The waves were more than two metres high, tossing the sailing boat around like a walnut shell. Below deck on the Bavaria C50 yacht, just 15m (50ft) long, a Ukrainian diving crew waited nervously. The skipper had seen much worse and before the war he had sometimes enjoyed taking his clients into mild storms. But now he was concerned. “This isn’t diving weather. Are you sure?” he yelled. They were not. One by one the divers voted to abort their mission and return to port. Then the lone woman among them, in her thirties, stood up. I’ll call her Freya. “Let me go alone, I’ll finish quickly,” she said. Freya’s buddy went into the water first and rigged the bomb, a makeshift device fashioned from a diver’s breathing tank. “This will be fun,” Freya called to him. Then she plunged. Freya — whose name, like those of her fellow saboteurs, has been withheld for security reasons — was born in Kyiv in the mid-1980s and raised mainly by her mother. By the time she finished high school she spoke some English and Spanish, and she chose a university course that would allow her to travel. (via The Times)
Scientists say they have found a way to make quantum time run backwards
Scientists have developed a new way to control quantum systems that can make their behavior appear more consistent with time moving backward rather than forward. The research, published in Physical Review X, introduces quantum control protocols that reshape a system’s “arrow of time,” the concept that time naturally moves in only one direction. The approach could eventually support new methods for extracting energy from quantum systems and preparing quantum states. A quantum system, such as a group of qubits, follows the rules of quantum mechanics rather than classical physics. Using the newly developed control protocols, researchers can suppress the usual emergence of the arrow of time or even reverse its apparent direction, making quantum processes look as though they are unfolding backward. As a demonstration of the technique, the team also created a measurement engine that can harvest energy from the act of making quantum measurements. (via Science Daily)
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Soccer fan disappeared for 10 days and was found in a bar unaware there was a search
An England soccer fan who vanished while traveling to the US for the World Cup was found safe in Spain — “blissfully unaware” of his family’s anguished search for him. Michael Hewitt, 65, last spoke with his family in Barcelona on June 21, one day after the diehard Leeds United fan jetted out of the UK. Hewitt was in Spain for a short layover before he was set to fly out to Boston, where England played out a 0-0 draw against Ghana last Wednesday. But after losing his phone — which contained all his travel tickets — he became stuck in Barcelona, said his brother Gary. “He lost his phone soon after arriving in Barcelona, and didn’t know any of the phone numbers stored on it,” Gary said. Hewitt didn’t have access to the internet and was blissfully unaware that his family was desperately searching for him. “Instead, he just got on with enjoying Barcelona, watching the England matches in the bars,” said Gary. The British Embassy in Spain tracked down the soccer fan’s hotel through his card payments. (via the NY Post)
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.
Recipes in cookbooks didn’t use to have precise measurements for ingredients
One of my favorite recipes for challah does not tell you how much flour to use. To a modern amateur baker, this omission borders on heresy. In an era where we measure yeast to the gram, a recipe that merely offers a rough estimate and casually instructs you to “add flour until the dough feels tacky” sounds daunting. But it is an honest reflection of how the bread is made: adding flour, half-a-cup at a time, until the dough hits that specific, tacky resistance. Surprisingly, the total volume can vary quite significantly. For most of history, recipes were incredibly short and concise. Handed down orally, they assumed a wealth of existing cookery expertise. They offered lists of ingredients with no exact amounts, vague timings and temperatures, and steps so terse you can only assume the intended reader was already deep in the cooking trade. We can see great examples of this in historical texts—from the ancient Roman On the Subject of Cooking to the medieval English The Forme of Cury. (via Iza.ac)
In this online museum you can run any one of 570 different operating systems in your browser
Andrew Warkentin has spent over twenty years collecting old operating systems and getting them to run. The result is the Virtual OS Museum, a launcher and Linux VM that boots 570-odd operating systems on top of QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM, with everything pre-installed, pre-configured, and rolled back to a known-good state by a snapshot tool when an install breaks. The catalog covers 1,700 installs across 250 platforms. It starts in 1948 with the Manchester Baby, the machine generally credited as the first stored-program computer, and ends with early Longhorn betas and Mac OS X 10.5 on PowerPC. Along the way: CTSS, the ancestor of every modern OS; the earliest Unix; the Xerox Star, whose Pilot/ViewPoint software invented the desktop metaphor; ZetaLisp; Plan 9; classic BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum and MSX builds; PalmOS; Newton OS; and a lot of obscure mainframe environments. (via Boing Boing)
Who needs AI when you have Zach King
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