Author: Mathew Ingram

Hi there. My name is Mathew Ingram, and until recently I was the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review in New York. I live in Canada. I post things I've written for work here, but also a daily newsletter called When The Going Gets Weird, which you can find here, and one about technology and culture called The Torment Nexus.
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Data center criticism is based on bad science and scare quotes

If you are following the growing artificial intelligence industry at all, you’ve probably come across some facts and figures about how AI is going to use up all of the country’s water, while also using up all the power and causing prices to spike for regular non-AI using humans, and also that the giant data centers required for this industry are taking over all the usable land, and will cause pollution to soar, and/or lead to a wide range of other negative societal effects. I don’t think of myself as an apologist for AI — although I have written about how it can be useful for important things like medical research, and how using it as a tool for writing isn’t always a terrible thing — and it’s possible that anti-data-center arguments have some merit purely as an anti-billionaire measure, but at the same time, many of the arguments I’ve noted above simply aren’t rational. They may contain numbers that sound terrible — billions of gallons of water, megawatts of power, etc. — but when looked at rationally they tend to collapse.

According to a recent Gallup poll, seven out of 10 Americans are opposed to the construction of data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, and almost half of those surveyed were strongly opposed. In the same March survey, 53% of Americans say they oppose building a nuclear energy plant in their area, far less than the 71% opposed to data center construction. Since Gallup first asked the nuclear power plant question in 2001, the high point in opposition has been 63%. Half of opponents mention data centers’ excessive use of resources, including almost 20% mentioning either their use of water or energy. Sixteen percent mention a related environmental concern of pollution, including noise pollution and air and water pollution. Most of the remaining opposition stems from general or specific concerns about artificial intelligence.

If you want to keep up with the revolt against data centers, there’s a dedicated website called Data Center Watch, which says it is run by a “boutique research firm tracking the growing opposition to data center development.” According to the site, local residents blocked or delayed about 20 projects around the US in the second quarter of last year, representing nearly $100 billion in proposed investment. Residents across the US are attacking and/or trying to block data center projects, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal:

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Anthropic discovers that Claude has a “secret thinking area”

As longtime Torment Nexus readers probably know, I have a minor obsession with the topic of artificial intelligence engines and consciousness — in part because such discussions inevitably reveal how little we know about human consciousness, let alone the machine kind. What is consciousness? Where does it reside? How does it emerge? How do we know that Atlantic writer Ted Chiang is conscious, let alone anyone else? And so on. If this isn’t your jam, I completely understand, and if you stop reading and move on, I will not be offended at all (but come back later!) I know that some people feel AI consciousness is a dead end, and that large-language models like Claude and Gemini and ChatGPT are just “stochastic parrots” or souped-up autocomplete tools that stole all their intelligence from others, and that talking about them being conscious or becoming conscious is like wondering if your toaster misses you when you are at work — and that those who discuss it, like Richard Dawkins did, have lost their minds or are the victims of “AI derangement syndrome.” I get that. I am not one of those people.

I’m not saying I believe that AI engines like Claude or ChatGPT are conscious or even that I think they will become conscious! But at the same time, I’m not saying they aren’t or won’t. David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University and a prominent researcher in the field of AI consciousness,  told New York magazine recently that the odds have 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.” Chalmers and Yoshua Bengio — who worked with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun on the development of neural networks — have written a paper that concludes that based on various criteria current AI engines are not conscious but future ones could be.

In the world of consciousness research, as I understand it, there are a (large) number of different models of how consciousness might work in human beings — or anywhere else, for that matter — and how we might find evidence of it working, or at least see the signs of it in operation. One of the most popular is called Global Workspace Theory or GWT, and it was developed by cognitive neuroscientist Bernard Baars in the 1980s. In a nutshell (and I am paraphrasing and condensing significantly here) this theory of consciousness suggests that the human brain operates a little like a theater where a play is being performed. Backstage, in the dark, there is a huge amount of unconscious work happening — things like regulating your breathing, recognizing visual input, retrieving memories, and so on. The stage is a kind of global workspace, where if a piece of data is important enough, it is shoved into the spotlight so that the rest of the brain can have access to it, and this is the foundation of consciousness.

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Did a climber leave his girlfriend to die on the mountain?

The judge, Norbert Hofer, was a specialist. At the Innsbruck Regional Court, in western Austria, he oversaw a jurisdiction designated for mountain, avalanche, climbing, cable-car, and ski accidents. Cases handled by this department rarely draw much public attention, but the trial of Thomas Plamberger, in February, was different. He was charged with homicide by gross negligence in the death of his girlfriend, Kerstin Gurtner, during an attempt to climb Grossglockner, Austria’s tallest mountain. Hofer was an alpinist himself and a mountain-rescue volunteer. He led groups of young people on summer hikes. The case against Plamberger was nearly unprecedented. Hundreds of unfortunates — hikers, climbers, skiers, snowboarders — die in the Austrian Alps each year, but these fatalities rarely result in criminal charges. Gurtner, thirty-three, had frozen to death a few dozen yards from the Grossglockner summit after Plamberger, then thirty-six, parted ways with her at around 2 a.m. on a winter night. (via the New Yorker)

In Italy they store their cheese in a bank vault because people keep stealing it

Northern Italy. In the dead of night, a group of thieves creeps toward a locked vault. Were they looking for jewels or priceless artwork? Gold bullion? No — Parmesan. And they almost managed it. Around 400 wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano were loaded onto their getaway vehicle before police apprehended the thieves. Credito Emiliano SpA is a local bank in the Emilia-Romagna region, the only place where Parmigiano Reggiano can be produced. Local Parmesan-makers, who have been subjected to multiple organized large-scale thefts over the years, have turned to the bank to store and protect their cheese. Such is the cheese’s worth that the bank also permits the wheels of cheese to be used by producers as collateral against loans. The cheese is in a purpose-built, climate-controlled storage facility that can hold 300,000 wheels (which are worth $950–$1,900 each) known as the “Fort Knox of cheese.” (via Longreads)

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How a former erotic model blew up the Nord Stream pipeline

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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The violent history behind the humble spice called nutmeg

From mulled wine at Christmas to hot cross buns at Easter, nutmeg has become an essential spice in Europe. But its widespread adoption — including in the traditional Dutch breakfast pastry of ontbijtkoek — comes on the back of a sordid history of colonial exploitation. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, Dutch cultivation of nutmeg and the related spice mace involved “one of very few historical situations where Asian slaves worked on European-owned farms or plantations,” according to anthropologist Phillip Winn. The Banda Islands, once the world’s only source of nutmeg, were home to between 13,000 and 15,000 people until their conquest by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1621. The roughly 1,000 Bandanese who survived were enslaved alongside other laborers under the  perkenier  system, where hundreds of workers toiled on each plantation (in Dutch, perk). (via JSTOR Daily)

He restores and installs free-to-use pay phones in Vermont using VoIP

Remember pay phones? Those relics of telecom’s distant past were once everywhere — on many busy street corners, in bars and restaurants, even built into airliners’ seatbacks. Now, an engineer in Vermont is aiming to give the old-fashioned device some present-day relevance. Patrick Schlott, 32, is an electrical engineer by training who works at the South Burlington, Vt.–based  eVTOL  maker Beta Technologies. Inspired in part by the free-phone projects  Futel  and PhilTel, he’s restored and installed free-to-use pay phones at over half a dozen locations across Vermont. With Schlott’s phones, users can make coinless calls anywhere in the United States or Canada—with each phone routing its calls through local internet connections via a simple Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) gateway. Schlott recently spoke with IEEE Spectrum about the rugged charm of old tech and the joys of reverse engineering. (via Spectrum IEEE)

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A swarm of remote-controlled cockroaches that can swim

Swarms of cyborg insects controlled remotely via electrical implants can now operate underwater, thanks to tiny diving suits supplying them with oxygen – which could one day enable them to explore Mars. Hirotaka Sato at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and his colleagues first demonstrated in 2021 that Madagascar hissing cockroaches could be remotely controlled with electrodes embedded in sensory organs known as cerci. In 2024, they demonstrated that a swarm of 20 of these cyborg insects could coordinate. Cockroaches breathe through pores called spiracles on their abdomen. But Sato and his team were unhappy with the insects’ inability to search flooded areas, which aren’t uncommon in disaster zones, so they have developed a diving suit to allow them to operate underwater. The researchers 3D printed a watertight resin suit, which protects the abdominal spiracles from water. Tiny hoses run forwards from the suit to connect directly to the thorax. (via New Scientist)

Wheeled vehicles existed for 5,000 years before someone thought of the bus

Buses do not seem like the sort of thing that needed to be invented. Anyone can see that the wheel needed to be invented, and that some further innovations were required to build carriages large enough for a substantial group of people to travel in them simultaneously. Once big carriages were invented, however, we might assume that people automatically started running them on regular timetables between fixed locations. The practice is so universal today, and its advantages so obvious, that it does not seem to require active innovation. Surprisingly, however, this is not true. The world had thousands of wheeled vehicles for millennia before it had a single bus. We know exactly who invented buses, when he did so, and how quickly his invention spread across the world. Wheels started being used for transport some time after 3,500 BC. For a very long time, however, wheels were not a world-changing technology. Early carts were precarious, and roads were too bad for them to be very useful. (via Works In Progress)

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Is there a new quantum processor or is Microsoft lying?

I’ve been writing a lot about artificial intelligence lately, and I wanted to break that cycle by writing about something that’s been bugging me for a little while now: namely, the controversy over Microsoft’s claim that it has developed a new and improved version of a quantum microprocessor based on the theoretical “Majorana” particle. What is said particle, you ask? I am not a quantum physicist by any means (I don’t even play one on TV) but I believe it is technically known as a fermion — a class of sub-atomic particles that obey certain rules. Protons and electrons are types of fermion, and so are quarks and weirder things like leptons (but not bosons). The main feature of a Majorana particle is that it acts as its own anti-particle. In regular physics, every particle has an anti-particle with the same mass but the opposite charge (except for photons, which are their own anti-particle because their magnetic charge is zero and the opposite of zero is still zero). When a particle and its anti-particle meet, they annihilate each other.

In case you were wondering (as I was), the Majorana particle is named after a brilliant Italian physicist named Ettore Majorana, who was born in 1906 and did ground-breaking work on theoretical physics; Enrico Fermi compared him to Isaac Newton. He correctly predicted the existence of the neutron, which won its discoverer the Nobel Prize, but in 1938, he disappeared mysteriously. Majorana was a public supporter of Italian fascism and a member of the National Fascist Party, but at the time he disappeared the Italian government had started requiring all university professors to swear an oath of loyalty to the Fascist regime in order to keep their jobs. It’s possible he didn’t want to do this and went into hiding but there is no record of anything written by him after his disappearance, and some colleagues suspect he committed suicide.

How does any of this relate to Microsoft’s quantum processor? Great question. When it comes to the nitty-gritty of the particle’s behavior I am completely out of my depth, so I’m going to defer to Wikipedia’s description of how Majorana particles could emerge, and also how they can (theoretically) be used in quantum computing:

In superconducting materials, a quasiparticle can emerge as a Majorana fermion, more commonly referred to as a Bogoliubov quasiparticle in condensed matter physics. Its existence becomes possible because a quasiparticle in a superconductor is its own antiparticle. Majorana fermions can be bound to a defect at zero energy, and then the combined objects are called Majorana bound states. This name is more appropriate than Majorana fermion because the statistics of these objects is no longer fermionic. Instead, they are an example of non-abelian anyons: interchanging them changes the state of the system in a way that depends only on the order in which the exchange was performed. The non-abelian statistics that they possess allows them to be used as a building block for a topological quantum computer.

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A $10M sports-forgery scam ended with a grisly death

In the last hours of his life, on the morning of July 16, 2025, Brett Lemieux stopped to chat with the workers building his mini-mansion. The crew had already demolished the first of three older homes Lemieux had recently purchased along East Hoover Street, a lane just two blocks long in Westfield, a wooded suburb 20 miles north of Indianapolis.After speaking with the workers and before he was found alone and dead, Lemieux — a 45-year-old remembered by his suburban neighbors as a dog-loving handyman, an enthusiastic baseball coach and a father admired for taking care of his disabled stepson — drove his Range Rover slowly toward his final parking spot, the driveway of one of his houses. Lemieux wasn’t coming out alive. His tinted windows allowed little perspective on his actions, but a goodbye letter he posted on the Facebook group Autographs 101 as he sat there soon exploded across social media. (via Bloomberg)

How the game of snooker got famous thanks to a train-wreck of a player

 The World Snooker Championship was established in 1927 but struggled to outgrow its niche audience. Luckily, in the seventies and eighties, Alex Higgins was playing. Born in Belfast, Higgins was a two-time world champion nicknamed Hurricane. Immediately after shooting, he would jerk his body and cue to the side in a frenetic motion that no one would teach. He drank heavily (including during big matches), smoked eighty cigarettes a day, and was a prodigious gambler. His rebellious, precarious lifestyle connected him to working-class fans, but wrecked his career. After winning the 1972 World Championship, Higgins revealed that he was squatting in condemned buildings. During his appearances on Pot Black, he had prostitutes brought to his dressing room and was found urinating in a sink. He was caught urinating again, this time in an arena flowerpot, after clinching his second world title. He headbutted a tournament official in 1986, and in 1990 punched another in the stomach. (via The Paris Review)

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This Texas ranch is for remote-controlled telescopes only

Rockwood, Texas is home to a unique business called Starfront Observatories. Owner/operator Bray Falls hosts hundreds of other people’s telescopes in perfect conditions — ultra-dark skies (Class 1 on the Bortle scale), clear weather, and fast internet connections — so astrophotographers from around the world can run their scopes and make observations completely from their computers. Out in the middle of nowhere Texas, a young astrophotographer is running one of the largest telescope ranches on Earth. Stargazers from around the world ship their gear to Bray Falls, who tends 550 telescopes (and counting) on 40 acres outside Brady, the geographic heart of Texas. Customers control the scopes from a laptop anywhere on the planet for as little as 99 dollars a month. The imagery produced by the telescopes on this ranch is impressive. (via Kottke.org)

A teenaged girl’s study on hand-dryer noise was published in an academic journal

When Nora Keegan found her ears ringing after using a hand dryer and noticed other kids holding their ears at the sound of the machines, she decided to investigate. Nora, of Calgary, was 9 years old at the time. Nearly four years later, Nora’s research on the topic has been published in a scientific journal and she is just 13 years old. “Oh, it was crazy,” Nora told “Good Morning America” about learning via email that her research had been accepted into the Canadian journal Paediatrics & Child Health. “I remember I was at school and I was so happy.” Nora began her science experiment in fifth grade by driving around with her parents, both doctors, looking for hand dryers in public places that children frequent, like libraries and restaurants. The family purchased a professional decibel meter for Nora’s experiment and also used a ruler and measuring tape to measure the hand dryers’ volume. (via ABC News)

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Om Malik 1966-2026

I first met Om Malik in 2006, when we invited him to be a panelist at the web conference that some friends and I had just started in Toronto called Mesh (despite having literally no clue what we were doing). The idea was to bring smart folks together to talk about the wonderful future that blogs and live chat software and other magical Web 2.0 creations were surely going to bring about (LOL). And Om was one of those smart people we wanted to have on stage — I had been reading his blog and his writing at Business 2.0 about broadband and other new technologies, and I wanted him to talk about how the social web was going to change the media (I worked at a newspaper then, and I really wanted something to change the media). And he was everything I expected when we met: funny, smart, shot straight from the hip. I liked him right away.

As we sat around chatting at the MaRS Centre in Toronto, I mentioned to Om that I thought he should turn his blog into a business — just put up a website and sell ads and so on. As I recall, he stayed up late the night before he had to leave for San Francisco, drinking wine and smoking cigars (both of which he gave up after having a heart attack the next year) and he missed his flight. When he got into the office, he got chewed out by an editor and not long after that he quit and turned his blog into Gigaom, hiring writers and working out of his apartment (using a Pringles can or some other gizmo to leech off the free Wi-Fi from the Starbucks across the street, if I remember correctly). Om told a story about how he told his mother he wanted to call the site MegaOm, and she reportedly said “You are getting so big, it should be called GigaOm!” I don’t know if this is true 🙂

If this is your photo of Om please let me know
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