Author: Mathew Ingram

In 1982, Larry Walters, a 33-year-old truck driver from North Hollywood, tied 45 weather balloons to a lawn chair and soared into the skies, getting as high as 16,000 feet, where he was spotted by a number of jet aircraft. ”This guy broke into our channel with a mayday,” said Doug Dixon, a member of an Orange County citizens band radio club. ”He said he had shot up like an elevator to 16,000 feet and was getting numb before he started shooting out some of the balloons.” Walters then lost his pistol overboard, and the chair drifted downward. He became entangled in a power line, briefly blacking out a small area. The chair dangled five feet above the ground, and Mr. Walters was able to get down safely.

The DIY scientist, the Olympian, and the mutated gene

David Epstein tells the story of a young woman with a rare genetic condition who spent years trying to convince doctors that she had the same disorder as a famous Olympic athlete: “I got a personal note from a 39-year-old Iowa mother named Jill Viles. She was the muscular dystrophy patient, and she had an elaborate theory linking the gene mutation that made her muscles wither to an Olympic sprinter named Priscilla Lopes-Schliep. A few days later, I got a package from Jill, and it included a stack of family photos — the originals, not copies; a detailed medical history; scientific papers, and a 19-page, illustrated and bound packet. Within a few minutes, I was astounded.”

Continue reading “The time a truck driver flew to 16,000 feet in a lawn chair”

We all know that tulip mania was a frenzy. Everyone in the Netherlands was involved, from chimney-sweeps to aristocrats. The same tulip bulb, or rather tulip future, was traded sometimes 10 times a day. No one wanted the bulbs, only the profits – it was a phenomenon of pure greed. Tulips were sold for crazy prices – the price of houses – and fortunes were won and lost. It was the foolishness of newcomers to the market that set off the crash in February 1637. Desperate bankrupts threw themselves in canals. The government finally stepped in and ceased the trade, but not before the economy of Holland was ruined. Yes, it makes an exciting story. The trouble is, most of it is untrue.

The only woman in an around-the-world solo sailing race is in the lead

Somewhere in the Southern Pacific Ocean, Kirsten Neuschafer is alone on her boat, Minnehaha, as she tries to outmaneuver the latest storm to cross her path as she approaches Cape Horn. She’s spent the past day heading north in an effort to skirt the worst of the oncoming weather. The storm is threatening wind gusts up to 55 miles per hour and seas building to 25 feet. Neuschafer is battling to win what is possibly the most challenging competition the sailing world has to offer — the Golden Globe Race. Neuschafer, the only woman competing, has left all rivals in her wake. Of the 16 entrants who departed five months ago, only four are still in the race, and for the moment at least, she’s leading.

Continue reading “Tulip mania: Classic story of a financial bubble is wrong”

If this happened in a movie, viewers would think it was ridiculous and incredibly unlikely, and yet this appears to be how Shari Redstone regained control of her father’s multibillion-dollar media empire:

I can still remember how the hairs on the back of my neck stood up when I first heard “Last Kind Word Blues,” by a Southern blues singer named “Geeshie” Wiley. I forget exactly where I heard it — I thought it was embedded as an audio file in the article posted below, a feature from the New York Times magazine that was published in 2014. But when I went back to check, it wasn’t there. It might have been in the movie “Crumb,” a documentary on underground artist Robert Crumb, which used it. Anyway, I think part of my interest was the haunting sound of the song itself, and part was that I had never heard of Geeshie Wiley, despite a lifelong love of American blues music from the turn of the century.

When I looked up the song, I came across the video embedded below on YouTube, in which someone going by the name “I Play Banjo Now” plays it in 2012, sitting on what appears to be a bed in an unkempt bedroom. It really captures the essence of Geeshie’s performance, I think, and many of the more than 500 commenters on the video seem to agree. I have returned to play this video many times over the years (I’ve also learned to play the song myself on guitar, although not nearly as well). The performer, I found out later, is Christine Pizzuti, whose version appears on an album of American Blues songs called The American Epic Sessions, along with artists like Jack White and the Avett Brothers. The album is also the soundtrack to a movie of the same name.

So who who was Geeshie Wiley? Where did she come from? And what happened to her? As the NYT piece makes clear, there are no easy answers to those questions:

Continue reading “The mystery of Geeshie and Elvie”

This is a video clip that begins with a real street, then the camera turns down an alleyway, and the video transitions to a simulated streetscape generated with Unreal Engine 5, the latest version of the video game-development software. It is almost impossible to tell that it’s not a real video of a real location (except maybe for the doll’s head on a window ledge that disappears halfway through).

In November, OpenAI, a company that develops artificial-intelligence software, released ChatGPT, a program that allows users to ask conversational-style questions and receive essay-style answers. It soon became clear that, unlike with some earlier chat-software programs, this one could, in a matter of seconds, generate content that was both readable and reasonably intelligent. Unsurprisingly, this caused consternation among humans who get paid to generate content that is readable and intelligent. Their concerns are reasonable: companies that make money creating such content may well see AI-powered tools as an opportunity to cut costs and increase profits, two things that companies that make money from content like to do.

AI in the media is, more broadly, having a moment. Around the same time that ChatGPT launched, CNET, a technology news site, quietly started publishing articles that were written with the help of artificial intelligence, as Futurism reported last month. A disclaimer on the site assured readers that all of the articles were checked by human editors, but as Futurism later reported, many of the CNET pieces written by the AI software not only contained errors, but in some cases were plagiarized. After these reports came out, Red Ventures—a private-equity firm that owns CNET and a number of other online publications, including Lonely Planet and Healthline—told staff that it was pausing the use of the AI software, which it said had been developed in-house.

Continue reading “Is AI software a partner for journalism, or a disaster?”

Deep in the digital archives of France’s national library, a collection of letters scratched out in unusual symbols were sitting neglected in a mislabeled folder until a trio of unlikely codebreakers—a computer scientist, a musician, and a physicist—revealed their historic origin, a feat that’s being publicized in a new study. Using a code breaking algorithm and manual analysis, the team led by computer scientist George Lasry were able to decode the forgotten letters and identify them as the lost writings from Mary Queen of Scots (otherwise known as Mary Stuart) in the years leading up to her beheading in 1587.

Scientists are using AI to talk to animals

In the 1970s a young gorilla known as Koko drew worldwide attention with her ability to use human sign language. But skeptics maintain that Koko and other animals that “learned” to speak (including chimpanzees and dolphins) could not truly understand what they were “saying”—and that trying to make other species use human language, in which symbols represent things that may not be physically present, is futile. Now scientists are using advanced sensors and artificial intelligence technology to observe and decode how a broad range of species, including plants, already share information.

Continue reading “A queen’s letters have been decrypted after 400 years”

Snipers are often seen as a special breed within the armed forces — they often operate solo, or as part of a small team, and they often work in remote areas, far from the theatre of battle. This creates a kind of emotional distance, which can have a significant downside in some cases: Eddie Gallagher, a Navy Seal who was court-martialed by the Army but later pardoned by Donald Trump, reportedly shot children and other non-combatants without provocation, and was turned in by his own men, who said he was “OK with killing anything that moved.” Even when they don’t engage in this kind of behaviour, snipers tend to keep to themselves and rarely talk about their exploits (Chris Kyle, the author of the book that became the move American Sniper, was an exception).

That said, we do know a little about the kinds of incredible distances that the world’s best long-range snipers can operate at, and as it turns out, three of the longest distance kills have been recorded by Canadian snipers. The longest was over the mind-boggling distance of 3.4 kilometres or 2.2 miles, in Iraq in 2017, by an unidentified member of Canada’s Joint Task Force 2 special forces unit (which it should be noted has been accused of some wrongdoing in the past). This record was 1.2 kilometres farther than the previous record, which was already an incredibly long distance to make a succesful shot. At that kind of distance, a sniper not only has to take into account wind speed, etc. but actually has to consider the rotation of the earth. An expert explains:

Continue reading “Why are Canadians such good snipers?”

Many people struggle to successfully climb Mount Everest. Lhakpa Sherpa has climbed Mount Everest 10 times, the most ascents ever by a woman. Unlike the routines of most climbers, who drop into specialized training for months or even years, Lhakpa’s training regimen takes place at a Whole Foods in West Hartford, Conn., where she carries large stacks of boxed fruits and vegetables. Occasionally, she hikes to the top of the 6,288-foot Mount Washington. The first time Lhakpa touched Himalayan blue ice, she was barefoot. One of 11 children born to a shepherd and homemaker in the village of Makalu, Nepal, she grew up on the slopes of Mount Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest peak at 27,825 feet.

An interview with a living vampire

Anne Helen Petersen talks with Kathleen McLaughlin about her new book, Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America’s Blood Industry, and her personal connection to blood donation: “I started getting sick in weird ways, and sometimes disabled, with what was for about five years a mystery illness. Basically, my hands and feet would go numb, and it got progressively more difficult to walk or to use my hands over a period of months. I was diagnosed with a rare disorder in which my immune system attacks healthy parts of my body. The treatment that works is periodic infusions of a drug made from isolated parts of other peoples’ blood.”

Continue reading “The queen of Everest works at Whole Foods”

I caught sight of this at the Globe and Mail site — the words “anonymous coward” in the header after I logged in — and it made me laugh. This is a term I stole from Slashdot when I was helping to design the Globe’s social strategy back in 2008 or so. My idea was that there would be a kind of tier system for users who joined the Globe, so they could “level up” the way one does in video games, by providing more information about themselves so that we could create a kind of social network. One of the perks of being a member was that you could use your real name. Until then, you were an “anonymous coward” 🙂

Gunnar Lundberg writes: “Thousands of people attempt to “thru-hike” the Appalachian Trail by traversing its entirety in a calendar year. According to historical stats, only one in four will succeed. The trail stretches for 2,193 miles, from northern Georgia to the middle of Maine, snaking its way through fourteen states in the eastern United States. Hikers cover anywhere from ten to forty miles per day, and the average thru-hike takes six months. During my five months on the trail, I encountered snow, straight winds, floods, heat waves, water shortages, black bears, and rattlesnakes. One day the heat rash was so painful. I laid on top of my sleeping bag and cried myself to sleep.”

Ancient Roman mosaic offers a different ending to the Trojan War

The discovery of a previously unknown Roman villa in rural Rutland, England, during the 2020 lockdown was one of the archaeological stories of the year. Villas are emblematic features of the Roman countryside, and many are known across Britain. But this new discovery is unique. It has what could be considered the most significant Roman mosaic discovery in the past century at its heart. The mosaic tells a grim tale of revenge from near the end of the Trojan War, famously described in Homer’s Iliad. It is the only known representation of the Trojan War from Roman Britain and tells the story in an unusual “comic strip” style.

Continue reading “Walking off grief on the Appalachian Trail”

In a video made in 1956, GM showed us what they thought driving a car would be like two decades in the future: jet-powered cars would follow a magnetic strip to their destination on single-lane superhighways, all going about 30 miles an hour, guided by men in control towers, while the family sang songs. The …

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http://dlvr.it/ShvmCy

The late 19th century in Europe saw the emergence of the hazy style of the Impressionists, which privileged mood and light over fine details. While this monumental shift has long been attributed to shifting stylistic preferences, a new study argues that it was also due to a change in the environment’s appearance: As the Industrial Revolution engulfed London and Paris in smog, the world literally became blurrier. Climate scientists Anna Lea Albright of the Sorbonne University and École Normale Supérieure in Paris and Peter Huybers of Harvard University researched this phenomenon by focusing mainly on 60 oil paintings by J.M.W. Turner and 38 works by Claude Monet.

What some young girls thought of the Apollo space program in 1971

There are a lot of myths about the Apollo space program. Chief among them is that most Americans fervently supported the space program’s enormous costs. In reality, most Americans of the 1960s thought the Apollo space program wasn’t a good use of taxpayer funds, with many people asking why that money wasn’t being spent to fight homelessness or hunger in the U.S.—the same criticisms you hear today. One of the girls quoted in the article in the Billings Gazette newspaper, 11-year-old Betsy Longo, expressed a similar sentiment. “I don’t think they should use so much money to go to the moon,” Longo said. “They should use it to stop cancer and help people here on Earth.”

Continue reading “Did air pollution help create the Impressionists?”