From CBC: “Snowball fighting is a Canadian tradition which can run from the impromptu raid on passing pedestrians to an all-out war. It’s also an international sport. Yukigassen, a Japanese word for “snow battle”, takes a schoolyard snowball fight, and adds precision, professionalism, and competition. Players describe Yukigassen as a combination of dodge ball and paintball. A high intensity sport that requires skill and team work. A form of moving chess. Competitive Yukigassen originated in the late 1980’s in the town of Sobetsu, Japan, at the foot of a smouldering volcano on the northern island of Hokkaido. Yukigassen is played on a 36×10 m court with seven obstacles or “bunkers” and a flag at each end. Each game has two teams of seven players face-off for three sets of three minutes each. The first team to win two rounds takes the match.”
How an evangelical arts-and-crafts empire stole thousands of ancient artifacts
From Off Topic: “If you live in the continental United States, you’ve almost certainly seen a Hobby Lobby before. There are over 1000 locations, and more often than not, they’re hulking establishments. Through the sale of countless buttons and sequins and knitting needle sets in the aisles of these behemoths, the Green family – the sole owners of the Hobby Lobby empire – have accrued the sort of vast fortune necessary to purchase priceless antiquities wholesale. This begs an obvious question. The cuneiform texts of an ancient Mesopotamian people should, in theory, hold little interest to an arts and crafts vendor based in the midwestern United States. So why, exactly, would Hobby Lobby shell out millions of dollars to get their hands on stone tablets crafted so many years ago? To grasp the rationale, it’s necessary to understand the values the Green family holds close to its heart. Early on, David Green adopted a Christian capitalist worldview centered around personal wealth as a precision tool to carry out God’s will.”
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Indiana’s House of Representatives once voted unanimously to change the value of pi
From Scientific American: “An ancient problem known as “squaring the circle” stumped mathematicians for more than 2,000 years. During that time, professionals and amateurs alike unknowingly published thousands of false proofs claiming to resolve it. The task seems straightforward, but a solution remained surprisingly elusive. In 1894 physician and mathematical dabbler Edward J. Goodwin believed he had found one. He felt so proud of his discovery that, in 1897, he drew up a bill for his home state of Indiana to enshrine what he thought was a mathematical proof into law. In exchange, he would allow the state to use his proof without paying royalties. At least three major red flags should have prompted lawmakers to regard Goodwin with skepticism. Among other errors, it claimed that pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, is 3.2 rather than the well-established 3.14159…. Yet, in a bizarre legislative oversight, the Indiana House of Representatives passed the bill in a unanimous vote.”
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.
Meet the man who says he finds musical melodies in the world of mushrooms
From Atlas Obscura: “In a pleasant December morning, Tarun Nayar was at a mangrove reserve in Mumbai, where he plugged his synthesizer into a thick leaf. The sound that emerged was hypnotic and otherworldly, blending a sense of the future with nostalgic echoes of 1980s synthwave. It felt like something right out of Stranger Things. Nayar is not your traditional musician—he’s a fungi whisperer. By connecting cables from his custom-built modular synthesizers to mushrooms, fruits, and leaves, he transforms their natural bioelectric signals into captivating sounds. During his performances, he works with focused precision, adjusting the knobs and buttons to fine-tune the rhythmic and peculiar sounds that are created. Over the last five years, Nayar has jammed with myriad types of fungi, including trumpet-shaped chanterelles and the glorious, red-roofed fly agaric mushrooms. He has also collaborated with a giant ficus tree, sword ferns, a pineapple, and even the odd-looking citrus fruit called Buddha’s Hand.”
An anthropologist argued the key to human development was the invention of the handbag
From the Yale Review: “The fossil record has created bias toward the stone tool, often a weapon, making it hard to imagine any other potential technologies. But Fisher argues that a woman’s invention of the carrier bag was the take-off point for the quantum advance which created the multiplier effect that led to humanity. Her argument is simple: our ancestors were nomadic; the earliest proof of permanently settled communities appears roughly twelve thousand years ago, which is recent. Human babies became unusually dependent on their parents. What would prompt our transforming minds to fashion a new object from a found material? To alter the verdant consensus of our surroundings? Did we need a spear, a blade? No. What we needed was much more urgent. We required a flexible container, allowing us to roam, to hold on to what we encountered, to carry seeds. We needed to move around with our babies and keep our hands free.”
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
I have the future gold medal winner here