Month: October 2026

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He got home from his around-the-world trip 28 years later

Adventurer Karl Bushby completed a multi-day swim of the English Channel, stepping foot on UK soil after a 28-year journey. Bushby, 57, left Chile, South America, on 1 November 1998, following two self-imposed rules – not to use transport to advance and not to return home until the journey is complete. On Tuesday, he announced that he had swum from France to the UK – the final, major hurdle of his journey back to his childhood home in Hull. Bushby said he swam for 20 hours over three days, making landfall at Shakespeare beach, just south of Dover, at 15:30 BST on Monday. To date, Bushby has covered more than 30,000 miles (48,000km), including 29 countries. He walked the length of South America, crossed the treacherous Darien Gap and continued north to Alaska. From there he crossed the Bering Strait on foot, swimming where necessary. Bushby then traversed Siberia and the rest of Asia before swimming across the Caspian Sea, which took 31 days to complete. (via the BBC)

Researchers built a model of a fruit fly’s nervous system and it can parallel park a car

What can a fruit fly do? Buzz around ripe bananas, sure. But maybe, a whole lot more. Like parallel park. Or play Minecraft. Creative internet users have in recent days taken a complete map of a fruit fly’s 166,000 neurons, published by Google, and made simulated flies do some things that are pretty impressive, given that these insects have a brain the size of a poppy seed. One has been trained to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Another dances to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” in response to four tones. Others have envisioned fruit flies playing poker and blackjack and slicing a doner kebab. Mr. Unthank, who lives in Italy, also programmed a fly to use a car’s blinkers when turning because he was frustrated that so few human drivers seem to use them. Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia completed the new map of the adult male fruit fly’s brain in partnership with Google. In 2024, a consortium led by researchers at Princeton published a map of an adult female fruit fly brain. (via the NYT)

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Why some people (including me) are spending more time on Twitter

Yes, I still call it Twitter. Mostly because I am old and set in my ways, but also because I have spent what feels like most of my life on there — certainly a large portion of my professional life — and for the vast majority of that time it was called Twitter. I also think that X is a pretty stupid name. To be fair, Twitter was a pretty stupid name as well (and here you can picture me trying to tell senior executives of the newspaper where I worked in 2008 that they should “tweet”). But it’s one that a lot of us got used to, so for the rest of this essay I will be calling it Twitter, just to be ornery. In any case, after it was acquired by Elon Musk in 2022, there seemed to be a kind of exodus from Twitter to a variety of apps such as Bluesky — initially a skunkworks started inside Twitter — and Threads, which began as a side project at Instagram, and Mastodon and other similar apps that are part of a loose grouping of open-source apps some call the “fediverse.” I have an account on all of these services, and I still check them all from time to time, but my impression is that momentum seems to have shifted back to Twitter.

The extent of this shift is difficult to quantify, in part because there is no real objective source of user numbers for any of those apps (save perhaps Mastodon) and the ones that we get from the companies themselves — especially from Musk, not surprisingly — are suspect. For example, Meta says that Threads has 500 million average users, and yet my own use of the app makes me suspicious of that number. I think a lot of those “users” have an account and maybe it opens in their browser or on their phone but they rarely post anything. This is part of the problem with counting users of any kind, whether it’s people loading a website or people opening an app. What counts as a user? If I have the Threads app on my phone but never look at it, am I a user? Lots of services talk about “monthly active users” — so some are only active once in a month? Great social network you’ve got there. For me at least, user should mean someone who interacts with the app in a significant way, preferably by posting or reposting regularly.

Elon says that Twitter got 513 billion “user seconds” in a day earlier this year, whatever that means (it’s a private company so he can more or less say whatever he wants). Bluesky was last reported to have about 47 million, according to one estimate. Again, these numbers likely mean someone installed the app or connected to a server, but they say nothing about how often they use it. So what we are left with is vibes. And the vibe feels like people are returning to Twitter, or using it more than they used to. Anecdotal evidence isn’t worth the paper it is printed on, but it does seem to be piling up. The first person I came across who admitted that they were “slinking back to X,” was Casey Newton, who writes a newsletter called Platformer and also co-hosts a podcast with Kevin Roose, a former writer for the New York Times. Here’s how Casey described his decision to spend more time on X after abandoning it earlier:

Mostly I left because I could not stand the thought of being there. I also hoped that I could use whatever minor influence I had to help kick-start new platforms. I encouraged Meta executives to challenge X with a Twitter clone, and have used Threads daily since it launched. I covered the launch of Bluesky closely and have continued to pour energy into it (and the Fediverse) even as they decline. While Musk was suing OpenAI in an effort to effectively destroy it, I repeatedly told Sam Altman to start a rival to X and take his AI posting there. Whatever virtue these actions may have had, they did not succeed at creating a true rival to X in the category that matters most to me: a forum for daily tech and business conversation. The community of people working in and around artificial intelligence product and policy simply refuses to move away from X.

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How the weather in space caused a 16-minute train delay in 1848

Detective work by a team of space-weather experts has discovered the truth about a historical event that had been thought to be the first-ever case of technological disruption by geomagnetic activity from the sun, but has now been shown to have taken place seven years later. From it being too hot or too wet to leaves on the track or cows on the line, there’s a fine tradition of what the British public consider to be flimsy excuses for delays on the trains. Yet an 1871 edition of the journal Nature describes a very different event that caused a train departing Exeter, in Devon on the south-west coast of the U.K., to be delayed by 16 minutes: a solar storm that flooded the railway signals’ electrical telegraph network with current. The event has been cited as the first example of a solar storm disrupting technology, but when a team led by Wild went back through historical records to investigate they found that things didn’t add up. (via Space.com)

New York City’s new robo-toilets kick you out after 10 minutes whether you’re finished or not

As of June 2025, New York City had just 975 operating public restrooms across its five boroughs, or one per every 8,697 residents. To start making it easier to go while on the go, the city is installing 17 new modular bathrooms—aka robotoilets—equipped with amenities like running water, temperature control, and baby-changing stations. The bathrooms, made and operated by Throne Labs, are already being erected around NYC, with the first two open as of this week and two more coming on Thursday. But as Mamdani put it, these bathrooms are “not a place to scroll on your phone.” Users are meant to do their business, then get a move on within 10 minutes—or face the consequences. How do the new bathrooms keep patrons from lingering? There’s a simple fail-safe: After 10 minutes in the bathroom, the doors will automatically open. (via Fast Company)

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A death and an obsession with revenge: the bizarre tale of Otto Z

On a balmy, quiet evening in June 2020, Otto’s elderly mother, Doria, was fading in her Munich apartment. As she lay with her eyes closed, her pale face, framed by her white hair, was calm. Otto, masked, gloved and draped in a sterile apron, dozed in a chair beside her. Otto, who sometimes goes by the name Rainer, and whose last name is only known as “Z” because of Germany’s strict privacy laws, was a doctor who had cared for his mother for years, ever since she had suffered a stroke and moved in with him. fter he called the funeral home, Otto told me, he waited beside his mother all night and into the next afternoon before he heard a knock at the door. He was surprised to see that, rather than doctors, the two men in the hallway were police officers. They wore bulletproof vests and carried guns. He invited them inside, where they scanned the rooms. He directed them to his mother’s bedroom and followed close behind, but the officers stopped him and asked him to take a seat. A tall, stylish woman approached and introduced herself as a coroner from the Munich Institute of Forensic Medicine. (via The Guardian)

In Wales you might be visited by someone with a horse’s skull and asked to rhyme

You’ll never forget the moment you first see a Mari Lwyd. She has lights or baubles for eyes. Her mane is made of colourful streamers, or holly and ivy. A white cloak falls from her skull, which is attached to a pole, which is held by a person inside it: they control the character’s mischievous nature, often snapping their bony jaw at you. The origins of Mari’s name are, like the horse herself, are deeply mysterious. One Welsh translation of it, Grey Mare, connects it to the heritage of pale horses in Celtic and British mythology, many of whom can cross over to the underworld. Mari is taken around a village traditionally, often between Christmas Day and Twelfth Night, She is dressed with festive lights and decorations, and is usually accompanied by an ostler. This brings the tradition closer together with Mummers’ Plays, a tradition of performances by the working classes in the 18th century. When the groups get to a house, they indulge in a ritual called pwnco: an exchange of rude rhymes with the person who lives there. (via Wales.com)

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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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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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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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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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.

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