In September 2022 the board of the Isocrates foundation gathered in Florence for its annual meeting. Its founder, Nicolas Puech, was the largest individual shareholder in Hermès. From 2004 he owned nearly 6% of the company, a stake that would now be worth €13bn ($15bn). Puech, who is part of the Hermès family, has no children. The entirety of his vast fortune was destined for the Isocrates foundation, which he had set up in 2011 on the advice of his Swiss banker of 24 years, Eric Freymond. What followed came as a shock to everyone involved. Freymond returned home to find a letter dismissing him from the board. By October Puech had revoked the powers he had granted Freymond to manage his money. He later filed a criminal complaint in Geneva, accusing Freymond of “massive fraud”. Puech had realised that his Hermès shares were nowhere to be found. Worse still, they had been missing for more than a decade. Hermès itself had no idea where they were. (via The Economist)
She grew up on a farm in Virginia and changed the world by inventing GPS
Gladys West knew from a young age that she didn’t want to be a farmer. But the mathematician, born in 1930 in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, still had to help harvest crops on her family’s small farm. The hard work started before daybreak and lasted well into the blistering heat of the afternoon. She hated the dirt but, while she worked, she kept her mind on the building behind the trees at the end of the farm. It was her school, and even then she knew it would be her ticket to freedom. “I was gonna get an education and I was going to get out of there. I wasn’t going to be stuck there all my life,” West, 89, says firmly, via an interview on Zoom in her home in Virginia. What she could not have guessed was that this focus would shatter the perceptions of black women of the time and even lead to the invention of one of our most widely used inventions – GPS, the global positioning system. (via The Guardian)
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Believe it or not there’s no scientific consensus on why ice is slippery
The reason we can gracefully glide on an ice-skating rink or slip on an icy sidewalk is that the surface of ice is coated by a thin watery layer. Scientists disagree, though, about why the layer forms. Three main theories about the phenomenon have been debated over the past two centuries. Earlier this year, researchers in Germany put forward a fourth hypothesis that they say solves the puzzle. But does it? A consensus feels nearer but has yet to be reached. In the mid-1800s, an English engineer named James Thomson suggested that when we step on ice, the pressure we exert melts its surface. Under normal conditions, ice melts when the temperature rises to zero degrees Celsius, but pressure lowers its melting point. This theoretical relationship between melting point and pressure was experimentally confirmed by Thomson’s younger brother William, better known as Lord Kelvin. In the 1930s, though, Frank P. Bowden and T.P. Hughes of the Laboratory of Physical Chemistry at the University of Cambridge cast doubt on the pressure melting theory. (via Quanta)
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 World Pie-Eating contest was won by a man who ate a meat pie in 62 seconds
A man has been crowned this year’s World Pie-Eating Champion after polishing off a meat pie in one minute and two seconds. Tom O’Neil, 24, lives in Blackpool but was born in Wigan, Greater Manchester, where the annual contest has been held since 1992. He was one of 19 competitors who lined up at Harry’s Bar in front of their regulation size pies, which measure 12cm (4.7in) in diameter with a depth of 3.5cm (1.3in). Mr O’Neil said this was a “proud day” and has already vowed to return next year to defend his title. He told BBC Radio Manchester: “I won a local contest about two years ago and then I saw this pop up online, so I thought I’m gonna go for it and then now I’m here.” Mr O’Neil said his talent was more of a natural ability than a learnt skill. (via the BBC)
How Salvador Dali wound up sabotaging the market for his own work
It began as a routine customs stop. But after waving down a truck making its way into Andorra, several unsuspecting French police officers suddenly found themselves face-to-face with a most unusual international shipment: 40,000 sheets of paper, all bearing nothing more than the simple, iconic signature of Salvador Dalí. The year was 1974. Members of the international press immediately decried the episode as yet another example of Dalí having “killed his own market.” Yet doubt still lingered in the air. Could the signed sheets really be authentic? Following Dalí’s expulsion from the Surrealist movement in 1939, and accelerating throughout the next four decades of his career, Dalí and his inner circle would certainly display a voracious appetite for cashing in on the artist’s global notoriety. Their money-hungry ways eventually inspired and cemented the artist’s sardonic anagram nickname: “Avida Dollars.” (via Artsy)
He created a giant painting on a glacier using charcoal and ice
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places 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 and Why Is This Interesting by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com