Month: September 2025

From Slate: “29-year-old Taylor Stanberry was the grand prize winner at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s 2025 Florida Python Challenge. The 10-day competition is a conservation event held in the Everglades to fight the invasive Burmese python population in South Florida. The pythons are believed to have been initially introduced through the pet trade and are now  threatening the native wildlife. (All captured snakes are killed.) Stanberry caught 60 pythons — three times the number of last year’s winner — and collected $10,000. “Everyone thinks that pythons just throw themselves at me because I post the good moments online,” Stanberry said, “but every night is hit-or-miss. I could go to the same area seven days in a row — one night I might catch nothing, and another night, I could nab 10 pythons in an hour. I just catch them with my bare hands — no equipment or anything.”

This cassette tape made of DNA can store every piece of music that has ever been recorded

From New Scientist: “Retro cassette tapes may be making a comeback, with a DNA twist. While DNA has been used as an information storage medium before, researchers have now combined this with the convenience and look of a 1980s cassette tape, creating what they are calling a DNA cassette.Xingyu Jiang at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Guangdong, China, and his colleagues created the cassette by printing synthetic DNA molecules on to a plastic tape. “We can design its sequence so that the order of the DNA bases (A, T, C, G) represents digital information, just like 0s and 1s in a computer,” he says. This means it can store any type of digital file, whether text, image, audio or video. While a traditional cassette tape could boast around 12 songs on each side, 100 metres of the new DNA cassette tape can hold more than 3 billion pieces of music, at 10 megabytes a song. The total data storage capacity is 36 petabytes of data – equivalent to 36,000 terabyte hard drives.”

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 caught 60 pythons with her bare hands and won $10,000”

From Nautilus: “Five years ago, when neurosurgeon Marcelo Galarza saw images from jazz guitarist Pat Martino’s cerebral MRI, he was astonished. “I couldn’t believe how much of his left temporal lobe had been removed,” he said. Martino had brain surgery in 1980 to remove a tangle of malformed veins and arteries. At the time he was one of the most celebrated guitarists in jazz. Yet few people knew that Martino suffered epileptic seizures, crushing headaches, and depression. Locked in psychiatric wards, he withstood debilitating electroshock therapy. It wasn’t until 2007 that Martino had an MRI and not until recently that neuroscientists published their analyses of the images. Galarza’s astonishment, like that of medical scientists and music fans, arises from the fact that Martino recovered from surgery with a significant portion of his brain and his memory and other skills gone, but his guitar skills intact.”

If you buy shark meat in the US there’s a good chance it comes from an endangered species

From Phys.org: “A new study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has uncovered that shark meat sold in U.S. grocery stores, seafood markets, and online vendors often comes from endangered species and is frequently mislabeled. Researchers purchased and DNA barcoded 29 shark meat products to determine their species identity, finding that 93% of samples were ambiguously labeled and included meat from 11 different shark species. Among the species identified were the great hammerhead and scalloped hammerhead, both listed as Critically Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Despite global declines in shark populations, their meat was being sold to American consumers, sometimes for as little as $2.99 per pound. In their study published in Frontiers in Marine Science, the researchers found that of the 29 products tested, 27 were labeled simply as “shark” or “mako shark.”

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 had part of his brain removed but his musical ability remained”

When AI engines or LLMs (large-language models) such as ChatGPT started to become popular, one of the main concerns some people had was the widespread crawling and indexing of content that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic engaged in while training these models, and that this is a form of theft. As some readers are probably aware, I’ve written about this before for previous editions of The Torment Nexus, and I’ve argued that instead of theft or copyright infringement, this kind of indexing should be considered a fair use under US copyright law, just as Google’s scanning of millions of physical books was, because of the transformative nature of that use (one of the four factors that judges have to consider in order to make a fair-use ruling). There have been a couple of court decisions that suggest this might become legal precedent — with certain restrictions — but the Supreme Court has yet to weigh in on the question.

In addition to the numerous copyright-infringement lawsuits that have been launched by authors, publishers, and newspaper owners like the New York Times (which tried to negotiate a payment-for-indexing deal with OpenAI but failed to reach an agreement on price), there have been a number of attempts to foil the scraping and indexing bots that AI companies use to hoover up content. Some are of the “spanner in the spokes” variety, like the Iocaine Project, named after the tasteless poison in the movie The Princess Bride (Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line!). It is an open-source program that allows website owners to trap AI bots and scrapers in a kind of garbage-infested dead-end, where they are forced to go around and around indexing nonsense in a maze with no exit. Other attempts to foil the bots are a little more sophisticated, and Cloudflare has come up with several. But is the solution worse than the problem?

In case you’re not familiar with Cloudflare, it is what’s known as a CDN or content-delivery network, essentially a giant middleman that stands between your blog or website (or the sites and services of hundreds of thousands of corporations, governments and other entities) and the festering swamp of hackers and ne’er-do-wells that is the open internet. If you use Cloudflare, your site will load a lot faster — because the company caches it and then serves it from its own superfast network of servers — and is also protected from hacking attempts and DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks, and a host of other nasty behavior. In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that use Cloudflare for my website, but just for DNS hosting and rerouting, so that when you type in mathewingram dot com you get taken to the right website.

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 “Does Cloudflare want to protect the web or control it?”

From Nautilus: “In 2006, scientists coined the term “hyperthymesia” to describe cases in which people showed an ability to remember vivid details about events that happened to them throughout their lives, including exact times and dates. Since then, researchers have documented at least 100 cases of hyperthymesia in the literature. Almost uniformly, those who have the condition find the memories — which tend to be carefully indexed by date — intrusive, uncontrollable, and distressing. Which is why the recently published case study of a 17-year-old girl dubbed TL is commanding attention. Like others with hyperthymesia, she can provide an especially rich amount of perceptual, spatial, and temporal information. But unlike the others, she is able to organize these memories into a kind of “memory palace,” and can access them whenever she likes. Most of the memories are filed in virtual binders, according to theme and date.”

He was kidnapped at age 6 and found alive 70 years later thanks to a DNA test

From People: “A California boy who was lured away by a bandana-wearing woman while he played in a park in 1951 was found alive more than 70 years later — and is now a grandfather living on the east coast. Luis Armando Albino was just 6 years old when he vanished from a park in West Oakland, where he was playing with his brother, Roger, on Feb. 21, 1951. Albino was located in part because his niece took a DNA test that led her to an uncle that hadn’t been seen by his family in more than half a century. As Albino played with his brother, a woman wearing a red bandana lured him by promising to buy him candy. The woman spoke to the young Albino, who is of Puerto Rican descent, in Spanish. Instead of buying the boy candy, however, the woman flew him across the country to the east coast, where he was reportedly raised by another family. In 2020, Alequin decided to take an online DNA test and it reportedly had a 22% match.”

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 17-year-old’s memory is as accurate as a computer”

From Global News: “A Prince George, B.C., man received a 90-day driving prohibition after he was spotted by police driving an unusual vehicle on a street on Friday morning. On Sept. 5, an officer was on patrol in the area of 15th Avenue and Nicholson Street at 9 a.m. when they spotted a man driving a pink toy car down the street. The toy appeared to be a Power Wheels Barbie Jeep Wrangler. Kasper Lincoln told Global News he’d borrowed the toy, which belongs to his roommate’s daughter, to go get a Slurpee. During the stop, the police officer believed the driver to be impaired and found that the driver had a suspended licence. The driver was arrested for prohibited driving and he then provided two breath samples that were both over the legal limit and was subsequently issued a 90-day driving prohibition, police said. Lincoln said he hadn’t had anything to drink that morning and had just woken up. He added that the Barbie Jeep was not impounded and had been returned to his roommate’s daughter.”

How the math of shuffling cards almost brought down an online poker empire

From Scientific American: “If you’ve ever shuffled a deck of playing cards, you’ve most likely created a unique deck. That is, you’re probably the only person who has ever arranged the cards in precisely that order. Although this claim sounds incredible, it’s a great illustration of how quickly large numbers can creep into everyday situations—with occasionally challenging consequences, as the developers of an online poker game painfully discovered in the late 1990s. The mathematics of card shuffling is quite easy to explain. To calculate how many arrangements 52 playing cards can have, you must go through all the possible shuffles. A standard deck can be arranged in 52 × 51 × 50 × … × 2 × 1 = 52! different ways. If you do the multiplication and round the answer, you will get a number with 67 zeros. That’s more than a quadrillion times as many ways to arrange these cards as there are atoms on Earth.”

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 fined for driving a pink Barbie Jeep while intoxicated”

From History Workshop: “Africans crossed the Atlantic alongside the earliest Europeans, some trafficked in bondage, others navigating precarious forms of freedom. Yet recent scholarship, particularly since the turn of the century, is starting to give voice to the many Africans who have not been studied or considered important historical actors, erased by both colonial records and modern prejudice. Black conquistadors appear in various ship logs, retellings of expeditions, and even in some of the most famous Indigenous testimonies of the conquest – the Nahua codices. Juan Garrido was a firsthand witness to many critical events during the expansion of the Spanish Empire. But the document which makes Garrido so unique is his probanza, used to petition rewards from the king for service to the crown. This outstanding piece of evidence provides an insight into the life of a Black subject of the Spanish Empire.”

How a dead cat led to the Blue Angels aerobatic fighter-jet team getting quieter

From Substack: “This is the story of a heart-wrenching emotional loss needlessly compounded by unapologetic Constitutional violations. When a beloved family member was terrorized by the United States Navy’s Blue Angels, an American citizen exercised her Constitutional right to criticize her government’s role in her daughter’s suffering. In response, a cadre of emotionally fragile snowflakes masquerading as naval officers chose the coward’s path: they silenced this citizen’s speech, violated their oath to the Constitution, and brought disgrace upon the uniform they claim to honor. A year later, when that same vulnerable creature died after enduring yet another sonic assault during her final days on Earth, the Navy’s Constitutional betrayal compounded the tragedy — an American remained silenced, unable to voice her grief or otherwise hold her government accountable for its role in her family’s suffering.”

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 Black man was a Spanish conquistador in the 1500s”