From The Guardian: “During the second world war, young women broke traditional gender barriers by working in Britain’s forests as part of the Women’s Timber Corps. As many as 15-18,000 young women left home for the first time, aged 17-24, to fell trees with an axe and saw for the war effort. The women could fell 10-tonne trees, carry logs like weight-lifters, work in dangerous sawmills, drive huge timber trucks and calculate timber production figures on which the government depended during wartime. They did exactly the same jobs as the men on less than half the pay. Britain was the largest timber importing nation in the world in 1939, bringing in 96% of its wood. When the war began, home grown timber supplies became vital. Britain needed to produce wood for the coal mines, as well as wood for railway sleepers, telegraph poles, rifle stocks, ship and aircraft construction, and packaging boxes for army supplies.”
A young girl got a life-saving liver transplant and her blood type changed
From The Sydney Morning Herald: “Doctors at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead in Australia called Demi-Lee Brennan a one-in-6 billion miracle. The 15-year-old liver transplant patient was the first person in the world to take on the immune system and blood type of her donor, negating the need to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of her life. Doctors say they have no idea how this happened. Demi-Lee was nine when she contracted a virus that destroyed her liver. She was given less than 48 hours to live when a donated liver from a 12-year-old boy became available. Demi-Lee had a 10-hour operation and was started on a cocktail of immuno-suppressant drugs. Nine months later, when her condition worsened, doctors were shocked to find that her blood type had changed. The head of hematology, Julie Curtin, said she was stunned when she realised Demi-Lee was now O-positive, rather than O-negative.”
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Would you pay almost $10,000 for a hand-carved wooden jigsaw puzzle? Some people do
From Now I Know: “The 100-piece version will cost you $895. Want a 250-piece challenge? You’re looking at a price tag of $2,895. The 1,000-piece version? Five bucks shy of $10,000. And yes, people buy these. The company behind these expensive pieces of pieces is Stave Puzzles, located in the small town of Norwich, Vermont. Stave was founded in 1974 by Steve Richardson and Dave Tibbetts (Steve plus Dave yields “Stave”), two puzzle enthusiasts who wanted to create, in their words, the Rolls-Royce of Puzzles. The puzzles are made of wood and each one, as the Boston Globe reported, is meticulously hand-cut, one piece at a time, by a blade no wider than an eyelash. The pieces are then sanded, polished to shine, and placed inside a thick blue-and-green golden-embossed box. The box doesn’t have a picture of the finished product — part of the joy, if you received the puzzle as a gift, is discovering what you’re building as you build 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.
This Texas town is experimenting with flying taxis and an Uber-style gondola system
From Fast Company: “Sugar Land is located just southwest of Houston; today, it is the sixth-fastest growing city in the U.S., and it is running out of space. With only 4% of land left to build on, the city is looking for innovative transportation solutions—and looking up for answers. Over the past year, Sugar Land has set in motion three big initiatives—one of them is a community microtransit service, the other two involve aerial solutions. Earlier this year, the city partnered with Wisk Aero, a company that has spent the past 14 years developing electric, self-flying taxis, also known as vertical take-off and landing (VTOL). The city is also studying an “autonomous elevated cable and rail mobility system” that would glide above its streets. The system can best be described as an on-demand gondola—a bit like Uber, except instead of a car, it’s a cabin that slides by to pick you up and drop you off at your desired location, with no stops in between.”
Jazz great Duke Ellington’s first passion was baseball and Roosevelt used to watch him play
From Sporting News: “In his memoir, jazz pianist and band leader Duke Ellington recalled playing baseball and having President Teddy Roosevelt ride by on horseback to watch he and his friends play. “There were many open lots around Washington then, and we used to play baseball at an old tennis court on Sixteenth Street,” he recalled. “President Roosevelt would come by on his horse sometimes, and stop and watch us play. When he got ready to go, he would wave and we would wave at him. That was Teddy Roosevelt – just him and his horse, nobody guarding him.” Ellington also remembered that he loved baseball much more than music. “At this point, piano was not my recognized talent. Baseball, football, track, and athletics were what the real he-men were identified with, and so they were naturally the most important to me.” But after an injury on the field, Ellington’s mother convinced him to take piano lessons.
Building a homemade plasma cannon out of two water jugs and a flamethrower
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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