From The Oxford Clarion: “The Eagle & Child is Oxford’s most storied inn. It was here that the Inklings met every Tuesday lunchtime – a writing group including J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Hugo Dyson, who infamously dismissed a plot twist in the Lord of the Rings with “Not another —ing elf!”. Larry Ellison is the billionaire behind US database giant Oracle. He owns the sixth largest island in Hawaii, hired Steve Jobs as his wedding photographer, and was compared to a lawnmower by a disgruntled engineer. He also doesn’t drink. All this makes him an unusual candidate for an Oxford pub landlord. But then the new Eagle & Child is going to be an unusual pub: it is to be the in-house bar for Ellison’s new Oxford outpost, the Ellison Institute of Technology.”
Letters hidden in my family’s attic reveal a 1910s bank con in Key West
From Atlas Obscura: “My mother doesn’t remember much about when she found the letters. The year was 1975, she was 10, and her father had just purchased a dilapidated two-story house on the island of Key West. She remembers finding a box containing 20 or so handwritten letters that were dated between 1913 and 1915. The collection of letters chronicles the correspondence between two bank colleagues: James L. Johnson, a cashier who lived at 616 Caroline Street, and E. M. Martin, the bank’s vice president and a shadowy figure whose life was riddled with many peculiar twists and turns. Both men worked at the Island City National Bank, a small bank open for only 10 years. The bank has long been an enigma. Its bizarre story stretches over a decade between various cities, countries, and continents. And these hidden letters turned out to be a missing piece of the puzzle, a winding tale of fraud, manhunts, and amnesia.”
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Coffee was considered ‘Satan’s brew’ before Pope Clement VIII baptized it
From Aleteia: “Legend has it that a goat herder named Kaldi was the first to discover the effects of coffee, around the year 850. The story goes that he noticed his goats would all flock to certain kind of cherry, which would make them more energetic. He chewed on the fruit himself to confirm the effects and was so impressed that he brought the cherries to an Islamic monastery, where experimentation with the pits would eventually yield the first form of coffee. The drink quickly achieved popularity in the Middle East. The association with its Islamic founders fanned the flames of prejudice and it was commonly dubbed “Satan’s Drink.” When members of his court implored Pope Clement VIII to denounce coffee, the pontiff insisted on trying a cup before he cast his verdict. After a few sips, he announced, “This Satan’s drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.”
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.
Before World War II, soldiers hunted for land mines with pointy sticks
From the IEEE: “Land mines have been around in one form or another for a thousand years. Up until World War II, the most common method for finding the explosives was to prod the ground with a pointed stick or bayonet. The hockey-puck-size devices were buried about 15 centimeters below the ground. When someone stepped on the ground above or near the mine, their weight triggered a pressure sensor and caused the device to explode. During World War II, land mines were widely used by both Axis and Allied forces and were responsible for the deaths of 375,000 soldiers. In 1941 Józef Stanislaw Kosacki, a Polish signals officer, developed the first portable device to effectively detect a land mine without inadvertently triggering it. It proved to be twice as fast as previous mine-detection methods, and was soon in wide use by the British.”
Our body temperatures have grown colder since the 19th century
From Interesting Engineering: “Today’s standard body temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit was established by German physician Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich in 1851. It’s a standard that for the most part has served us well, however, more recent studies have indicated that our body temperatures may actually be colder. “Our temperature’s not what people think it is,” said Julie Parsonnet, MD, professor of medicine and of health research and policy. “What everybody grew up learning, which is that our normal temperature is 98.6, is wrong.” For their study, Parsonnet and her team compiled temperatures from three distinct historical periods. The three periods covered people born in the early 1800s all the way to today. What their calculations found was a decrease in body temperature of 0.05 F for every decade.”
What to do when it’s minus 40? Go for a swim
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