From CNN: “The oldest known tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments from the Old Testament sold on Wednesday for $5.04 million, more than double its high estimate. The stone, which dates back around 1,500 years to the Late Roman-Byzantine era, sparked more than 10 minutes of intense bidding, according to a statement from Sotheby’s New York. The anonymous buyer plans to donate the artifact to an Israeli institution. The stone is a remarkable artifact from the ancient world, but it lay forgotten for hundreds of years. Weighing in at 115 pounds and standing two feet tall, the stone was discovered in 1913 during excavations for a new railway line, but the significance of the find was not fully appreciated and the stone went on to be used as part of the paving outside someone’s house for three decades, and the surface was exposed to heavy foot traffic.”
They bought a lottery ticket with his stolen credit card and he wants a share of the winnings
From AP: “Thieves used a stolen card to buy a winning French lottery ticket worth 500,000 euros ($523,000). But they vanished before cashing in —- and now they’re among France’s most famous fugitives. The man whose card was stolen, identified in police documents as Jean-David E., is offering to split the cash with the lucky winners. He wants his wallet back, too. The thieves, meanwhile, face the risk of arrest. As of Saturday, the state lottery operator La Française des Jeux, said that no one had submitted the ticket to cash out. Jean-David filed a police complaint about the theft, but is ready to withdraw it if the thieves come forward so that they can share the money. The lawyer launched a national appeal asking the perpetrators to contact his office to make a deal.”
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A Salvadoran fisherman was lost at sea for more than a year but somehow survived
From IBT: “Jose Salvador Alvarenga, 37, spent 13 months adrift at sea before washing ashore on the Marshall Islands. Alvarenga and another fisherman named Ezekiel went out to catch sharks off the coast of Mexico on Dec. 21, 2012. The boat’s motor broke down and the two fishermen were soon adrift in the Pacific Ocean following a storm blew them away from the coast of Mexico. According to Alvarenga, Ezekiel stopped eating and died four months after being set adrift. Alvarenga washed ashore on the Ebon Atoll and a rescue boat transported him to Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands. The fisherman survived by catching birds, turtles and fish while drinking rain water when available, and tried to keep track of time by watching the phases of the moon.”
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.
Scientists say that the switch to eating soft food changed the way humans speak
From Science: “Don’t like the F-word? Blame farmers and soft food. When humans switched to processed foods after the spread of agriculture, they put less wear and tear on their teeth. That changed the growth of their jaws, giving adults the overbites normal in children. Within a few thousand years, those slight overbites made it easy for people in farming cultures to fire off sounds like “f” and “v,” opening a world of new words. The newly favored consonants, known as labiodentals, helped spur the diversification of languages in Europe and Asia at least 4000 years ago; they led to such changes as the replacement of the Proto-Indo-European patēr to Old English faeder about 1500 years ago, according to linguist Balthasar Bickel. The paper shows “that a cultural shift can change our biology in such a way that it affects our language.”
Fog harvesting could help to provide drinking water for arid cities
From the BBC: “Capturing water from fog on a large scale could provide some of the driest cities in the world with drinking water. This is what researchers in Chile have concluded after studying the potential of fog harvesting in the desert city of Alto Hospicio in the north of the country. Average rainfall in the region is less than 0.19in per year. Many who live in the city’s poorest communities rely on drinking water that is delivered by truck. However, clouds of fog that regularly gather over the mountain city are an untapped source. Capturing fog water is remarkably simple – a mesh is hung between poles, and when the moisture-laden clouds pass through that fine mesh, droplets form. The water is then channelled into pipes and storage tanks. It has been used at a small scale for several decades, mainly in rural South and Central America. One of the biggest fog water harvesting systems is in Morocco, on the edge of the Sahara Desert.”
What it’s like inside the famous Blue Grotto on the island of Capri
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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