On December 7, 1877, Thomas Edison walked into the offices of Scientific American and placed a metal device on a desk. With a turn of a crank, Edison astonished the dozen or so staffers who had gathered around the contraption.The machine spoke. “Good morning,” it said in Edison’s voice. “How do you do?” SciAm’s editors described the demonstration in the December 22, 1877, issue. “There can be no doubt,” they wrote, “but that the inflections are those of nothing else than the human voice.”Accompanying the report was adetailed sketch of Edison’s device, which the inventor called a phonograph. Virtually overnight, the article catapulted Edison to fame and established the phonograph as the first machine to record and reproduce human speech. But was it? On May 15, 2026, at the annual meeting of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections in Memphis, an audio historian proposed another candidate for the title — one that preceded Edison’s by nearly a century. (via Scientific American)
Pacific islanders saved his life in 1943 and he spent the rest of it repaying them
On June 5, 1943, Fred Hargesheimer was shot down by a Japanese fighter while on a mission over the Japanese-held island of New Britain in the southwest Pacific. He parachuted into the jungle, where he barely survived for 31 days until local hunters found him. They took him to their coastal village, and for seven months hid him from Japanese patrols, fed him and nursed him back to health. In February 1944 he was picked up by an American submarine. After returning to the United States following the war, Mr. Hargesheimer married and began a sales career. But he could never forget those who saved him. After revisiting the village of Ea Ea in 1960, he came home, raised $15,000 over three years and returned in 1963 with his son to contract for the building of the villagers’ first school. In the decades to come, Mr. Hargesheimer built a clinic, another school and libraries in Ea Ea, renamed Nantabu, and surrounding villages. (via the New York Times)
A Soviet scientist cracked the code of the Mayan language and said his cat helped him do it
From a young age, Yuri knew he wanted to dedicate his life to history. He entered Kharkiv State University to study at the Faculty of History, but World War II interrupted his education and forced him to move to Moscow. There, he continued his studies at the same faculty at Moscow State University. His interests went beyond history into ethnography, which led him to write his thesis on shamanic practices. Even then, he was fascinated by Maya writing — despite everyone around him insisting it could never be deciphered. At the time, decoding the Maya hieroglyphs was considered impossible. There were no keys or reference materials to guide the work. This meant Yuri had to do more than just decipher texts — he had to invent an entire system for working with these complex inscriptions from scratch. He had a cat named Asya, and he often said she inspired his greatest breakthrough: the method for deciphering the Maya script. (via Palme School)
Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called The Torment Nexus.
His autistic child would only drink from one specific cup so the company custom made it
in 2004 or so, Ben Carter, then age 2, started using the cup pictured above. Fast forward to 2016, and he was still using the cup. Ben, then age 14, was on the severe end of the autism spectrum. His father posted to Twitter that Ben would only drink from this specific blue cup — he doesn’t drink from anything else, to the point of requiring two emergency trips to the hospital due to severe dehydration. Unfortunately, Tommee Tippee retired this specific line of cups. Giving Ben a newer version didn’t work. So he took to social media. Hundreds if not thousands helped spread Marc’s message. And ultimately, the Tommee Tippee company noticed. The company searched for the mold for the original cup, located it — and got to work. Per a company spokesperson, Tommee Tippee was “able to start production on a run of the original cup,” producing 500 or so, enough to “ensure that Ben has a lifetime supply.” (via Now I Know)
Charles Darwin’s grandfather proposed his own theory of evolution seventy years earlier
Erasmus Robert Darwin was an English physician. He was also a natural philosopher, inventor, and poet. His poems included much natural history, including a statement of evolution and the relatedness of all forms of life. He was a founding member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, a discussion group of pioneering industrialists and natural philosophers. Darwin’s final long poem, The Temple of Nature, was published posthumously in 1803. The poem was originally titled The Origin of Society. It is considered his best poetic work. It centres on his own conception of evolution. The poem traces the progression of life from micro-organisms to civilised society. The poem contains a passage that describes the struggle for existence. Percy Bysshe Shelley specifically mentions Darwin in the first sentence of the 1818 Preface to Frankenstein to support his contention that the creation of life is possible. (via Wikipedia)
This kid’s bird descriptions and imitations are mind-boggling
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest and Why Is This Interesting by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com
I like to save things. Particularly interesting websites and news articles. Some of them are just for my personal use (projects I want to work on, etc.) and some are for inclusion in one of my newsletters: either When The Going Gets Weird, which is a daily collection of interesting and/or weird news stories and links, or The Torment Nexus, which is a weekly long-form analysis of a topic related to technology and society (both are published for free here on my website and also on Ghost and Substack). If for whatever reason you don’t save bookmarks — perhaps you live in the moment, perhaps you have a photographic memory — this post is unlikely to be of interest to you! But if you do save a lot of bookmarks, a tool called Raindrop is one of the best I have found for doing so.
For an indication of my bookmark-hoarding problem, I currently have about 170,000 bookmarks and links saved in Raindrop, in a variety of folders. For many years I used Instapaper for doing this, but it was a little too sparse for my liking, both in terms of the UI and the features it included. I switched to Pocket for awhile, because it had a more visual interface and was owned by Mozilla, and I eventually built up a huge repository of links there, but last year Mozilla said it was shutting the service down. Like many others, I had to not only export hundreds of thousands of bookmarks but also find a new home for them, so I researched a bunch of different open-source options, and wound up with Raindrop (I’m sure there are others that work for you and that’s fine).
The process of exporting 150,000 bookmarks and then importing them into a new service is not one I would recommend, since most services can’t handle that kind of load all at once, so you have to do it in batches. If you go here, you can see the conversation between me and the obviously irritated developer/maintainer (I assume) when I complained that the import of my hundreds of thousands of bookmarks from Instapaper kept failing — it handled the import of a huge number from Pocket, but when I tried to import from a CSV I downloaded from Instapaper the service kept giving me an error that said “You creating enormous load. Contact with us.” So I sent emails but got no response.
As you can see from the Reddit thread, the maintainer said “We do not have a total limit of bookmarks you can add to Raindrop. But we do prevent importing 100,000+ of bookmarks in short period of time. Please wait a week, when you will be able to import more.” So long story short, that’s what I did and it worked great. I don’t know who I was speaking with, but both the website and Google Play say Raindrop is the work of Rustem Mussabekov, a young developer originally from Kazakhstan who now reportedly lives in St. Petersburg.
One of the best parts about Raindrop is that it saves a copy of the website, so that if the article disappears or becomes unobtainable for some other reason, there is a local copy to refer to. It also has auto-tagging and auto-filtering built in, to make organizing easier, and full-text search. It’s also cross-platform — you can add an extension to any browser to save links, and you can access your links either through raindrop.io or through apps for both iPhone and Android. And so far both the service and its apps and website have been rock-solid even when filtering or moving hundreds of thousands of bookmarks. If you are in the market for a bookmark manager, I highly recommend Raindrop (I am not getting paid for this endorsement, for the record, just a fan).
One of the consistent drumbeats that has accompanied the rise of artificial intelligence, along with “Is it going to kill us?” and “Will it kill us and the planet?” is the idea that AI will lead to an epidemic of job losses, and possibly even the destruction of entire categories of jobs. We can see some of this fear in articles published by the Wall Street Journal and CBNC, with headlines like “AI Is Wrecking An Already Fragile Job Market For College Graduates” and “Right now is a really difficult time to find a job,’ expert says.” One recruiting firm says marketing companies are no longer looking for entry-level employees because AI can do it all; the CEO of another consulting firm told his own children not to focus on jobs that involve writing or data, but to choose those that require “people skills,” like becoming a police officer (good advice until Robocop becomes a reality, I suppose). Anthropic founder Dario Amodei has said that he believes AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the near future. Here’s the WSJ:
AI is accelerating trends that were already under way. With each new class after 2020, an ever-smaller share of graduates is landing jobs that require a bachelor’s degree, according to a Burning Glass Institute analysis of labor data. That’s happening across majors, from visual arts to engineering and mathematics. And unemployment among recent college graduates is now rising faster than for young adults with just high-school or associate degrees. Meanwhile, the sectors where graduate hiring has slowed the most—like information, finance, insurance and technical services—are still growing, a sign employers are becoming more efficient and see no immediate downside to hiring fewer inexperienced workers.
Top executives at industry giants like Amazon and JPMorgan have said in recent weeks that they expect their workforces to shrink considerably. Venture-capital firm SignalFire found that among the 15 largest tech companies by market capitalization, the share of entry-level hires relative to total new hires has fallen by 50% since 2019. “For the first time in modern history, a bachelor’s degree is no longer a reliable path to professional employment,” Gad Levanon, chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute, told CNBC. Although college graduates are still less likely to be unemployed than their non-degree counterparts, the advantage is smaller than it’s been in decades. Concerns about the economy, persistent inflation and a slowdown in consumer spending are also likely contributors to an erosion of entry-level opportunities, according to some researchers.
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.
Master Yan’an has trained at the Shaolin Temple in China since he was 6 years old. He has climbed the roughly 1,500 stone steps up Wuru Peak to the Bodhidharma Cave thousands of times. None of the steps is the same size or height. Some are narrow; some are tall. During the day, tourists who visit the temple usually take one to two hours to reach the peak. It is not advised to climb at night. There are no lights along the trail, and one wrong step could send a hiker tumbling down the steep staircase. But Master Yan’an had an unusual student last summer. San Antonio Spurs All-NBA center Victor Wembanyama was looking for a challenge that would test him in ways he’d never been tested before. He wanted to build his inner strength alongside his already prodigious physical strength. His goals, he said, transcended mere athletic glory. (via ESPN)
A French aristocrat built a business on famous works of literature but it was a Ponzi scheme
It was Gérard Lhéritier’s most amazing coup. The manuscript of Les 120 Journées de Sodome, the Marquis de Sade’s novel of sexual depravity and violence, had long been considered lost to French cultural heritage. Sade wrote it in 1785 while imprisoned in the Bastille for debauchery, by order of the king and at the request of his mother-in-law. He used his prison time fruitfully, to become a writer of plays, short stories and novels, and he composed The 120 Days of Sodom in tiny, meticulous characters on a strip made from 33 pieces of paper glued together. The scroll, which reached 12 metres in length, was rolled up and left hidden in his cell when he was evacuated just before the storming of the prison on July 14 1789. Lhéritier exhibited the scroll at the Museum of Letters and Manuscripts, which he had founded in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He later sold the scroll for €12.5mn, divided into 2,500 shares at €5,000 each. (via the FT)
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.
