Author: Mathew Ingram

From Weird Universe: “In 1961, the French patent office granted Robert-Oropei Martino a patent for a method of placing advertisements on fish. From his patent: “It is known that the effect of advertising is largely determined by the medium chosen for it. It is recognized that advertising carried out on a mobile medium, in particular rotating, attracts much more attention than the same advertising on a fixed medium. According to the present invention, a particularly effective advertisement is produced by having it carried by fish in an aquarium, pond or other. It is obviously possible to imagine many ways of having advertising carried by fish. According to the invention, a corset is preferably used, made to the dimensions of the subject in a material that is sufficiently flexible not to hinder it, and which is closed on it by any appropriate means.”

The close ties between the modern art movement in the US and the CIA

From JSTOR Daily: “The preeminent Cultural Cold Warrior, Thomas W. Braden, who served as MoMA’s executive secretary from 1948-1949, later joined the CIA in 1950 to supervise its cultural activities. The relationship between Modern Art and American diplomacy began during WWII, when the Museum of Modern Art was mobilized for the war effort. MoMA was founded in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. A decade later, her son Nelson Rockefeller became president of the Museum. In 1940, while he was still President of MoMA, Rockefeller was appointed the Roosevelt Administration’s Coordinator of Inter-American affairs. The Museum followed suit. MoMA fulfilled 38 government contracts for cultural materials during the Second World War, and mounted 19 exhibitions of contemporary American painting for the Coordinator’s office, which were exhibited throughout Latin America.” 

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Continue reading “The French government gave him a patent for advertising on fish”

From The Guardian: “A man who had gone into cardiac arrest and been declared brain dead woke up as surgeons in his home state of Kentucky were in the middle of harvesting his organs for donation, his family has told media outlets. As reported Thursday by both National Public Radio and the Kentucky news station WKYT, the case of Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II is under investigation by state and federal government officials. Officials within the US’s organ-procurement system insist there are safeguards in place to prevent such episodes. Hoover’s sister, Donna Rhorer, recounted how Hoover was taken to Baptist health hospital because of a drug overdose. Doctors soon told Rhorer and her relatives that Hoover lacked any reflexes or brain activity, and they ultimately decided to remove him from life support.”

The secretive dynasty that controls the Boar’s Head meat company

From the New York Times: “In May 2022, the chief financial officer of Boar’s Head, the processed meat company, was asked a simple question under oath.“Who is the C.E.O. of Boar’s Head?”“I’m not sure,” he replied.“Who do you believe to be the C.E.O. of Boar’s Head?” the lawyer persisted.The executive, Steve Kourelakos, who had worked at the company for more than two decades and was being deposed in a lawsuit between owners, repeated his answer: “I’m not sure.”It is odd, to say the least, when a top executive of a company claims not to know who his boss is. And Boar’s Head is no fly-by-night enterprise. The company is one of the country’s most recognizable deli-meat brands; it generates what employees and others estimate as roughly $3 billion in annual revenue and employs thousands of people.”

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 “Man declared dead wakes up during organ harvesting”

From Sherwood News: “Last year, observers detected an anomaly on the daily balance sheet of the US Treasury Department: a $7 billion estate- and gift-tax payment. John Ricco, now an analyst at Yale University’s Budget Lab, first spotted the huge receipt. “The degree by which this payment exceeds others in modern history — it’s not just, ‘Oh, this was the biggest one by 20%,’” Ricco said later. This was the biggest one by a factor of seven.  Based on estimates of the average tax rate on estates, the February 2023 payment implied the death of someone possessing a fortune between $17.5 and $40 billion. Last year, I published a brief story about the statistical mystery and had nearly forgotten about it months later when I got a phone call. The voice on the other end of the line was calling about my mysterious billionaire.”

A climber’s remains have been found 100 years after he disappeared on Everest

From National Geographic: “When they spotted it, there was no mistaking what they were looking at: a boot melting out of the ice. As they drew closer, they could tell the cracked leather was old and worn, and the sole was studded and bracketed with the diamond-patterned steel hobnails of a bygone era of climbing.  In September, on the broad expanse of the Central Rongbuk Glacier, below the north face of Mount Everest, a National Geographic documentary team that included the photographer and director Jimmy Chin, along with filmmakers and climbers Erich Roepke and Mark Fisher, examined the boot more closely. Inside, they discovered a foot, remains that they instantly recognized as belonging to Andrew Comyn Irvine, or Sandy, as he was known, who vanished 100 years ago with the famed climber George Mallory.”

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 “Who died and paid the US gov’t $7 billion in estate tax?”

From The Warzone: “Details about the weapons in America’s nuclear arsenal, especially regarding their warheads, remain some of the most secretive elements America’s nuclear weapons enterprise. There is no better example of this than a material that the US Department of Energy has used to build thermonuclear warheads, also known as hydrogen bombs, that is so secret that no one knows exactly what it does or exactly what it’s made of, and that is only ever referred to publicly by a codename, Fogbank. Experts believe that Fogbank is an aerogel, a category of ultralight gels in which a traditionally liquid component is instead a gas. Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on missiles and nuclear weapons, says the codename Fogbank might be derived from nicknames for aerogels, such as “frozen smoke” and “San Franciso fog.”

The history of orchids is also the history of colonialism

From Longreads: “Orchid mania didn’t begin with lady’s slippers. It began with exotic specimens, introduced to English gardeners and noblemen in the late 18th century. While many of them had seen botanical drawings of tropical orchids, the live specimens were something else entirely. Their strangely shaped flowers and bright colors sparked a fixation that came to exemplify the values of the period, for the heroic white adventurer who risks his life to harvest the knowledge and beauty of other lands, returning victorious to his home after striding across harsh landscapes, battling his way through jungles, and fighting man and beast to achieve his goals. The orchid stood for supremacy — of knowledge, of culture, of whiteness.” 

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 “Warheads use a secret material known only as Fogbank”

Like many, I’ve been fascinated by the speed with which artificial intelligence has taken over the spotlight as the technology that everyone is either excited by, confused by, or terrified by (or possibly all three). Part of that, I think, has to do with the speed at which the group of things we call AI have been evolving — it’s hard to believe that the term AI was mostly restricted to academic circles as recently as 2022, when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released in the wild. Then came visual AI engines like DALL-E and Midjourney, which generated some hilarious photographs and video clips, like the widely-lampooned video of an AI version of Will Smith trying to eat spaghetti, which is alternately laughable and also creepy, in a way that only AI art seems to be. ChatGPT and other AI engines based on large language models routinely generated nonsensical results — or “hallucinations,” as some call them — where they just make things up out of thin air.

Within a matter of months, however, those same AI chatbots were producing high-quality transcriptions and summaries, and the AI photo and video engines were generating incredibly lifelike pictures of things that don’t exist, and videos of people and animals that are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. I recently took a test that Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten sent to his newsletter readers, which presented them with pictures and asked which ones were generated by AI and which by humans, and I have zero confidence that I got any of them right. ChatGPT’s various iterations, meanwhile, have not only aced the Turing test (which determines whether an AI is able to mimic being human) but the LSAT and a number of other tests. It’s true that AI engines like Google’s have told people to do stupid thing like eat rocks, but the speed with which their output has become almost indistinguishable from human content is staggering.

I should mention up front that I am well aware of the controversy over where AI engines get all the information they use to generate video and photos and text — the idea that their scraping or indexing of books and news articles is theft, and they should either pay for it or be prevented from using it. If I were an artist whose name has become a prompt for generating images that look like his work, I might think differently. But for me, the act of indexing content (as I’ve argued for the Columbia Journalism Review) is not that different from what a search engine like Google does, which I believe should qualify as fair use under the law (and has in previous cases such as the Google Books case and the Perfect 10 case.) Whether the Supreme Court agrees with me remains to be seen, of course, but that is my belief. I’m not going to argue about that here, however, because that is a separate question from the one I’m interested in exploring right now.

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Continue reading “Is AI going to save us or kill us? Even the experts don’t agree”

From LitHub: “Not only was Mark Twain (née Samuel Langhorne Clemens on this day in 1835) an inventor of good stories and witty rejoinders, he was a literal inventor—of both successful and not-so-successful items. Over the course of his life, he registered three patents: the first, in 1871, was for an “Improvement in adjustable and detachable straps for garments,” meant to be an alternative to suspenders, which Clemens apparently found uncomfortable. The invention didn’t catch on for any of its intended pantaloon purposes, but as it turned out the advantages were obvious, at least for a certain item Twain didn’t even think of. “This clever invention only caught on for one snug garment: the bra,” wrote Rebecca Greenfield in The Atlantic. “A clasp is all that secures that elastic band. So not-so-dexterous ladies and gents, you can thank Mark Twain.”

Classrooms without walls: A forgotten age of open-air schools

From Messy Nessy Chic: “In the early 20th century, open air schools became fairly common in Northern Europe, originally designed to prevent and combat the widespread rise of tuberculosis that occurred in the period leading up to the Second World War. Schools were built on the concept that exposure to fresh air, good ventilation and exposure to the outside were paramount! The idea quickly became popular and an open air school movement was introduced for healthy children too, encouraging all students to be outdoors as much as possible. It all started with the creation of the Waldeschule (literally, “forest school”), built in Charlottenburg, Germany in 1904 and designed to provide its students with the most exposure to the sun. Classes were taught in the surrounding forest, which was believed to help build independence and self-esteem.”

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 “Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain invented the bra clasp”

From The Guardian: “A fugitive father and his three children have been spotted together for the first time in nearly three years, along the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island. Just before Christmas 2021, Tom Phillips fled into the Waikato wilderness with his children Ember, now 8, Maverick, now 9, and Jayda, now 11, following a dispute with their mother. Phillips has not been seen since last November after he allegedly stole a quad bike from a rural property and broke into a shop in Piopio. CCTV footage showed two figures on a street, believed to be him and one of the children. But a breakthrough in the search for the family came when the group was seen together last Thursday on Marokopa farmland, in New Zealand’s Waikato region, after a chance encounter with teenage pig hunters who pulled out their phones and began filming.”

The enduring mystery of the Loretto Chapel’s circular staircase

From Atlas Obscura: “It’s considered a miracle, an engineering marvel, and even a scientific anomaly, depending who you ask. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, the helix-shaped spiral staircase at Loretto Chapel has long puzzled visitors, including architects and physicists. There are several unknowns surrounding the staircase and its late-19th-century origins. First off: how was the 20-foot structure, which includes two 360-degree turns, built without the use of nails or other support? And how has it never wavered, despite so much use, after all these years? Also unknown is the type of wood used to build the staircase, and who built it in the first place. Neither the carpenter nor their materials have ever been identified. There are numerous conflicting theories, and roughly 250,000 visitors marvel at the chapel and its mystifyingly unsupported spirals each year.”

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 “A father is seen with his children three years after they vanished”