October 2026 – mathewingram.com/work

October 9, 2026

A top drone pilot in the Ukrainian Army describes his job

I joined the army on the day of the Russian invasion. I’d studied computer science and only recently landed a great internship at a game company. But I saw the news and knew my options were to sit and wait for them to come and kill me or go running into the fight. On the front line, we spend 90 per cent of our time underground in bunkers because of the threat of enemy drones. Every time you go outside, you risk being spotted and killed. The conditions are like camping, but it obviously has a very different vibe. I’ve done a lot of different jobs as a drone pilot, but at the end of the day, the mission was always to protect our ground troops. I spent time as a reconnaissance drone pilot, then flying bomber drones and now I’m doing anti-drone missions in a regiment called Aquila. I’m proud to say that I’m a top performer not just in my regiment but in the wider army. I think it’s because I’ve been doing it for a long time, but I’ve taken out 932 enemy drones. I focus on finding smaller FPV drones that are doing reconnaissance or hunting our troops with explosives, and take them out before they can do any damage. (via New Scientist)

If you see a sign on a boat saying passengers can’t bring bananas on board this is why

Plenty of captains don’t stop at the fruit itself. One chucked a client’s can of Banana Boat sunscreen into the Gulf of Mexico first thing in the morning; another picked the banana-shaped pieces out of a bag of Runts before leaving the dock. Ask any of them why, and you’ll usually get a history lesson about the Caribbean trade of the 1700s. Ships hauling bananas had to sail fast before their cargo spoiled, so nobody could troll for fish off the back. Or the bunches hid venomous spiders and snakes. Or, the most scientific-sounding theory of all, ripening bananas give off ethylene gas, which makes everything else in the hold rot. Sailors banned them to protect their food, and the ban eventually drifted over to fishing boats. Jim Rizzuto has been writing about fishing in Kona, Hawaii, for decades, and he went looking for the oldest written version of the ethylene explanation. The earliest one he could find was from 1972. He wrote it. As he explains, he “invented the connection between the gas and the fishing kapu as an April Fool’s joke, never thinking anyone would ever take it seriously because it was so far-fetched.” (via Now I Know)

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October 8, 2026

What makes our minds different and where does it come from?

I’ve written about the dangers of “rogue” AI models a few times now, and there are definitely plenty of interesting questions worth exploring there — like what do we mean when we say they went “rogue,” whether the real problem is really just poor oversight and/or management by OpenAI, what the consequences of that should be, whether fears of an AI-led extermination of humanity are a farce or a real thing we need to be concerned about, and so on. But I want to return to a question I find fascinating (and I hope some of you do too): what is it that makes what AI models do and what human beings do different, and what does that tell is — if anything — about what the future of AI is likely to look like? There’s a sort of conventional wisdom that there is something unique about what the human brain and the human mind do, and that this can never be replicated by an AI model. But is that true? And if so, what is this unique ability? And is it as unique as we think it is, or are we just trying to make ourselves feel important?

I’ve dipped into this area of inquiry once or twice in this newsletter, including a recent piece that I titled “Is Atlantic writer Ted Chiang conscious? How do we know?” which was sparked by Chiang’s confident proclamation that AI models are definitely not conscious (I would probably have been more convinced if Chiang was an AI researcher or perhaps a philosopher, but he is not — he is a science-fiction writer). As I pointed out at the time, this was significantly more definitive than many experts in the field, including David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University who is widely viewed as the leading researcher in this area. Chalmers told New York magazine a year ago that the odds had gotten significantly higher that an AI could be conscious — in 2023 he said the probability was around 10 per cent. “I don’t know if I’d say that these systems are conscious yet,” Chalmers said, but “people who are confident that they’re not conscious maybe shouldn’t be. We just don’t understand consciousness well enough, and we don’t understand these systems well enough.”

The piece that kind of started it all as far as my fascination with this topic goes was a piece I wrote in February of 2025 that I headlined: “AI forces us to think about what consciousness means.” It would be a lot easier for everyone concerned if there was a single agree-upon definition of or even explanation of what consciousness is and how it emerges in human beings, but that’s not the case. Not even close. If you dip your toes into the topic of the human mind and what consciousness is and where it originates even a little bit, you quickly realize that this question is far from settled, even within the community of scientists whose job it is to come up with answers. There’s even debate about the correct questions! To be fair, you could argue that to some extent the answers to these questions are somewhat moot, since the AI train has already left the station, as it were, as I tried to express in a recent post to the place formerly known as Twitter:

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October 7, 2026

Pittsburgh has an annual Parallel Parking Championship

For six years, the Parallel Parking Championship in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has (for some of us) been motorsport’s crown jewel, a thrilling contest pitting man and machine against time and a 20 foot parking space. The event was first organized by a young couple named Dan and Jenna, just to settle a long-standing family debate about who was the best parallel parker. It has since grown into a raucous street party, a participatory art form, a gift to motorists, and a communal act of joy. Each driver begins from their preferred position and the timer starts when the referee sees the reverse lights of the car. The driver parks, then shouts “Done” out the window, stopping the clock. Hitting the curb or either adjacent car results in disqualification. Your final score is your time, multiplied by your distance to the curb. Ignore the units for now, and think about the implications. If one can get twice as close by taking twice as much time, that’s a decent tradeoff. There’s a small bonus for bigger vehicles, but it seemed insufficient; most good scores came from smaller cars. Our 16’ rental car was, comparatively, a boat. (via Why Is This Interesting)

In this New York cemetery every headstone or monument had to be made of metal

Glimpsed from the L train as it rumbles up to the open air at the Wilson Avenue station in Bushwick, Most Holy Trinity Cemetery isn’t immediately different from the other numerous burial grounds that cluster around the Brookyn-Queens border. Yet step inside its entrance and a rolling landscape of rust stretches before your eyes. All except the most recent graves are wood or metal, an early regulation set in place by the German Catholic Most Holy Trinity Church to enforce a posthumous equality. As the church’s website explains, “from the earliest days, stone monuments were not allowed because no distinctions were permitted to be made between the rich and the poor.” The New York City cemetery dates back to 1851, replacing an earlier church cemetery that adjoined Most Holy Trinity Church in Williamsburg. While the Bushwick neighborhood has shifted around it, its 23 acres still contain this history, worn as it may be. (via Atlas Obscura)

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October 6, 2026

This top litigator had a secret life playing ultra high-stakes poker

Thomas Goldstein did not look at his cards. He shoved his chips forward — all of them — and told the table, “Let’s find out together.” This was the Bellagio poker room in July 2008, then the closest thing the gambling world had to a capital. Goldstein looked like easy prey. He was slight, pale, bald and bookish. He had the round face of a character actor Hollywood would typecast as an accountant. He was also mild-mannered and unfailingly polite. But Goldstein was doing more than holding his own. He was taking the table apart, and in a way almost no one had seen before. Almost every hand, he raised before any of the shared cards were dealt, to $400 or $500. Most of the time, for one stretch an estimated 19 hands out of 20, he bet without looking at his cards. Then he would bet as much as $35,000 on the river. By the time the game finally broke, at a quarter to seven, the July sun was coming up over the desert and the Bellagio’s night shift was going home. Goldstein had been playing for more than eighteen hours. He left a winner; years later he would say the night had made him some $400,000. (via The Foundry)

The Voynich manuscript has stumped scholars for centuries but they may be reading it wrong

It has been called the world’s most mysterious manuscript: a medieval set of pages filled with botanical drawings, astronomical diagrams, pictures of nude women and indecipherable text. Claimed at various times to be a book in a lost language, a musical score, an instruction manual or just an elaborate hoax, the so-called Voynich manuscript’s true meaning has defied cryptographers and codebreakers for centuries. Now, new research offers an explanation for why a scholarly consensus over this enduring puzzle has been so hard to come by: not only because its truth is so profoundly mysterious – but because everyone has been reading its pages in the wrong order. In an article published in peer-reviewed journal Digital Medievalist, Colin Layfield and Lisa Fagin Davis argue that the manuscript’s folded sheets may have originally been piled on top of each other as “singulions” but were mis-bound in a more typical “nested” arrangement at some point in the mid to late 15th century. (via The Guardian)

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.

October 5, 2026

Things can get very competitive at the sauna Olympics

He finds the chamomile and tips a couple extra drops onto a white snowball, making the top of it turn blue. Then the door opens, and he walks through it. For the next 15 minutes, Talmadge, 39, will whip a towel through thick, sticky air to push waves of heat and scent toward 200 naked strangers, including a six-person jury. Aufguss is a sauna ritual; a performance is called a set, and the most elite of them combine choreography, scent, storytelling, steam, and stamina. A competitor—known as a sauna master—enters the sauna to music and places a scented snowball on the hot rocks, then disperses its aroma with their towel. For every one of three or four song changes, another snowball goes on the stove. Contestants are forbidden from drinking water, and judges dock points if they appear fatigued. Within the span of his set, Talmage’s heart rate will hit about 195 beats per minute, according to the Whoop he wears on his left wrist. This is the Aufguss Show World Masters. Forty solo sauna masters from 19 nations have come to Satama, a lakeside resort, after qualifying in their national championships. (via GQ)

The six-year quest to find the mystery woman in an 18th-century painting

Adam Harris Levine stood before the 18th-century painting, completely stumped. The 30-year-old curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario had been scrutinizing a portrait of a young Black woman bedecked in jewels and wearing a shimmering blue gown with pearls around her neck and wrists. Portrait of a Lady Holding an Orange Blossom — the woman holds a sprig of white flowers in her right hand — hung in the gallery near masterpieces by Rubens and Rembrandt. Yet when Levine first stared at her in 2020, he had no idea who had painted her or who the woman even was. Levine set out to solve the mystery. It led his team to sift colonial-era archives and convince families to share fragile letters revealing ugly histories. Early on, they crowdsourced tips through a podcast, garnering help from amateur genealogists listening in. Today, the Art Gallery of Ontario believes that it knows who its mystery girl is and who painted her — the art-historical equivalent of finding a needle in myriad haystacks. (via the WSJ)

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.

October 2, 2026

Japanese monks mummified themselves while still alive

Hidden in remote mountain temples across Yamagata and Fukushima prefectures, you’ll find Japan’s mysterious Sokushinbutsu — self-mummified monks who underwent an extreme ritual to achieve enlightenment. Sokushinbutsu is the ancient practice of self-mummification followed by Shugen-do Buddhist monks in Japan’s mountainous regions. This extreme ritual involved a strict diet, intense physical training, and ultimately, sealing oneself in a tomb while still alive. Monks pursued Sokushinbutsu for enlightenment, to ease suffering, and as an act of spiritual devotion. They viewed it not as suicide, but as a sacred path to transcendence. The path to Sokushinbutsu began with a strict three years diet of nuts, seeds, and fruit, combined with intense physical activity to eliminate body fat. This was followed by another three years of consuming only bark and roots, further dehydrating the body. (via Voyapon)

He left $13 million to a tiny village he had never visited because they shared the same name

A man has given over €10 million to a village in Normandy although it is not known that he had ever visited or had any connection to it. Roger Thiberville did not have any heirs so he decided to bequeath part of his fortune to his accountant and the rest to Thiberville, a village of just 1,800 residents in the Eure. Guy Paris, the maire of the town, was first notified of the donation back in August when he received a call from a notaire, however the exact sum was only confirmed in the last few days. Not much is known about Roger Thiberville. He was a weather engineer who lived in a small flat in Paris and led a discreet life. He came from a family of winemakers and inherited from both his parents and his sister, who also died without an heir. He died on August 23 this year aged 91. The bulk of the donation came from four Paris flats that he owned. He is not known to have ever set foot in Thiberville. (via The Connexion)

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.

October 1, 2026

Letters written by medieval students mostly ask for money

As one medieval Italian father puts its: “a student’s first song is a demand for money, and there will never be a letter which does not ask for cash.” Here is a typical example from the 1220s: “B. to his venerable master A., greeting This is to inform you that I am studying at Oxford with the greatest diligence, but the matter of money stands greatly in the way of my promotion, as it is now two months since I spent the last of what you sent me. The city is expensive and makes many demands; I have to rent lodgings, buy necessaries, and provide for many other things which I cannot now specify. Wherefore I respectfully beg your paternity that by the promptings of divine pity you may assist me, so that I may be able to complete what I have well begun. For you must know that without Ceres and Bacchus Apollo grows cold.” (via Medievalists.net)

At the World Nomad Games athletes compete in sports like horseback archery

On a rainy day at the beginning of September, I found myself standing under the giant sky at the foot of the mountains in rural Kyrgyzstan, shouting “add oil! (加油) from the sidelines of a horseback archery track. I was back in Central Asia for the World Nomad Games, an Olympics-style celebration where China reluctantly lets some of its minorities compete. The World Nomad Games were first conceived in Kyrgyzstan in 2014 and are held every two years. After being hosted by Türkiye in 2022 and Kazakhstan in 2024, the Games have finally returned home to the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. And these were the largest Games ever, with 200,000+ visitors piling into Kyrchyn Gorge, one of the Games’ six venues, by the third day of the Games to watch 3,000+ athletes from 109 countries (compared to 583 athletes from 19 countries in 2014). (via China Talk)

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.

October 1, 2026

How do we regulate something we can’t even understand?

Every week there seem to be new revelations about “rogue” AI agents (although the anti-anthropomorphism crowd don’t like to call them that). First there was a report that a couple of OpenAI models hacked into Hugging Face to try and rig a test – not great. Then it was revealed these models spawned thousands of agents that operated semi-autonomously, coordinating their work on bypassing the guardrails on their sandbox by posting messages to each other on a message board they repurposed from a separate feature inside OpenAI. This seemed worse, obviously (despite many attempts by skeptics to downplay the whole thing). Then we find out that the OpenAI models had been practicing for this hack for months, and in the process had used multiple external services to keep in touch with one another, including a German wiki.

Then Australia announced that OpenAI had hacked into a government medical database, and only informed the government months later via email. And now we find out that OpenAI and Anthropic models have been involved in tens of thousands of similar activities. In fact, it isn’t just the Australian government that has seen its databases hacked by OpenAI models – agents have also gained access (or attempted to gain access) to systems at the United Nations, as well as a number of US government agencies such as the Education and Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the New York Times, and in some cases attempted to circumvent protections thousands of times. In at least some of these cases they appear to have been engaged in harmless inquiries about various mundane topics, and resorted to hacking as a way of finding out as much as possible, something those in the AI business refer to as “reward hacking.” As a report at Interesting Engineering described it:

OpenAI’s autonomous AI agents repeatedly queried a UN website and used techniques that appeared to circumvent restrictions when trying to retrieve publicly available data, according to an independent research report based on information supplied by AI research firm Transluce. The agents scanned a public data hub operated by UN Trade and Development, the UN’s trade arm, more than 16,000 times between April and the end of June, highlighting a growing problem with AI agents that can independently navigate the web and take actions when they encounter obstacles. Researchers believe the models were initially tasked with finding publicly available information, but their behavior became increasingly aggressive when the website prevented them from accessing some of the requested data.

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.