Author: Mathew Ingram

Brynn Holland writes for The History Channel: “James Barry began his military career on July 6, 1813, as a Hospital Assistant in the British Army, and was soon promoted to Assistant Staff Surgeon, equivalent to lieutenant. He then served in Cape Town, South Africa, for 10 years where he befriended the governor, Lord Charles Somerset. Barry was known for his short, hot temper. Patients, superiors, army captains and even Florence Nightingale herself were on the receiving end of his anger. He threw medicine bottles and even participated in a duel. But his medical skills were unprecedented. He was the first to perform a successful caesarean section in the British Empire where both the mother and child survived. Dr. Barry died from dysentery on July 25, 1865. His last wishes were to be buried in the clothes he died in, without his body being washed—wishes that were not followed. When the nurse undressed the body, she discovered female anatomy and tell-tale stretch marks from pregnancy.”

How an accountant in India was recognized as a mathematical prodigy

Stephen Wolfram, who published his first scientific paper at 15 and got a PhD in theoretical physics at the age of 20, writes about the man known as Ramanujan: “I have for many years received a steady trickle of messages that make bold claims but give little or no backup for what they say. But in the end I try to at least skim them—in large part because I remember the story of Ramanujan.  On about January 31, 1913 a mathematician named G. H. Hardy in Cambridge received a package of papers with a cover letter that began: “Dear Sir, I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only £20 per annum. I am now about 23 years of age….” and went on to say that its author had made “startling” progress on a theory of divergent series in mathematics, and had all but solved the longstanding problem of the distribution of prime numbers.”

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Continue reading “The extraordinary secret life of Dr. James Barry”

Clive Thompson writes: “By now, we all know the problems of greenhouse gases. Burning fossil fuels creates CO2 — with methane sometimes as side product as well — and it traps the sun’s heat. The result: Global warming, and all the weirding of climate that comes with it. We moderns have known this since the 80s. But the basic idea behind greenhouse gases was discovered over a century earlier — by a female suffragette who, in 1856, did some ingenious scientific experiments. When she wrote up her work, she neatly and pithily predicted the possibility that we’d one day cook the planet. Eunice Foote was born in 1819 on a farm in Connecticut, and raised in Bloomfield, New York. In that period of history, few women received good technical educations, but Foote was an exception: Her parents sent her to the Troy Female Seminary, where she learned advanced math and science.”

This little known member of the Van Gogh family was crucial to Vincent’s success

Sheehan Quirke, also known as The Cultural Tutor, writes: “Johanna is the least famous of the van Goghs. Vincent might just be the world’s best-known artist. Then there’s Theo, his devoted brother, without whose support Vincent could never have done what he did. And, finally, we have Jo. She was born Johanna Gezina Bonger in 1862, the daughter of an insurance broker. She studied English and became a teacher at a girls’ school in the Netherlands. In 1884 she was introduced to Theo van Gogh by her brother. Theo was immediately taken, but it was five years later that he proposed. Jo said yes and they were married in early 1889. That same year, Vincent died, and Theo also died just six months later. What did Jo do? She inherited all of Vincent’s (then valueless) paintings and took them with her to the Netherlands. Although Vincent had sold only one painting in his lifetime and died a nobody, Jo was committed to sharing Vincent’s artistic genius with the world.”

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Continue reading “This 19th-century woman predicted global warming”

Stephen Rodrick writes for GQ magazine: “The guru was late. Very late. This was odd, because the guru is all about being ten minutes early. Show up tardy to one of his sessions and you will be stuck outside of enlightenment with your shoes in your hand. I thought about getting mad or, more specifically, hangry. It was my sixth day without meat or coffee on this week-long yoga retreat in rural Tennessee, and my contraband stash of caffeine pills and prosciutto had long been exhausted. Just then came the hellish noise of an engine, and a motorcycle rose over a crest. It was the guru. He rode toward us, his blue robe and white beard flowing behind him, and brought his Ducati to a stop so that it would be perfectly framed behind him on camera.”

The head of a virus database appears to have invented an alter ego

From Martin Enserink and Jon Cohen in Science magazine: “When Jeremy Kamil started to sequence samples of the coronavirus in the spring of 2020, it was clear where he should deposit the genetic data: in GISAID, a long-running database for influenza genomes. Kamil, a virologist at Louisiana State University’s (LSU’s) Health Sciences Center Shreveport, says he quickly struck up a friendly relationship with a Steven Meyers, who used a gisaid.org email address. The two often exchanged emails and talked on the phone, sometimes for hours, about the pandemic and data sharing. Meyers said he had previously worked at Time Warner and had changed jobs after his boss at that company, Peter Bogner, launched GISAID in 2008. Meyers was born in Germany and living in Santa Monica, California, just like Bogner, whom he would call “our big boss” and “the Big Cheese.” Over time, things got a little weird, Kamil says. Emails he sent to Meyers were sometimes answered from Bogner’s email account.”

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Continue reading “An inside look at Sadhguru, the internet’s favorite mystic”

This is an excerpt from a book by Clancy Martin, called “How Not to Kill Yourself.” It comes from the excellent Small Bow newsletter by former Gawker editor AJ Delaurio. (Trigger warning should be obvious).

“I make my own suffering so much worse when I struggle against the suffering, when I think the suffering is somehow a sign of something else or has to be turned off or is the cause for me to panic, to freak out, to attack or run away. For me the worst kind of suffering, the real ‘I want to kill myself’ kind of suffering, is always that second kind, the Freaking-Out-Over-Suffering kind of suffering. Sometimes that manifests as self-loathing. Sometimes that manifests itself as anxiety or despair. Sometimes that manifests itself as a kind of terrible claustrophobic panic. But it is always the second dart, not the first. So, if I can just tell myself, when I am struck by the first dart, let yourself feel that dart. Don’t do anything more about it. Just let that dart stab you. Then I may very well be a rabbit with his neck caught in a wire snare, but at least I’m not decapitating myself with my scramble against it.”

From the New York Times: “Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future. On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.

Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work. “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Dr. Hinton said during a lengthy interview last week in the dining room of his home in Toronto, a short walk from where he and his students made their breakthrough. His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.””

From a recent edition of the always excellent Griefbacon newsletter, written by Helena Fitzgerald, which you should all subscribe to:

“The first time I thought in posts—the first time I imagined my fears and desires, my crushes and my worries, playing out in the immediate future specifically on social media—was during a winter break when I was twenty or so, on vacation with my family. Obsessing over someone who’d broken up with me, I filtered every experience I had and every beautiful thing I saw through how I would post about it, and the reaction I hoped those posts might compel. That was the first time I can remember living in the way I’ve lived since then. Online had seeped into my real-time emotional life; it was like realizing you’re fluent in a language when you wake up from a dream in which you were speaking it.”

“I say all the time that I miss the internet, but I use the internet to say it. All I really mean is that I miss a different version of myself. I miss when I knew less; I miss when there was more time. Despite being engaged in the act of shedding at every moment from birth, we don’t notice what we’ve shed until no part of it clings to us any longer. This is merely forward motion— not a tragedy, not a triumph, not a hardship, and not a miracle. We live in planned obsolescence, learning the new technology just in time for the newer technology to outpace it and render those skills useless. Whatever I thought the internet was is already long over, something the newest generation of novelty seekers has never seen, and would likely not even recognize.”

Every year for the past decade or so (with the exception of the COVID years of course), Becky and I have travelled to Italy for the delightful International Journalism Festival, which is held in the ancient city of Perugia, about two hours north of Rome in the hills of Umbria. It is a fantastic conference that takes place over five days and involves more than 350 speakers, hundreds of volunteers, and about a dozen amazing venues in the Centro Storico. Even more amazing, attendance is free and open to anyone. The photo below is just one of the beautiful venues, the Sala dei Notari or Gallery of Notables, which was built sometime in the 13th century — about two hundred years before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press.

Another one of the festival’s venues, which was new last year, is the incredible Church of San Francesco, which was partially destroyed in World War II and has been restored to become a modern entertainment venue — with plexiglas filling in the hole at the top of the nave, and a modern sound system. It was quite spectacular to be on stage there.

Every year we have been to Italy, we have taken advantage of the trip by booking a few days to go somewhere else for a short vacation. Last year it was Puglia, in the south, and we also made a side visit to Matera, the ancient city of caves, one of the oldest continuously-inhabited towns in the world. The year before that it was Florence and Pisa, and we’ve also seen most of Rome (of course) as well as Venice, Sorrento and the Amalfi Coast, and Cinque Terre. This year we met up with our Italian friend Anna Masera, who used to teach journalism at the university in Turin, and spent some time touring Sicily, including a somewhat terrifying trip up a very windy Mount Etna.

Continue reading “A trip to Perugia and then to Sicily”

Manon Bischoff from Scientific American writes: “Geologically, Sardinia is one of the quietest places in Europe. The island, along with its neighbor Corsica, is located on a particularly secure block of Earth’s crust that is among the most stable areas of the Mediterranean, with very few earthquakes in its entire recorded history and only one (offshore) event that ever reached the relatively mild category of magnitude 5. Physicists chose this geologically uneventful place because the Archimedes experiment requires extreme isolation from the outside environment. It involves a high-precision experimental setup designed to investigate the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics—the amount of energy in the empty space that fills the universe. Scientists are hauling a two-meter-tall cylindrical vacuum chamber and other equipment down into an old Sardinian mine where they will attempt to create their own vacuum and weigh the nothing inside.”

The great European house cat migration

From Frank Jacobs at Big Think: “Domestic cat bones around 8,000 years old have recently been found in both Serbia and Poland. This pushes back the arrival in Europe of one of humanity’s earliest companion animals by several thousands of years. Until recently, the thinking was that cats arrived in Europe only in Late Antiquity (roughly the 3rd to 7th century AD). That still holds true for many parts of the continent, but an earlier influx via Asia Minor into the Balkans, and further north, seems to have preceded it. Because the five known varieties of wildcat (Near Eastern, Chinese, Central Asian, Southern African, and European) are quite similar and can interbreed, scientists until recently had a hard time pinning down in which part of the world cat domestication first occurred. Some even suggested that it had happened at multiple times and places.”

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Continue reading “How much does nothing weigh? A new experiment will find out”

From David Gauvey Herbert in NY Mag: “In January 2010, a team of detectives and a prosecutor flew to Philadelphia to present a case to a league of elite investigators called the Vidocq Society, which met once a month to listen to the facts of cold cases. The group’s co-founder, Richard Walter, was billed as one of America’s preeminent criminal profilers. But that quickly unravelled: Since at least 1982, he has touted phony credentials and a bogus work history. He claims to have helped solve murder cases that, in reality, he had limited or no involvement with — and even one murder that may not have occurred at all. These lies did not prevent him from serving as an expert witness in trials across the country. His specialty was providing criminal profiles that neatly implicated defendants, imputing motives to them that could support harsher charges and win over juries. Convictions in at least three murder cases in which he testified have since been overturned. In 2003, a federal judge declared him a “charlatan.”

This school has no classes, no teachers and lots of freedom

Christopher Spata writes for the Tampa Bay Times: “At the Spring Valley School, three dozen students ages 5 to 18 are trusted to do what they want. There are no classes, grades or homework. There are no “teachers,” only “staff.” Students decide when it’s time to graduate. Democracy rules, and students’ voting power far outweighs that of the school’s four adults. The kids at Spring Valley can fire or hire staff, admit or expel students and spend its budget. If you call, it’s likely a 15-year-old will answer the phone. When a Tampa Bay Times reporter asked to observe a day inside the tiny private school, the students considered the request and voted to allow it. Spring Valley has doubled tours for prospective families to twice a week, and an expansion of the 2,500-square-foot schoolhouse begins this summer. Students and staff voted recently to increase tuition from $4,850 to $6,717, the first significant increase in over a decade.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “The fake criminal profiler who wanted to be Sherlock Holmes”