maybe? But, anyway, he never did take anything more than a man needs to get food in his belly. True, he happens to know a little about the trafficking of the items in question, but knowledge is not a crime. It’s a long story but not too long. He can give you the details he knows. To begin with, he does not know why anyone would even want them. Because the truth is, these plants have turned life upside down for him and for many brothers here in Springbok, in the Northern Cape of South Africa. It is because of them that this sleepy stopover town of 13,000 people, in the arid band that unfurls along the country’s western coastline, is now at the centre of a global poaching epidemic.”
Home security camera gets video of a meteorite hitting the ground
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