Author: Mathew Ingram

From Scientific American: “Human echolocation has at times allowed people to ride bikes or play basketball despite being completely blind from a very young age. These echolocators typically perceive their environment by clicking sharply with their tongues and listening to differences in the sounds reflected off objects. Brain-imaging studies reveal that expert echolocators display responses to sound in their brain’s primary visual region, and researchers have speculated that long-term input deprivation could lead to visual regions being repurposed. “There’s been this strong tradition to think of the blind brain as different,” said Lore Thaler, a neuroscientist at Durham University in England. Thaler co-led a 2021 study showing that both blind and sighted people could learn echolocation with just 10 weeks of training.”

Tracking a serial killer: The bodies behind the walls at 10 Rillington Place

From the LRB: “On​ 24 March 1953, 43-year-old Beresford Wallace Brown was trying to put up a shelf on which to perch his radio while redecorating the ground-floor kitchen of 10 Rillington Place, where he was an upstairs tenant. The wall sounded hollow behind Beresford Brown’s hammer. He stripped off a sheet of wallpaper and spotted a hole in the wooden panel behind it: an alcove. He shone a torch in, and saw the white torso of a woman, her head covered. He and a fellow tenant went to a kiosk to call the police. The police found two more bodies stashed away behind the first one. All three women in the alcove, Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina Maclennan, were in their twenties. They had died between January and March.”

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Continue reading “Scientists say anyone can learn to do echolocation”

From The Guardian: “When Delimar Vera was six years old, the woman she thought was her mother – Carolyn Correa – turned to her and said, “There’s a bad lady who wants to take you away from us, but you’re not going to let her, right?” Vera promised she wasn’t going anywhere; she’d tell the “bad lady” to get off her. “I was a sassy kid,” she says now, 20 years on. Remembering that strange exchange still gives Vera chills. It was Correa herself that had taken Vera away, kidnapping her as a newborn, crossing over from Philadelphia to New Jersey, changing Delimar’s name to Aaliyah and raising her as her own. Vera, 26, tells me the story of her bizarre and traumatic childhood – part horror story, part fairytale, and still in many ways a mystery.”

These twins created their own secret language

From the BBC: “Twins Matthew and Michael Youlden speak 25 languages each. The 26th is Umeri, which they don’t include in their tally. If you’ve not heard of Umeri, there’s good reason for that. Michael and Matthew are the only two people who speak, read and write it, having created it themselves as children. The brothers insist Umeri isn’t an intentionally secret language. An estimated 30-50% of twins develop a shared language or particular communication pattern that is only comprehensible to them, known as cryptophasia. The term translates directly from Greek as secret speech. Nancy Segal, director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University, believes there are now better and more nuanced words for the phenomenon, and prefers to use “private speech”.

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 “They said she died in a fire as a baby but she was kidnapped”

From the New Yorker: “Dwight Burdick, a private physician to the Saudi royal family, was on a rotation at the King’s palace, in Jeddah, when he got an urgent summons. Princess Hala, a daughter of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, had gone wild with a knife. Burdick was asked to enter her quarters and forcibly sedate her. Burdick, a lifelong peacenik with a neat white beard, had moved to Saudi Arabia from Texas in the mid-nineties. He had served for years on the King’s personal medical detail, but had never before encountered Princess Hala. The request to drug her alarmed him—forced sedation was a “violation of my professional ethics,” he said—but he was curious. Though he admired Abdullah, he knew little about the lives of the ruler’s daughters.”

She was an R&B legend but it took her 30 years to get the royalties she deserved

NPR: “Ruth Brown was R&B’s first major star. It was 1949 when Billboard changed the name of its Race Music category to Rhythm and Blues — the same year Brown released her first single. She was required to pay for touring and recording costs out of pocket and when Atlantic ended their professional relationship in the early 1960s, Brown had no savings to fall back on. She moved to Long Island, New York, and spent a decade and a half working a series of low-paying jobs, often as a single mother. But in 1976, her career was revitalized when she performed the role of Mahalia Jackson in a production of the musical Selma. She used her new fame to leverage Atlantic Records into paying her back royalties — and she didn’t stop there. The deal she cut with the label also allowed dozens of other musicians to recoup their earnings as well.”

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 “The Texas doctor and the imprisoned Saudi princesses”

From Scientific American: “A bipartisan group of Texas legislators has just done something extraordinary: they have unanimously subpoenaed Robert Roberson, convicted in 2003 of killing his daughter based on the now-discredited theory of shaken baby syndrome, to testify before them five days after he was scheduled to be executed, effectively forcing the state to keep him alive. Roberson is one of many people who have been imprisoned for injuries to a child that prosecutors argue resulted from violent shaking. But research has exposed serious flaws in this idea, and dozens of other defendants who have been wrongly convicted under this theory have been exonerated. Yet Roberson remains on death row, even as politicians, scientists and others—including the lead detective who investigated him—have spoken out on his behalf.”

The story behind this Turkish subdivision of Disney-style castles

From The Guardian: “When drone footage of the complex of 732 castles appeared online a few years ago, they quickly became a viral phenomenon: there are dozens of YouTube videos marvelling at the cluster of Disney-like chateaux. Since then, the mystery of whether they will ever be finished has only deepened. The castles were supposed to bring a welcome injection of Gulf money to this part of Turkey. On paper, it was a tempting pitch for prospective purchasers from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Instead, since construction abruptly stopped in 2016, the project has become a bizarre white elephant. As the scandal has dragged on, it has sparked multiple lawsuits, one attempted suicide, and even a minor diplomatic incident between Turkey and Kuwait.”

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 “He’s still in prison for a crime that doesn’t exist any more”

From The Art Newspaper: Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana caused an uproar at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019 and quickly went viral as a symbol of the absurdism of the contemporary art market, though Cattelan himself described Comedian (2019), his first “sculpture” in 15 years, as “a sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value”. That value will be put to the test next month, when one of the three editions of Comedian goes up for sale at Sotheby’s New York. Made up of a banana duct taped to the wall, the work includes a certificate of authenticity and instructions for how to display the sculpture. The work, which was priced at $120,000 by a gallery in Miami Beach in 2019, is estimated by Sotheby’s to sell for between $1m and $1.5m. A single banana and one roll of duct tape are included in the sale, the auction house said.”

The rollercoaster king: the man behind the UK’s fastest thrill-ride

From The Guardian: “When rollercoaster fans speak of creativity, they speak of Anton Schwarzkopf, late pioneer of the loop, and Ron Toomer, who became the first engineer to haul people up more than 200ft before sending them into a drop. They speak of Alan Schilke and Jeff Pike, both admired for their structures that marry timber with steel. They speak of Werner Stengel, a living legend at 88, whose idea it was to send passengers hurtling around corners while tilted at 90 degrees. John Burton – a self-effacing aficionado of theme parks and musical theatre from Staffordshire – is an anomaly. He was only a few years on from working as a crab feeder at an English aquarium when he was invited to create his first rollercoaster. He was given an £18m budget, a patch of damp ground, and told: make it big. He was 27.”

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 “Banana duct-taped to a wall could sell for more than $1M”

From Garden & Gun: “It is nearing midnight on an unpaved road bordering the Florida Everglades when Donna Kalil slams on the brakes. Light from her blue F-150 floods the scene along the road, where, within the grass, a sheen of iridescent skin glints, and the sinuous shape and inkblot pattern of a Burmese python leap into focus. Kalil jumps from the truck, long braid swinging, and moves in on her quarry. At sixty-two years old, Kalil is a full-time, year-round professional python hunter, and the original python huntress: She is the first woman to hold this job, not that gender crosses anyone’s mind out here in the living, breathing wilderness of the Everglades. Kalil positions herself between the python and the endless black reach of swamp beyond it. Then she pounces, angling for a strong grip just behind the head. This brief fight represents the 876th time Kalil has pitted herself against a Burmese python and won.”

He cracked a 30-year-old encrypted file that helped end apartheid in South Africa

From Wired: “John Graham-Cumming’s day job is the CTO of the security giant Cloudflare, but he is also a historian of technology. He might be best known for leading a campaign to force the UK government to apologize to the legendary computer scientist Alan Turing for prosecuting him for homosexuality and harassing him to death. The story he shared centers around Tim Jenkin, a former anti-apartheid activist. It was the early 1980s, and the ANC’s efforts were flagging. The problem was communications. Using a Toshiba T1000 PC running an early version of MS-DOS, Jenkin wrote a system using the most secure form of crypto, a one-time pad, which scrambles messages character by character using a shared key. When Jenkin returned to South Africa in 1992, he took his tools with him — but then years later, he had forgotten the password.”

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 “She’s one of Florida’s most lethal python hunters”

In case you are a first-time reader, or you forgot that you signed up for this newsletter, this is The Torment Nexus (you can find out more about me and this newsletter — and why I chose to call it that — in this post.)

Before I begin, I would just like to apologize in advance to anyone who is reading this and is in their 20s or 30s (or possibly 40s) and doesn’t remember the launch of the first Netscape web browser in 1994. I realize that for some of you, writing about this and my personal experience of it is probably a little like how I felt when my grandfather mused about life during “The Great War” (it didn’t get called World War I until after World War II, obviously, because no one knew there would be a second one). So if you have as much interest in the early days of the world wide web as you do in the Great Pyramid of Egypt then please move on to TikTok or whatever and I will see you later.

I was all set to write about something else this week for The Torment Nexus — which I will keep to myself, since I may write about it at a later date — and then I saw a link to a blog post from Jamie Zawinski, a programmer who was working at Netscape at the time (he is now the the proprietor of the DNA Lounge, a San Francisco nightclub). Zawinski writes about launching Mosaic Netscape 0.9 on October 13, 1994 (okay, I am a little late for the actual anniversary but it is what it is) and describes it in this way:

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

Continue reading “Netscape’s anniversary and some existential thoughts about the web”