Month: June 2025

From Engora: “A spy, a scoundrel, and a scholar — William Playfair was all three. He led an extraordinary life at the heart of many of the great events of the 18th and 19th centuries, mostly in morally dubious roles. Among all the intrigue, scandal, and indebtedness, he found time to invent the bar and pie charts, and make pioneering use of line charts. Playfair had always been a good writer and good at explaining data. He’d produced several books and pamphlets, and by the mid-1790s, he was trying to earn a living at it. But things didn’t go too well, and he ended up imprisoned for debt in the notorious Fleet Prison (released in 1802). There were no official government spying agencies at the time, but the British government quite happily paid for freelancers to do it. He discovered the secrets of the breakthrough French semaphore system while living in Frankfurt and handed them over to the British government in the mid-1790s.”

The 400-year old mystery of Roanoke may have finally been solved

From Fox Digital: “A team of researchers believes they may have cracked one of America’s most enduring legends: Where did the settlers of the Roanoke Colony go? Known as the Lost Colony, it was the first English settlement attempt in the United States. A group of over 100 colonists settled on North Carolina’s Roanoke Island in 1587, led by Sir Walter Raleigh. John White, the governor of the colony, returned to England for supplies in 1587. When he came back to Roanoke Island in August 1590, he found the settlement mysteriously abandoned – and all the colonists, including his daughter Eleanor Dare and his granddaughter Virginia Dare, gone. One of the only clues remaining at the site was the word “CROATOAN” carved into a palisade, which might referred to Croatoan Island, which is now called Hatteras Island, or the Croatoan Indians. The mystery has haunted Americans and Brits for the past four centuries.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “He was a spy and a scam artist who also invented the bar chart”

From Flaming Hydra: “The best-kept secret in the history of Marvel Comics was in high dudgeon by the time he sat down at his typewriter. It was a July afternoon in 1971, and Ron Whyte, a playwright and activist, was about to hammer out an ill-advised letter. Truth be told, there may have been some pills involved: he had just finished the 15-minute ordeal of strapping on the prosthetics that he had used to walk since the age of 20, when the doctors had amputated what remained of his legs, and he’d long since relied on a variety of drugs for help with the pain he experienced as a gay, poor, legally blind, paraplegic double amputee. What we know is that Ron Whyte was at Marvel Comics in 1966, where he worked with Stan Lee and Roy Thomas. And curiously,  in the large collection of Ron Whyte’s papers at Yale University there are scripts for some of the most storied and beloved comics — comics eventually published in Stan Lee’s name.”

Two hundred thousand eggs disappeared and then came the ransom note

From the Washington Post: “The hens were unaware of the heist. Before the product of their labor was an item on a police report, it was a shipment headed from Maryland to Florida: 280,000 brown eggs. They belonged to Cal-Maine Foods, which boasts being number one in the pecking order of egg supply. About 1 of every 5 eggs sold in America are laid by a Cal-Maine hen. They line the refrigerated shelves of Walmarts, Costcos and other supermarkets, labeled Eggland’s Best, Land O’Lakes and other brands. By gobbling up its competitors, Cal-Maine built an egg empire without most egg eaters knowing the company’s name. But by the April afternoon when the 280,000 eggs left the farm, that was beginning to change. A winter spike in bird flu was widely seen as the cause of empty shelves and eggs doubling or tripling in price.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “A gay paraplegic had a key role in the early days of Marvel”

From the BBC: “A man hoping to become the first person to complete an unbroken round-the-world walk is preparing for the last leg of his journey. Karl Bushby set off from Chile in 1998. Since then he has walked across American and Asian continents, swam 186 miles across the Caspian Sea and fought off ice lumps and polar bears through the Bering Strait, all without using any form of transport. The former paratrooper has less than 2,000 miles left to walk before he arrives at his home city of Hull. Mr Bushby, who is currently in Mexico waiting for a visa to complete his challenge, has said returning home will be a very strange place to be after being away for some 27 years. Following his 31-day swim across the Caspian Sea last year, Mr Bushby said he continued his journey to Azerbaijan and then through to Turkey. The traveller said he had to step aside from his mission, named the Goliath Expedition, while he waited for a visa.”

This former New York fashion photographer abandoned the city for life off the grid

From the New York Times: “Early in 2007, John Wells, a former fashion and catalog photographer, sold the farmhouse he’d renovated in Columbia County, N.Y., paid off his debts, canceled his credit cards and headed to the West Texas desert. There, he settled on a 40-acre plot near a ghost town called Terlingua, 30 miles from the Mexican border — a raw and rocky terrain of mesquite and desert juniper known locally as the Moonscape.There were no paved roads, no electricity and no water. Mr. Wells, who was then 48, chose the property because he could see no other dwellings.He was there to hash out life on his own terms, off the grid, to tame the rough environment to suit his own minimal needs, like a modern-day Thoreau.He called his new home the Southwest Texas Alternative Energy and Sustainable Living Field Laboratory, or the Field Lab for short, and began to chronicle his adventures on a blog.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “He started walking around the world 27 years ago”

From Nautilus: “The 60-year-old man lying on the street, as far as anyone knew, was just a janitor hit by a drunk driver. There was no mention of it on the local news, no obituary in the morning paper. His name might have been Anonymous. But it wasn’t. His name was Peter Putnam. He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr, and two blocks from the crash, in his run-down apartment, where his partner, Claude, was startled by a screech, were thousands of typed pages containing a groundbreaking new theory of the mind. “Only two or three times in my life have I met thinkers with insights so far reaching, a breadth of vision so great, and a mind so keen as Putnam’s,” Wheeler said in 1991. And Wheeler, who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” had worked alongside some of the greatest minds in science. Robert Works Fuller, a physicist, told me in 2012, “Putnam really should be regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century.”

The word bear was coined because people were afraid to call them by their real name

From Now I Know: “The word bear is derived from the Proto-Germanic term ‘beron,’ meaning ‘the brown one.’ It’s not all that uncommon for words to be derived from descriptive terms; the initial names of things have to come from somewhere, after all. But bear is somewhat special because, apparently, ‘beron’ wasn’t the animal’s first name. Rather, according to linguistic experts, the term ‘beron’ is a euphemism for the animal’s original name. Our ancestors were so worried about bears, they didn’t even want to name them because they feared the bears might overhear and come after them. So they came up with this word bruin, meaning “the brown one” as a euphemism, and then bruin segued into bear. We know the euphemism, but we don’t know what word it replaced, so bear is the oldest-known euphemism. Some linguists believe the original term was a variation on the word ‘htrkos,’ a reference to the Arctic.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “He changed brain science while working as a janitor”

From Science Alert: “Nearly two decades ago, an experiment floating high above Antarctica caught a weird signal. Designed to capture the radio spurts of cosmic rays falling from above, in 2006 the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) recorded a short pulse of radio waves from below – an event that looked like an upside-down shower of cosmic rays, not bouncing off the surface, but emanating from under the ice sheet. The balloon-borne suite of instruments recorded a similar event in 2014, and scientists have been scratching their heads ever since. No explanation quite fits, suggesting that the culprit could be a particle unknown to science. Scientists thought a neutrino may come from a supernova that then tunnels its way right through Earth and comes out the other side. However, only the 2014 detection coincided with a supernova that could be responsible – no such event was found for 2006.”

Niels Bohr didn’t have a beer pipeline to his house but he did get a lot of free beer

From Beerena: “The Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 and helped develop the first atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project, had a long and successful scientific career. As a reward for his hard work, the Danish brewery Carlsberg gave him a house with an installed beer pipeline, so that he could enjoy free beer for the rest of his life. The only problem with that story is that it’s not entirely true. Bohr moved into the honorary Carlsberg residence in 1932, which was originally built for Jacob Christian Jacobsen, the founder of the Carlsberg brewery. The house was not given to him, but he had the right to use it for the rest of his life. After moving into the house, a representative of the brewery stopped by and asked him how many beers a day he wanted to be delivered to him. Bohr said: 12, thinking of bottles, but the brewery started delivering 12 crates of beer to him every day to him, and that arrangement lasted for a while until the misunderstanding was corrected.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Strange radio signals detected from deep under Antarctica”

From Futurism: “A flurry of activity at pizza delivery outlets near the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, is a surprisingly accurate predictor of war, as hungry military leadership hunkers down to monitor unfolding military activities. As painstakingly documented by X account Pentagon Pizza Report, a “busier than usual” indicator on the Google Maps profile of the Domino’s in Arlington has been associated with major acts of war taking place around the world. Most recently, the franchise received an onslaught of orders just before closing last night — almost perfectly coinciding with Israel’s devastating attack on Iran. Even long before the advent of live, GPS-based customer tracking on Google Maps, famished Pentagon workers have long given away that there’s something much darker going on by ordering copious numbers of pies. “The Pentagon Pizza Index has been a surprisingly reliable predictor of seismic global events — from coups to wars — since the 1980s,” wrote The Economist‘s head of data journalism.

You’ve never heard of her but she has played bass guitar on thousands of pop hits

From Wikipedia: “Carol Kaye is one of the most prolific recorded bass guitarists in rock and pop music, playing on an estimated 10,000 recordings in a career spanning over 65 years. Kaye began playing guitar in her early teens; after some time as a guitar teacher, she began to perform regularly on the Los Angeles jazz and big band circuit. She started session work in 1957, and through a connection at Gold Star Studios began working for producers Phil Spector and Brian Wilson. After a bassist failed to turn up to a session in 1963, she switched to that instrument, quickly making a name for herself as one of the most in-demand session players of the 1960s, playing on numerous hits. She moved into playing on film soundtracks in the late 1960s, particularly for Quincy Jones and Lalo Schifrin. During the peak of her years of session work, Kaye became part of a stable of Los Angeles–based musicians known as The Wrecking Crew.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “You can tell war is imminent by the Pentagon’s pizza orders”

From Luxury London: “Hidden under enormous shoulder pads and bleach blonde hair, Joan Hannington, who would go on to be dubbed the ‘Godmother’ of London’s criminal network, was one of the world’s most notorious jewel thieves. Her story epitomes the rag to riches trope, having been born in 1957 to an Irish working class family and raised as one of six in London’s East End. Her childhood was brutal, marked by physical and emotional abuse, and led her to dream of a life outside of poverty. Her criminal journey didn’t start until she finally fled her violent father – who, at one point, tried to drown Hannington and her siblings in a bath – at just 13. Four years later, she married convicted armed robber Ray Pavey and the couple had a daughter, who was swiftly swept into foster care. It was this event that triggered Hannington’s criminal career, as she embarked on a mission to earn enough money to get her daughter back by faking references to land a job at an exclusive jewellery store in west London.”

Beneath a farmer’s field they found a cave network that is over 10 kilometres long

From UnHerd: “Making progress in this part of the cave requires immense care, for on almost every surface, walls, floor and roof, gleaming white formations sprout, some of them very fragile. To stumble here would be to smash natural marvels that have been growing in the silent darkness for many thousands of years. Some think the cave was formed before the Wye adopted its present course. There are great crystalline banks and stalactites and stalagmites adorned with tangled, calcite filigrees — what cavers call helictites — as if made of Venetian glass. Sated, after taking photographs we headed for the entrance, aware that reaching it would take at least five hours: The White Forest is not only beautiful, but remote. In all, we were underground for nearly 12 hours. The total length of Redhouse Lane now looks certain to exceed ten kilometres, and if the explorers make the connection to the nearby Slaughter Stream Cave, this will take their combined length to more than 24 kilometres.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “She looked like a matron but was really a notorious jewel thief”

From the WSJ: “A tiny Pentagon office had spent months investigating conspiracy theories about secret Washington UFO programs when it uncovered a shocking truth: At least one of those theories had been fueled by the Pentagon itself. The congressionally ordered probe took investigators back to the 1980s, when an Air Force colonel visited a bar near Area 51, a top-secret site in the Nevada desert. He gave the owner photos of what might be flying saucers. The photos went up on the walls, and into the local lore went the idea that the U.S. military was secretly testing recovered alien technology. But the colonel was on a mission—of disinformation. The photos were doctored, the now-retired officer confessed to the Pentagon investigators in 2023. The whole exercise was a ruse to protect what was really going on at Area 51: The Air Force was using the site to develop top-secret stealth fighters, viewed as a critical edge against the Soviet Union. Military leaders were worried that the programs might get exposed if locals somehow glimpsed a test flight of, say, the F-117 stealth fighter, an aircraft that truly did look out of this world. Better that they believe it came from Andromeda.”

There’s a Japanese art that is like bonsai but for rocks instead of trees

From Why Is This Interesting: “Suiseki, the Japanese art of collecting and displaying viewing stones, is centuries old, and originated in China. There, the art form is known as gongshi (“scholar’s stones”) and seeks to provide viewers with stones selected for their tasteful asymmetry, evocative textures, and even resonance when struck. In Suiseki, the stones are similarly chosen for their majesty and evocative qualities, representing landscapes and objects. Much like bonsai, the presentation of these viewing stones is part of their narrative allure. Known as daiza, their bases seek to present the stones in various ways: nestled in sand, perched in custom dishes, or placed in specially carved wooden bases, the stone’s natural grooves gracefully seating in the recess. A suiseiki is traditionally a part of a set, and alongside its base is its storage box (kiri-bako), which often includes the stone’s place of origin (such as the Kamo river), and lineage of historical provenance. Having a complete set commands a premium for collectors, with a recent furuyaishi stone fetching $38,000 at auction.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “UFO myths were compounded by Pentagon disinformation”

This isn’t an AI newsletter per se, in the sense that I don’t always write about it. That said, however, I do write about it fairly often, mostly because I don’t think there’s anything else happening right now — apart from maybe crypto — that blends the surprising and the terrifying and the confusing and the potentially evil so perfectly as AI. That’s the Torment Nexus sweet spot! (You can find out why I called the newsletter that in this post, in case you don’t know the story already). Is the kind of artificial intelligence — or whatever you want to call it — that we see all around us now an incredible technological advancement? No doubt about it. Regardless of what you think of AI’s current abilities or potential, it’s still mind-boggling to think of how far we have come in the three years since ChatGPT and other tools first appeared on the scene. Are they intelligent in any real sense of that word? Sure. Are they conscious? Who knows. Is AI an unalloyed good? Of course not. Does it spell doom for mankind as we know it? Maybe, but probably not.

I’m not here to take sides in the “Is AI Good Or Evil” debate, to be honest. There are people much smarter than me who already have both sides of that covered, and most of them (although not all) have a much deeper understanding of the technology and its limits than I do. In fact, one of the things I find so fascinating about AI right now is that there is so much disagreement even within the field itself, and even among those who helped create the technology we are currently using, like former University of Toronto professor and former Google AI staffer Geoffrey Hinton and Meta chief technologist Yann LeCun and McGill University lecturer Yoshua Bengio. Are we close to AGI? Geoff says yes, Yann says no (and prominent AI critic Gary Marcus says hell no). Does AI pose a mortal danger to humanity as we know it? Yoshua and Geoff both say yes, Yann says no. I’ve written about this before, and also about the question of AI and consciousness.

In the same vein, I was interested to see two recent studies of AI that seemed to point in completely opposite directions. In one, published by Apple’s Machine Learning Research project and titled The Illusion of Thinking, scientists raised some significant doubts about AI’s “intelligence,” pointing out that even the latest more sophisticated AI engines from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and DeepSeek couldn’t solve — or took much longer than they should have to solve — a puzzle that an eight-year-old could probably figure out without too much trouble (a block and peg puzzle known as the Tower of Hanoi). They seemed to have a tough time with some other simple puzzles as well, including the “river crossing” puzzle, in which the test subject has to get three conflicting objects (fox, chicken, and bag of grain) from one bank to another even though they can only take two at a time. In fact, the AI engines had difficulty even after the researchers gave them clues that pointed towards the solution! Here’s a summary of the paper:

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Is AI smarter than we are or stupider than we are? Yes”