Month: June 2025

From the Journal of Urology: “First century Rome saw the introduction of vectigal urinae, a tax introduced by Roman emperor Vespasian for the collection and distribution of urine, an expensive raw commodity. It was used in the tanning industry, where it was mixed with the hide to soften it, loosen the hairs and dissolve the fat. It was also used as bleach where tunics were immersed in urine and whitened. Wealthy Romans were willing to pay large sums of money for toothpaste in which urine was the key ingredient. It was thought that Roman urine would not be effective but rather Portuguese urine provided an ideal whitening effect, and so large quantities of the ‘stronger’ Portuguese urine were imported for this purpose. It is said that when Vespasian’s son Titus protested against the vectigal urinae, his father held up a gold coin and said “It doesn’t smell!” To this date, Vespasian’s name is associated to public urinals in France (vespasiennes), Italy (vespasiani), and Romania (vespasiene).”

In 1935 the US Army bombed a Hawaiian volcano to stop the lava flow. But did it?

From the USGS: “The eruption in question began on November 21, 1935. Six days later, an unusual breakout at an elevation of 8,500 feet on the north flank of Mauna Loa sent lava to the north. On December 23, fearing that the flow would reach the headwaters of the Wailuku River, which supplied water for the town of Hilo, Thomas Jaggar, founder of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, called on the Army Air Service to bomb the lava flow source. His hope was that the lava tubes or channels could be destroyed, thereby robbing the advancing flow while feeding another flow that would re-cover the same area. The flow was bombed on December 27, and lava stopped flowing during the night or early morning of January 2, 1936. Jaggar publicly praised the Army for its responsiveness and technical accuracy in delivering the bombs to his selected targets. In turn, Jaggar was praised for his successful experiment and saving Hilo. But at least one scientist questioned the effectiveness of the bombing.”

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Continue reading “Urine was so valuable in ancient Rome that there was a toilet tax”

From SFGate: “The evidence of Petro Zailenko’s quiet legacy can be found all over this corner of the Northern California redwood forest. Signs throughout Hendy Woods State Park, nestled deep in Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley along the Navarro River, bear his name and facts — or theories, at least — about him. They say he was a Russian immigrant born in 1914 who may have been wounded and captured by Nazis during World War II. They say that in the late 1950s or early 1960s, he jumped ship from a Russian fishing trawler in San Francisco and made his way north to Anderson Valley. There, he briefly worked at a lumber mill — until, apparently, someone asked to see his immigration papers. That’s when Zailenko fled into the woods, afraid he’d be deported. For the next 18 years, he lived among the redwoods and came to be known locally as the Hermit of Hendy Woods. When he died, the coroner listed his occupation as hermit and his address as a “Hollowed out tree stump in Hendy Woods State Park.”

Crocodiles have an extra aorta in their hearts to help them digest their huge meals

From ABC.au: “Crocodiles and alligators eat so much in a single meal that they need to divert gas-rich blood away from their lungs into their stomachs to digest it, US research suggests. The study, which was conducted in American alligators, shows they can eat 23% of their own mass at once. This is equivalent to a 60 kilogram woman eating 14 kilograms of beef – bones, teeth and all – in one sitting. The scientists focused on the extra left aorta that crocodilians have on the side of their otherwise very mammal-like hearts. Normally, blood pumped by the right side of the heart flows through the reptile’s pulmonary artery into the lungs, where a transfer of carbon dioxide occurs. But when a crocodile or alligator gorges this blood is shunted to the stomach instead. There, the carbon dioxide is converted into gastric acid, a digestive juice, and bicarbonate, which functions as a sort of built-in antacid when the time is right. The gastric acid boost means crocodilians produce 10 times more digestive juice than mammals.”

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 Russian hermit lived for years in a California redwood tree”

From Tempo de Conhecer: “There is a book whose reading — or mere possession — proved fatal for many. Not because it contained subversive ideas but because the object itself was deadly. It is a 19th-century book known as Shadows from the Walls of Death — a dark title for an even more lethal content. The work was published in 1874 by Robert Kedzie, a physician and professor of chemistry in the United States. His goal was not to kill, but to warn. At the time, many household wallpapers contained arsenic-based pigments, especially the famous “Paris green.” The problem was that, over time and with humidity, these pigments released toxic gases, such as arsine, which could cause headaches, vomiting, seizures, and even death. Kedzie collected 86 authentic samples and bound them into a book. People who handled the book without protection began to fall ill, and there were reports of deaths linked to direct exposure to the book’s pages.”

We breathe through only one nostril at a time but scientists aren’t sure why

From Medical Discovery News: “most people don’t realize that when you breathe through your nose, you do so more from one nostril than the other and your body knows to switch to the other nostril every few hours. This nasal cycle is controlled by the autonomic nervous system which also controls things we don’t think about like heart rate and breathing. Our bodies deliberately send more blood to an erectile tissue between the two nostrils to increase its size and direct the air flowing through one of the nostrils. After a few hours, the airflow switches to the other nostril. Why do we do this? Some scientists believe the alternating airflow allows each nostril to maintain optimal moisture levels so no one side gets dried out. It may also protect against respiratory infections or allergies. Others believe it’s tied to our olfaction or sense of smell. It’s possible that the quicker and slower airflow in each nostril optimizes us to the vast range of smells. Some smells take longer to detect and transmit to the brain.

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 book was destroyed because it killed people who read it”

From PBS: “It was Coney Island in the early 1900’s. Beyond the Four-Legged Woman, the sword swallowers, and “Lionel the Lion-Faced Man,” was an entirely different exhibit: rows of tiny, premature human babies living in glass incubators. Barkers, including a young Cary Grant, called out to passersby, enticing visitors to come see the preemies. Visitors paid a few coins to enter and would approach rows of incubators along the wall, peering through the glass windows at the tiny, shriveled preemie babies living inside. The brainchild of this exhibit was Dr. Martin Couney, an enigmatic figure in the history of medicine. A French-born doctor, Couney created and ran incubator-baby exhibits on the island from 1903 to the early 1940s, and though he died in relative obscurity, he is credited with saving the lives of thousands of the country’s premature babies.”

A park ranger on a hike in Texas accidentally discovered a brand new genus of plant

From Atlas Obscura: “Cathy Hoyt, the supervisory park ranger for Big Bend National Park, and volunteer botanist Deb Manley go for walks together once a month around Big Bend, which is in western Texas near the Mexico border. It’s a big park – over 800,000 acres. So in early March of 2024, they went out on their regular monthly walk to go look at some plants, but then they saw something they didn’t recognize. It was very small, less than the size of a quarter, tiny and fuzzy, with little ribbon-like flowers sticking up out of the middle that had pink and white stripes on them.  So the first thing Manley did was consult a guidebook to plants in the area called, Flowering Plants of Trans-Pecos Texas and Adjacent Areas. But it wasn’t in there. Then she tried putting photos of this fuzzy little plant up on an app called iNaturalist, but nobody recognized it.”

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 “Baby incubators started as part of a Coney Island sideshow”

From Der Spiegel: “It’s two hours after midnight. The extreme mountaineer Kristin Harila is trudging through the death zone on K2, the second tallest mountain in the world, following the beam of her headlamp. To her left, the mountainside plunges almost vertically, hundreds of meters into the depths. Above her on the right is an enormous hanging glacier groaning and cracking menacingly in the freezing cold. She is only about 400 meters from the top. One final steep ascent and Harila will have reached her goal. The Norwegian woman is aiming to complete a staggering, record-breaking project. Within just three months, she has climbed all of the highest mountains in the Himalaya and Karakorum. When she reaches the peak of K2, Harila will have summitted all 14 8,000-meter peaks on the planet, faster than anyone ever before. But suddenly, their path is blocked. A man is hanging there from a rope. He is upside down.”

Scientists have discovered a superconductor hidden inside pencil lead

From SciTechDaily: “MIT scientists have identified a bizarre new material: a superconductor that also acts like a magnet. Using a special stacking of graphene layers from graphite, they observed this dual behavior — something thought to be impossible until now. For over a century, scientists believed that magnets and superconductors were fundamentally incompatible, like mixing oil with water. But a groundbreaking discovery from MIT physicists is now turning that idea on its head. In a recent study published in Nature, the research team revealed something remarkable: a new material called a chiral superconductor. It carries electricity with zero resistance, and it’s magnetic. This strange combination has never been observed in such a direct way before. Even more surprising? The researchers found this exotic behavior in a very familiar substance: graphite, the same material used in ordinary pencil lead.”

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 “Dozens of climbers walked past a man who was dying on K2”

I’ve never met Marc Andreessen, although at one time in the distant past we were Twitter friends — I enjoyed the long threads he used to do, and I wrote about a few of them at Gigaom in a previous lifetime (including one about how newspapers should “burn the boats” by getting rid of their print operations). I recall thanking him a number of years ago on the anniversary of the creation of Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, something I also wrote about recently at The Torment Nexus. And I’ve been thinking a lot lately (as I’m sure many other people are) about the future of the open web — something I also wrote about in another recent Torment Nexus newsletter. So it was interesting to come across an interview that Andreessen did with his a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz, in which he talked about his life before the web, and how he came to work at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Illinois, which started him on the path towards eventually becoming a billionaire venture capitalist.

I’m aware that being a billionaire — especially a tech billionaire — is somewhat problematic in this day and age, for a variety of reasons, and I know that some people think Marc is an bad person for other reasons. I don’t really have much to say about any of that, except to say that I don’t think being wealthy is inherently bad (although many wealthy people seem determined to prove me wrong), and I have no idea whether he is using his money for good or evil, or some combination of the two. All I know is that his invention of a graphical web browser (and subsequent iterations of it, like Netscape) changed my life, as it changed millions or possibly billions of other people’s lives around the world. So it was interesting to me to hear about how it came about, and along the way it reinforced one of my mottos, which is a variation on “better to be lucky than smart.” My version is: “it’s better to have good timing than be smart, but if possible, do both.”

Andreessen was clearly a good programmer, but he also happened to be in exactly the right place at the right time, and he hitched his wagon to an unassuming rock that would become a hurtling meteor, namely the internet and Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of hyperlinking and the web. This is reinforced throughout his discussion with Ben. As both note, he was a farm kid from the boonies in Wisconsin, more familiar with tractors than programming. But he was interested in computers and wound up at the University of Champaign-Urbana in Illinois and got a job at the NCSA, where they had some of the best computers — and the best internet connectivity — in the world. So there’s young Marc, using a Unix workstation that cost $50,000 in 1992 dollars (equivalent to about $115,000 now), with a fat internet connection from the NSFnet, which he gives credit to former vice-president Al Gore for helping to create.

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 “How Marc Andreessen and I (and you) created the web”

From the New York Times: “Interpol had been looking for a disgraced finance executive for weeks when Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist, found him, hiding in Belarus. He identified the secret police agents behind one of the most high-profile assassination plots of all: the 2020 poisoning of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. That revelation put Grozev in President Vladimir Putin’s cross hairs. He wanted Grozev killed, and to make it happen the Kremlin turned to none other than the fugitive financier, who had been recruited by Russian intelligence. The fugitive enlisted a team to begin the surveillance. The members of that team are behind bars now. The financier lives in Moscow, where several times a week he makes visits to the headquarters of the Russian secret police. Grozev — still very much alive — imagines the man trying to explain to his supervisors why he failed in his mission.”

He won the Nobel Prize for physics and then he changed his mind

From The Atlantic: “Adam Riess was 27 years old when he began the work that earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics, and just 41 when he received it. Earlier this year, Riess, who is now 55, pulled a graph-paper notebook off a bookshelf in his office at Johns Hopkins University so that I could see the yellowing page on which he’d made his famous calculations. He told me how these pen scratches led to a new theory of the universe. And then he told me why he now thinks that theory might be wrong. For nearly a century, astronomers have known that the universe is expanding, because the galaxies that we can see around us through telescopes are all rushing away. Riess studied how they moved. He very carefully measured the distance of each one from Earth, and when all the data came together, in 1998, the results surprised him. The galaxies were receding more quickly than expected. This “immediately suggested a profound conclusion,” he said.

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 “The man that Vladimir Putin couldn’t kill”

From MIT: “Arnhildur Pálmadóttir was around three years old when she saw a red sky from her living room window. A volcano was erupting about 25 miles away from where she lived on the northeastern coast of Iceland. Though it posed no immediate threat, its ominous presence seeped into her subconscious, populating her dreams with streaks of light in the night sky. Fifty years later, these “gloomy, strange dreams,” as Pálmadóttir now describes them, have led to a career as an architect with an extraordinary mission: to harness molten lava and build cities out of it. Pálmadóttir today lives in Reykjavik, where she runs her own architecture studio and the Icelandic branch of the Danish architecture company Lendager, which specializes in reusing building materials. The architect believes the lava that flows from a single eruption could yield enough building material to lay the foundations of an entire city. She has been researching this possibility for more than five years as part of a project she calls Lavaforming.”

Amelia Earhart was pushed to make riskier flights by her publicity-hungry husband

From The New Yorker: “Rather then spending time practicing in the powerful Electra, Earhart had been crisscrossing the country, giving lectures, making sponsorship appearances, and attending promotional events. For a while, she had a gig as the aviation editor at Cosmopolitan, in which she published a column about flying; she also launched a line of pilot-inspired women’s clothing. Seen from today’s perspective, Earhart was at once a pioneering aviator and a proto-influencer. Her husband of half a dozen years, George Palmer Putnam publicly blamed a blown tire, skirting any mention of pilot error. An heir to the Putnam publishing empire, he was more than Earhart’s husband; he was her manager, dealmaker, and publicist. Some found him dashing, but others thought of him as a hustler. He’d launched Earhart into fame with that Atlantic crossing in 1928 with the intention of publishing a quickie memoir.”

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 “This Icelandic architect wants to build cities out of lava”

From Damn Interesting: “Paris, 29 May 1832. All through the night, a young Frenchman named Évariste Galois stayed awake, quill in hand, frantically scrawling notes and equations across dozens of sheets of paper. He had only been studying mathematics seriously for a few years, but he had proven to be a veritable prodigy. After quickly exhausting the knowledge of his teachers, he’d branched out into his own research, extraordinarily prescient. By all rights, Galois ought to have been lauded and laurelled by the scientific community for his work. Above all, he should have been recognised and rewarded by France’s prestigious Academy of Sciences. But Galois⁠—at least, by his own reckoning⁠—had received little but dismissal from the mathematics community. Now he sat feverishly scribbling, trying to commit as many of his ideas to paper as possible.”

Williams Syndrome is like reverse autism: people who have it are almost too friendly

From the BBC: “Imagine walking down the street and feeling an overwhelming love and warmth for every single person that you met. That is a familiar experience for people with Williams Syndrome, a rare genetic condition that affects approximately 1 in 7,500 individuals. People with WS, often dubbed the ‘opposite of autism’, have an innate desire to hug and befriend total strangers. They are extremely affectionate, empathetic, talkative and gregarious. But there is a downside to being so friendly. Individuals often struggle to retain close friendships and are prone to isolation and loneliness. People with WS are also sometimes too open and trusting towards strangers, not realising when they are in danger, leaving them vulnerable to abuse and bullying. “It’s very easy for someone to fool a person with Williams Syndrome and take advantage of them, because they are so trusting,” says Alysson Muotri, a professor of paediatrics and cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California.”

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 “While plotting a revolution he also reinvented algebra”