Month: February 2025

If you’ve been reading the news at all, you probably know that Elon Musk — and/or a group of twentysomething programmer/hackers with nicknames like “Big Balls” (no, I am not making this up) — have taken control of significant parts of the functional machinery of the US government, including the Departments of Energy, Education, Housing and Urban Development, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They are installing external servers and shutting down billions of dollars worth of payments, as well as firing tens of thousands of federal employees. Do they have the authority to do this? Donald Trump has issued an executive order saying that they do. The courts disagree, but it remains to be seen whether Trump will obey the courts or simply ignore them. Can he do that? Perhaps. Is there any way for the state or Congress to stop him? Not really. Is this the beginning of a constitutional crisis? Probably.

This isn’t a political newsletter, so all of that is outside my purview at the moment, although I have to say it is troubling in the extreme. From a technological point of view, however, what is interesting to me is that even with all of that going on — running and/or dismantling the entire federal government — Elon Musk still managed to find the time to put together a $97-billion hostile takeover offer for OpenAI. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal describes it:

A consortium of investors led by Elon Musk is offering $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, upping the stakes in his battle with Sam Altman over the company behind ChatGPT. Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, said he submitted a bid for all the nonprofit’s assets to OpenAI’s board of directors Monday. The unsolicited offer adds a major complication to Altman’s carefully laid plans for OpenAI’s future, including converting it to a for-profit company and spending up to $500 billion on AI infrastructure through a joint venture called Stargate. He and Musk are already fighting in court over the direction of OpenAI. “It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement. “We will make sure that happens.”

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Continue reading “Does Elon Musk want to buy OpenAI? Yes and no”

From Discover Music: “No matter how memorable Bobby Fuller’s signature hit was – and his version of “I Fought The Law” is inarguably a classic rock’n’roll record of any era – it always risks being upstaged by the macabre and never-explained circumstances of his death. Born on October 22, 1942 in Baytown, Texas, Fuller became a noted performer in the El Paso, Texas area to which he and his family relocated. Fuller was just 23 when his song hit the charts, but within a few weeks, he met an unseemly and mysterious end. Eight days after the group’s last gig in July 1966, he received an unexplained late night phone call that prompted him to leave in the family Oldsmobile. Later that day, he was found dead by his mother Loraine outside his Hollywood apartment. The car was full of gasoline; accounts have subsequently varied as to whether he had sustained bruises or cuts. His body had been there for some time.”

Her discovery wasn’t alien life but science has never been the same since

From the NYT: “With TV cameras pointed at her, Felisa Wolfe-Simon began speaking at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 2, 2010. She was at that time a visiting researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey, speaking to a sizable audience of journalists and bloggers, two of them wearing tinfoil hats, and hordes of streamers online. Days before, NASA had teased “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” Dr. Wolfe-Simon had not found aliens, but she had found a terrestrial organism that was behaving unlike any life form known on Earth. The creature came from Mono Lake, a body of water near Yosemite National Park that is nearly three times as salty as the Pacific Ocean and is full of toxic arsenic. Dr. Wolfe-Simon’s team said they had isolated an organism that could survive on arsenic.”

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Continue reading “The short life and strange death of rock ‘n’ roller Bobby Fuller”

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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Continue reading “The world’s third richest man bought Tolkien’s local pub”

From the NYT: “In the 1850s, Eunice Foote, an amateur scientist, made a remarkable discovery about greenhouse gases that could have helped form the foundation of modern climate science. But the scientific paper she published that might have added her name to the pantheon of early climate scientists was quickly forgotten, and she faded into obscurity. There isn’t even a photograph of her today. Foote’s ingenious and elegant experiment involved two glass cylinders filled with various substances, including moist air and carbon dioxide. She placed a thermometer in each container, then left them in sunlight. In her 1856 paper about the experiment, “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays,” she wrote that a cylinder with moist air became warmer than one with dry air, and a cylinder filled with carbon dioxide warmed even more. “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature,” she wrote.

The last two Jewish men in Afghanistan disguised their synagogue as a kebab stand

From Wikipedia: “The country’s last rabbi fled in 1988, and the last formal prayer services were held at the synagogue in 1990. In the mid-1990s, Zablon Simintov moved into the synagogue, by then Kabul’s only functioning synagogue. The Taliban had come to power in 1996, and the synagogue had been deserted and left in disrepair. The Taliban considered the synagogue un-Islamic and as such, ransacked it and frequently arrested Simintov and fellow resident Yitzhak Levin. Simintov and Levin argued frequently about who was the rightful owner of the synagogue, and they lived in different wings. Each would complain to the Taliban about the other, to the point that the Taliban imprisoned both men. To disguise the synagogue from the outside, Simintov operated a kebab restaurant from the building called Balkh Bastan beginning in 2009.”

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Continue reading “She discovered the greenhouse effect 150 years ago”

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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Continue reading “This village claims Jesus moved to Japan and became a farmer”

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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Continue reading “Oneida silverware started out as a sex and eugenics commune”

From SFist: Clockwise from top left: Gwen Danielson in a 2019 mugshot; Jack “Ziz” LaSota; Alexander “Somni” Leatham; Emma Borhanian; Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt; Maximillian Snyder; Michelle Zajko; and possibly Teresa Youngblut from Instagram

I apologize in advance for this post, which may not interest many of you, or may be too meandering and/or inconclusive for others. Some pieces I write for The Torment Nexus involve a topic where I have a clear point of view that has been established over time — copyright and artificial intelligence, the absurdity of the TikTok ban, etc. This is not one of those times. In this case, I’m trying to think through a particular subject, and writing about things helps me think through them in a more logical (one might even say rational) way. You are welcome to join me on this journey, but obviously you don’t have to!

The subject or subjects of this newsletter have been sort of brewing in the back of my mind for some time, but they started to crystallize when I read about what is known as the “Zizian cult,” a group of what appear to be mostly trans women who have adopted n extreme version of Rationalist philosophy, following the writings of someone who goes by the nickname Ziz, for reasons that are unclear. The person with that name was born Jack Amadeus LaSota, and some of her followers — she uses female pronouns — have been implicated in four murders: in one, an elderly man had his throat slit, after previously being stabbed by a Samurai sword; in another case, a young woman allegedly killed her elderly parents in Pennsylvania; and most recently, a US border guard was killed during a shootout in Vermont near the US-Canadian border with Quebec.

You may be wondering what any of this has to do with technology, which is allegedly the domain of this newsletter. What’s interesting to me about the Zizians is that they seem to have taken a philosophical approach that one often finds among programmers and other Silicon Valley types, i.e. Rationalism, and taken it to its logical — and possibly absurd — extreme. Rationalism has been around since Plato’s time, but modern rationalism with a capital R is a relatively recent invention, and was popularized by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who runs a site called LessWrong and co-founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Scott Alexander Siskind, a practicing psychiatrist who writes a blog called Astral Codex Ten, is a prominent member of the community, and Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and others have been or are aligned with it.

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Continue reading “How did Rationalism lead to the creation of a murder cult?”

From The Sunday Times: “Somewhere in Boston there is a doctor who treats disorders of the brain: a brilliant woman, a Harvard graduate, a mother of two. But she has a dark secret. Unbeknown to her colleagues or her patients, she is also a writer of thrillers, churning them out at a terrific rate, nearly all of them bestsellers. Four were on the Sunday Times list of top-selling books of 2024. One, The Housemaid, is being turned into a film starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried; another is set to be a film too, while a third is to be a television series. Across all formats, and including translations, she has sold 17 million books. Do the hospital receptionists have any idea? Apparently not. To them she is just a common brain doctor. She writes under the pen name Freida McFadden and avoids book tours and signings. Some people have wondered if she is in fact AI or a team of writers. “She has published 15 books in the last four years!?” someone wrote on Reddit. “Something super fishy about her.”

The tallest building in North Korea is a thousand-foot-tall hotel that has been empty for decades

From Wikipedia: “The Ryugyong Hotel is a 330 m (1,080 ft) tall unfinished pyramid-shaped skyscraper in Pyongyang, North Korea — it is the most prominent feature of Pyongyang’s skyline and also the tallest building in North Korea. Its name (which means “capital of willows”) is also one of the historical names for Pyongyang. The building has been planned as a mixed-use development, which would include a hotel. Construction began in 1987 but was halted in 1992 as North Korea entered a period of economic crisis after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After 1992, the building stood topped out, but without any windows or interior fittings. In 2008, construction resumed, and the exterior was completed in 2011. The hotel was planned to open in 2012, for the centenary of founding leader Kim Il Sung’s birth. A partial opening was announced for 2013, but this was later cancelled. In 2018, an LED display was fitted to one side, which is used to show propaganda animations and film scenes.”

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Continue reading “This bestselling author lives a secret life as a brain doctor”

From Wikipedia: “Emily Rosa is the youngest person to have a research paper published in a peer reviewed medical journal. At age nine she conceived and executed a scientific study of therapeutic touch which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998. In 1996, Rosa saw a video of Therapeutic Touch practitioners claiming they could feel a “Human Energy Field” emanating from a body and could use their hands to manipulate the HEF in order to treat disease. She heard Dolores Krieger, co-inventor of Therapeutic Touch, claim that everyone had the ability to feel the HEF. Using a standard display board, Rosa devised a single-blind protocol for a study she conducted at age nine for her 4th grade science fair.”

The so-called Mediterranean diet is mostly a work of fiction

From Politico: “It’s the most famous diet in the world. It might also be the most misunderstood. “All this is part of the lifestyle of the Mediterranean diet,” the 72-year-old explains serenely, mopping tomato sauce off his plate with a thick hunk of artisanal bread. It’s a beautiful story and a terrific seasoning for our meal. The only problem is it’s not true. Fifty years since the term was coined by the American physiologist Ancel Keys — and a decade and a half after UNESCO recognized it as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity — the Mediterranean diet has become a mishmash of hyperbole, half-truths and howlers, stirred together for political and commercial ends. There are two competing theories on how the Mediterranean diet was born. Both begin with Keys, its founding father. Keys got his start in the world of nutrition in the 1930s, developing a portable provision for United States troops (the famous “K-ration”).

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Continue reading “She co-wrote a scholarly paper when she was nine years old”

From Wikipedia: “At the height of Soviet–Chinese tensions in 1969, Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong ordered the construction of the Underground City. The Underground City was designed to withstand nuclear, biochemical and conventional attacks. The government claimed that the tunnels could accommodate all of Beijing’s six million inhabitants upon its completion. The complex was equipped with facilities such as  restaurants, clinics, schools,  theaters, factories, a roller skating rink, grain and oil warehouses, and a mushroom cultivation farm. Elaborate ventilation systems were installed, with 2,300 shafts that can be sealed off to protect the tunnels’ inhabitants from poison gases. Gas- and water-proof hatches, as well as thick concrete main gates, were constructed to protect the tunnels from fallout.”

Even in one of the world’s newest deserts there are still signs of life

From Noema: “Until the 1960s, the Aral was the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water, covering an area of around 26,300 square miles. Its Uzbek name, Orol Dengizi, meant “Sea of Islands.” In the space of the last six decades it has shrunk to a tenth of its former size, one of the worst ecological disasters in history. Technically an endorheic lake, a body of water with no natural outlet, its existence was dependent on the inflow of two rivers: the Amu Darya and, farther to the north, the Syr Darya. Under Soviet mismanagement, both rivers were diverted into arid steppe to irrigate booming cotton farms. The planners knew what was happening but considered the loss worthwhile; the Aral became what ecologists term a “sacrifice zone.” As the shoreline receded year by year, the water’s salt content increased, causing a mass die-off of aquatic species. The exposed seabed has become the Aralkum, the world’s youngest desert.”

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Continue reading “There’s a huge network of tunnels underneath Beijing”