Author: Mathew Ingram

At 21, Rodney Wilkinson was the best fencer in South Africa: national champion in foil and sabre, second in epee. He had toured Europe and Argentina. He had not stood on the Olympic podium, because South Africa was banned. The apartheid state had taken that from him, along with everything else it took from everyone. Eleven years after the incident, the same man was working as a contract engineer at the Koeberg nuclear power station, 19 miles north of Cape Town. He was furious with the regime that had conscripted him, sent him to fight a war in Angola he didn’t believe in, and made his country a pariah. In an act of folly or courage, in December 1982 he walked four bombs into South Africa’s only nuclear power station, weeks before it was due to come online. On 17 December, he pulled the pins, made it out of the control room, had a farewell drink with his colleagues, and then disappeared. (via The Guardian)

He accidentally discovered that his wife was a world-class Tetris player

I contacted Kelly Flewin, a 29-year-old gas station attendant in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and the senior referee at twingalaxies.com, who told me that any record in one of the more popular classic games would always set the classic gaming world on fire. “It’s funny,” I told him. “We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and my wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She’s weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem.” After I hung up the phone, I went to the bedroom and woke my wife, Lori. “Honey,” I said. “You’re not going to believe this, but I just got off the phone with a guy who’s in charge of video game world records, and he said the world record for Game Boy Tetris is 327 lines, and he wants us to go to New Hampshire this spring so you can try to break the world record live in front of the judges at the world’s largest classic video game tournament. (via Boston.com)

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Continue reading “The man who blew up a nuclear plant and then disappeared”

A beekeeper has been jailed for six months after she set swarms of her insects on sheriff’s deputies attempting to carry out an eviction at a friend’s house. Rebecca Woods insisted she only released her truckload of hives to allow the bees to enjoy the “lovely, flowering landscape” near the home of an elderly friend and cancer patient. But a district court in Springfield, Massachusetts, heard that Woods, 59, admitted under questioning that she was trying to save him from eviction by freeing the bees in the presence of the deputies who had shown up to serve papers. Several officers were stung on their heads and faces, and one required hospital treatment. One deputy is seen frantically waving his arms, trying to shoo the insects away. Woods, who put on her beekeeper’s suit during the incident, had driven up to the property with the hives stacked on a trailer pulled by her blue SUV, and proceeded to lift the lids of a number of them. (via The Guardian)

The company that owns the salvage rights to the Titanic wants to sell off artefacts

More than a century after the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, the company that owns exclusive salvage rights to the shipwreck wants to auction about 100 artifacts raised from the ocean floor during the first recovery effort nearly 40 years ago.The doomed vessel’s wreckage has been an object of fascination and controversy since it was found in 1985, and the newly proposed sale is already stirring fresh debate over the fate of the thousands of items pulled from the site.When the company, R.M.S. Titanic, last proposed selling artifacts, in 2016, it was struggling through bankruptcy and the plan drew objections from the U.S. and French governments, as well as from UNESCO and other cultural institutions. The latest potential sale was proposed in a document that R.M.S. submitted in March to the federal court in Norfolk, Va., which oversees the recovery effort and may have to approve the auction. (via the New York Times)

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Continue reading “Beekeeper jailed for opening the hives to protect a neighbor”

Researchers from Cairo University and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have located two air-filled spaces within Giza’s Menkaure pyramid that hint at a possible secret entrance. The Menkaure pyramid is the smallest of the three main pyramids on Cairo’s Giza plateau. Built for the Fourth Dynasty ruler Menkaure, it was completed in the 26th century BC. It was excavated between 1906 to 1910, but has not been fully explored since then. Working within the ScanPyramids project, the research team used non-invasive ground-penetrating radar, ultrasound, and electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) to confirm the presence of voids behind this area. Their discovery supports the theory, suggested by researcher Stijn van den Hoven in 2019, that a second entrance might exist at that location. In 2023 it found a previously undiscovered corridor at the Great Pyramid of Giza using advanced scanning techniques. (via Art News)

Researchers built an AI chatbot that only knows the world before 1931

The internet’s chatbots have read every forum rant, leaked Slack log, and confident blog post your uncle ever wrote about chemtrails. The results are predictable: they reflect the state of the internet, and it isn’t pretty. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a chatbot that only draws on knowledge from before the internet, reality TV, or AI-slop content ever existed? Three researchers have created just that: a chatbot that hasn’t read anything published after 1930. Talkie is a 13-billion-parameter language model trained on digital scans of English-language texts published before the end of 1930. That cutoff aligns with the current US public domain year, meaning anything published until the end of that year is fair game and there are no lawsuits from irate IP-holders to worry about. You can download it from GitHub or chat with it through a web interface (via Malwarebytes)

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Continue reading “Secret chambers have been discovered in a Giza pyramid”

Here is the promise you and I must cling to across the thousands of words that follow: At some point within this text, I will reveal to you what—after 555 responses, 13,000 miles of travel, and months of monomaniacal research—I have determined to be the best free restaurant bread in America. I will not attempt to slither to the moral high ground, arguing that best is a meaningless measure, or insisting that all bread is dear in its own way. Even if you attempt to betray me—for instance, by merely scanning the text that follows for the phrase Here it is: the best free restaurant bread in America—I will uphold my end of the bargain. Though it strikes the ear as an insoluble query, there is a correct answer—right now, known only to God (and to me, an agent of his will), but erelong to the steadfast reader. (via The Atlantic)

A newspaper boy dropped a nickel on the ground and it popped open to reveal a microfilm

On June 22, 1953, a fourteen-year-old newspaper boy collecting for the Brooklyn Eagle was paid with a nickel that felt too light to him. When he dropped it on the ground, it popped open, revealing that it contained microfilm. The microfilm contained a series of numbers. After agent Louis Hahn of the FBI obtained the nickel and the microfilm, the agency tried to find out where the nickel had come from and what the numbers meant. On the microfilm, there were five digits together in each number, 21 sets of five in seven columns and another 20 sets in three columns, making a total of 207 sets. There was no key for the numbers. The FBI tried for nearly four years to find the origin of the nickel and the meaning of the numbers. It was only when KGB agent Reino Häyhänen chose to defect in May 1957 that the nickel was linked to the KGB. (via Wikipedia)

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Continue reading “A heroic quest to find the best free restaurant bread in the US”

Jack Parsons was one of the most influential figures in the history of the American space program. He also stood accused of espionage, and held a deep fascination with the occult. By 1939, Parsons and his wife Helen Parsons-Smith had fully embraced the teachings of the Ordo Templis Orientis, a central hub for Aleister Crowley’s spiritual and religious philosophy. Crowley taught that a Thelemite’s central ambition was to achieve a higher state of existence by embracing one’s “True Will,” or one’s ultimate purpose beyond selfishness or ego. In pursuit of that goal, many aspects of Parsons’s life blurred the boundaries between science and mysticism. As a Thelemite, he performed ritual magic, including banishing impure elements with pentagrams, invocating the power of the “Holy Guardian Angel,” and offering daily adorations to the sun. (via Supercluster)

These two women are twins but due to a rare event they have different fathers

Lavinia and Michelle know that those of us who haven’t shared a womb with a sibling can be fascinated by twins: their similarities, how they differ, whether there’s any kind of mysterious synergy between them. They aren’t identical twins. They share the same striking eyes, but the lower halves of their faces are different. Their personalities differ, too. But they share many things, including the almost inconceivable circumstances that brought them into the world, and which only came to light four years ago, when they were 45 and both took DNA tests from the genealogy firm Ancestry. Their results of those tests revealed something never before documented in British history. Lavinia and Michelle are twins who grew together in the same womb, were born from the same mother, and delivered within minutes of each other – but have different fathers. (via The Guardian)

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Continue reading “The occult history of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory”

This is one of the venues at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, which I’ve been to a number of times . It’s the former San Francesco al Prato church or the Church of Saint Francis in the Meadow, and it was derelict and half destroyed for decades — due to landslides, earthquakes, floods and general neglect — before being renovated and turned into a conference venue. The original building dates back to the 1200s sometime, but in the 1800s they tried to renovate it and wound up almost destroying it. It was reconstructed in its current state in the 2000s.

The temple of Saint Michael the Archangel sits on a hill about 20 minutes outside the gates of the old city of Perugia in Italy, and was built sometime in the 5th century. It was originally a pagan temple, and at some point became a Christian church. It is open to the public and has a unique wooden circular dome, and inside there are alcoves distributed around the circular walls for christenings, etc.

The Mole (mo-lay in Italian) is an iconic building in Turin, mostly because the rest of the city has a height limit that makes the Mole stick out even more than it would otherwise. It is the tallest unreinforced building in the world — meaning it has no skeleton of metal girders, as most tall modern buildings do. It was originally built as a synagogue, and the spire is quite spectacular close up. It is now the museum of the motion picture, which commemorates the fact that the Lumiere brothers developed the first moving pictures in Turin in the 1800s, despite being French by birth (Turin has historically had a very French flavour).