From ProPublica: “Early last year, Matthew Allison could be found at the Space Banana dance club, awkwardly swaying to his own beat. Clutching the cheapest house beer, he’d greet people with a bear hug, a broad grin and his familiar, “Yo, bro!” salutations. Allison, then a 37-year-old convenience store worker and Saturday-night DJ, seemed to like everyone he met in Boise, Idaho’s small electronic dance music scene. And most people seemed to like him back. He was so gentle, former friends remember, that for a time he eschewed honey so as not to cause harm to bees. He was “a little goofy,” a former friend, Tyler Whitt, recalled. But that lovable persona hid a more sinister core. When he was behind his computer screen, Allison used the handle BTC, short for BanThisChannel, he told ProPublica. On the social media and messaging platform Telegram, authorities say, Allison was a key figure in a network of white supremacist and neo-Nazi chat groups and channels known as Terrorgram.”
He nearly drowned on his way to inventing the ubiquitous side-release buckle
From Tedium: “I’ve been thinking a lot about fasteners, especially side-release clamps. You know the kind. The plastic buckles where you use two fingers to press in, and the two pieces of plastic disconnect from one another. It’s everywhere, and this is probably the first time you’ve heard someone talk about it. Who came up with the idea of side-release clamps? Surprisingly for an object of such ubiquity, the answer is simple: It was conceived by just one inventor, a guy who shares a name with a hero plucked from the funnies. Dick Tracy of Illinois has explained how a white-water rafting incident got him thinking about the importance of easy-access latches. At the time, hiking backpacks had stabilizing chest straps that were loop-through—and hard to remove with a single hand. Fortunately for him, he was in a position to do something about it. He worked for Illinois Tool Works (ITW), a major manufacturing firm, and he had been tasked with coming up with new product lines that could bring in millions of dollars.”
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A Canadian city blocks street for weeks so tiny salamanders can cross
From the Washington Post: “Traffic on a busy roadway in Canada has halted for several weeks — not due to construction or road repairs, but to protect a tiny, slithery creature: the Jefferson salamander. The city of Burlington, about 37 miles southwest of Toronto, has closed off a portion of King Road for the past 13 years to make way for the annual migration of the Jefferson salamander, which is endangered in Ontario. The road was closed on March 12 and will remain blocked until April 9. Jefferson salamanders are about four to eight inches long, and they are gray or brown in color, often with blue flecks. The species is native to the northeastern and midwestern United States, where it is not endangered, but in southern Canada, it is facing “imminent extinction.” Jefferson salamanders spend most of their time underground in forest areas, but in the spring, they emerge and relocate to their breeding ponds, known as vernal pools, which fill up with water in the spring and dry up by the summer.”
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.
The foundations of modern physics were laid by scholars trying to understand angels
From Aeon: “Before the discovery of gravity, energy or magnetism, it was unclear why the cosmos behaved in the way it did, and angels were one way of accounting for the movement of physical entities. While most physicists would now balk at angelic forces as an explanation of any natural phenomena, without the medieval belief in angels, physics today might look very different. Even when belief in angels later dissipated, modern physicists continued to posit incorporeal intelligences to help explain the inexplicable. Malevolent angelic forces (ie, demons) have appeared in compelling thought experiments across the history of physics. These well-known ‘demons of physics’ served as useful placeholders, helping physicists find scientific explanations for only vaguely imagined solutions. Angels also catalysed ferociously precise debates about the nature of place, bodies and motion, which would inspire something like a modern conceptual toolbox for physicists, honing concepts such as space and dimension.”
Famous artificial intelligence theorist Marvin Minsky also invented the Useless Machine
From Wikipedia: “Marvin Minsky, an American cognitive and computer scientist who helped pioneer the development of artificial intelligence through his work on neural networks, also designed a famous example of a “useless machine,” a device whose only function is to turn itself off. Such machines were popularized commercially in the 1960s, sold as an amusing engineering hack, or as a joke. Minsky designed a version of the useless machine that became famous in information theory — basically a box with a simple switch which, when turned “on”, causes a hand or lever to appear from inside the box that switches the machine “off” before disappearing inside the box again. Minsky’s mentor at Bell Labs, information theory pioneer Claude Shannon, made his own versions of the machine. Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke later wrote, “There is something unspeakably sinister about a machine that does nothing—absolutely nothing—except switch itself off”, and he was fascinated by the concept.”
Riding a bicycle on a string
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
@mathewi 👀