One July morning in 2023, I was driving my son to an art class when my friend Amy Ryan called. The Gilgo Beach serial killer had just been identified and taken into custody.“You will not believe who it is,” she reported: “It’sRex Heuermann.” However unlikely it was that the two of us — lifelong New Yorkers in middle age, one a journalist, the other, an Oscar- and Tony-nominated actress — would know a serial killer merely by way of our domestic routines, it is in fact where we had landed. Heuermann was a consulting architect who worked with the stewards of several well-kept prewar apartment buildings in Brooklyn. I dealt with him briefly over the reconstruction of a courtyard garden when I served on my co-op board in Brooklyn Heights. I sat in occasional basement meetings with him talking about, as I vaguely recall, things like drainage efficiency. But Heuermann had been in Amy’s apartment, arguing with her architect. (via the NYT)
This 400-year-old Lithuanian oak was just named the European Tree of the Year
The 400 year old Oak of Laukiai once stood almost forgotten, known only to the people of the small Rukai village. A year ago, however, the local community restored the area around the tree and organised a celebration in its honour, bringing people together and reminding them of its quiet strength. Today, the sixth generation of the Laukiai people is growing up alongside this oak. The Old Wild Apple Tree, which placed second, has withstood wind, rain, snowstorms, and heat waves for more than 150 years, growing in harsh conditions at an altitude of 860 meters. From a place called Diel, it quietly watches over the village below – a silent observer of its joys, troubles, and changes. The third placed Crooked Elmof Szyslowiec rises above the moat on an island near the former castle of the Szydłowiecki and Radziwiłł families. Its unusual shape comes from its location, forcing it to lean toward the water. This year, for the first time, the trees competed for Tree points instead of votes. (via Tree of The Year)
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The screeching of peeling tape is a familiar albeit annoying sound. However, despite decades of study, its source has remained elusive. The peeling of adhesive tape from a solid surface is known to progress with a stick-slip mechanism. Indeed, numerous studies investigated the chaotic trajectory of these motions and the associated pulling forces, which is important for disparate phenomena, such as fracture mechanics, triboluminescence, and earthquake dynamics. However, the early studies missed a crucial aspect of the slip mechanism, which relies on a sequence of transverse cracks which can travel supersonically, relative to the air, across the width of the adhesive under the tape as it detaches from the solid substrate. This sound is produced by a discrete train of weak shocks emanating from the fine fractures which travel supersonically with respect to the surrounding air, in the transverse direction. (via Physical Review)
He discovered the jet stream but no one noticed because he published it in Esperanto
Had Japanese meteorologist Wasaburo Ooishi not been an Esperantist, U.S. scientists during World War II might have been more aware of a national vulnerability. Between 1923 and 1925, Ooishi completed almost 1,300 observations of fierce high-altitude winds, later named the jetstream. The somewhat eccentric Ooishi was not only the director of Japan’s Tateno atmospheric observatory but also the head of the Japan Esperanto Society, proponents of the artificially constructed language. Ooishi announced his discovery in the Tateno observatory’s annual reports, which he published in Esperanto. Not surprisingly, his research was ignored, and the U.S. military was caught off guard by two consequences of the invisible jetstream. The first surprise came in 1944 when B-29 pilots flying toward targets in Japan discovered at their cruising altitudes winds as high as 230 mph. The winds caused bombs to miss targets and, as headwinds, required bombers to use far more fuel than expected. (via the Smithsonian)
Super Glue was invented accidentally and forgotten then rediscovered
The incredibly stable adhesive known as Super Glue was invented by accident in 1942 by Dr. Harry Coover while he was working for Eastman-Kodak’s chemical division in Rochester, New York. During World War II, Coover was part of a team conducting research with chemicals known as cyanoacrylates in an effort to find a way to make a clear plastic that could be used for precision gunsights for soldiers. While working with the chemicals, the researchers discovered that they were extremely sticky, and this property made them very difficult to work with. Moisture causes the chemicals to polymerize, and since virtually all objects have a thin layer of moisture on them, bonding would occur in virtually every testing instance. They rejected cyanoacrylates as a feasible option and moved on with their research. Six years later, in 1951, Coover was transferred to Kodak’s chemical plant in Kingsport, Tennessee. That’s when he re-discovered the cyanoacrylates and recognized new potential in them. (via MIT)
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.
Scientists think they’ve found the mysterious “sunstone” that the Vikings used to navigate
To avoid getting lost on their voyages across the North Atlantic 1000 years ago, Vikings relied on the sun to determine their heading. (This was long before magnetic compasses were available in Europe.) But cloudy days could have sent their ships dangerously off course, especially during the all-day summer sun at those far-north latitudes. The Norse sagas mention a mysterious “sunstone” used for navigation. The trick for locating the position of the hidden sun is to detect polarization, the orientation of light waves along their path. Even on a cloudy day, the sky still forms a pattern of concentric rings of polarized light with the sun at its center. If you have a crystal that depolarizes light, you can determine the location of the rings around the hidden sun. Calcite is such a crystal. It has a property called birefringence: Light passing through calcite is split along two paths, forming a double image on the far side. (via Science.org)
Wagner designed a wooden horn that was to be used during his opera Tristan und Isolde
About 4 1/2 hours after the first notes of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” a startling sound emerges from the wings, one many in the audience likely have never heard before. A nearly 4-foot wooden horn known as a holztrompete, specially constructed to the composer’s somewhat ambiguous specifications, signals the arrival of the ship carrying Isolde and King Marke to Brittany, inspiring a mortally wounded Tristan to hang on to life for a few more moments. A new production of the opera features a specially constructed horn that measures a minimum 46.5 inches and lengthens slightly if the tuning slide is turned. While the Wagner Tuba was invented in the 1850s by the composer for his Ring Cycle to bridge the sounds of horn and trombones, the holztrompete’s details are more nebulous. Wagner said it should have “the effect of a very powerful natural instrument, such as the alphorn” and that he wanted it to be “at least three feet long, made of wood, almost trumpet-like, slightly curved downwards.” (via AP)
Blue Angel aerobatic pilots choreograph their performance by picturing every move
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
A police officer has recalled the moment he was lowered from a helicopter into a crocodile-infested river in South Africa as part of an effort to recover human remains. Captain Johan Potgieter was tasked with capturing a crocodile suspected of eating a businessman who had been swept away by floodwater. “The crocodile itself was lying on an island… there really was no other way to get to it except from the air,” he told the BBC. Since the operation, remains have been found inside the 15ft and 1,100lb crocodile. DNA tests are underway to confirm their identity. The man’s car had become stranded attempting to cross a low bridge in the flooded Komati River last week. By the time the police got to the scene, it was empty, leading them to suspect he had been swept away by the water. Drones and helicopters were used to in the search mission which led police to a small island where a number of crocodiles lay in the sun. (via the BBC)
People with schizophrenia don’t fall for the same visual illusions that non-schizophrenics do
Normal human subjects are readily fooled by a 3D representation of a face mask, but schizophrenics are not. This visual trick is known as the hollow mask illusion and consists of a 3D representation of a hollow, concave mask of a face, viewed pointing inwards. When healthy individuals look at this, more than 99% of the time what they report seeing is a normal face that is convex. This illusion exploits the brain’s system for making sense of the visual world by superimposing what it expects to see, based on past experience and memories, with what it is actually seeing. Yet patients diagnosed with schizophrenia almost never fall for it and instead report seeing a “hollow” face. But why? To find out a joint UK and German study published in the journal Neuroimage brain scanned 16 healthy volunteers and 13 schizophrenics as they experienced the illusion, which was presented to them using a 3D headset. (via The Naked Scientists)
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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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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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I could be wrong, but I feel like this post is going to be similar to the one I wrote recently about crypto stablecoins. I know some readers never got past the headline, because they were busy imagining all the bad things about crypto — the rug pulls and the graft and so on. One reader even pointed out that my post probably didn’t make it past many people’s spam filters, since the headline contained a word that many people and algorithms ignore on contact. So be it! In any case, this one is probably going to get an overwhelmingly negative response as well, because I think many people have already decided that AI is and always will be terrible — given things like the water use (which I wrote about here) and the plagiarism (which I wrote about here) and convincing people they are immortal or should unalive themselves, etc. (which I wrote about here). If you fall into that category you probably haven’t even made it this far, so I might as well just continue with my thesis: namely, that AI is doing some positive things.
I’ve been collecting examples of things that AI is doing that are clearly beneficial, either to an individual or to society in general — or if not inarguably beneficial then at least not obviously bad — and they have been piling up. I will freely admit here that some of these are still hypothetical, meaning AI has been used in research or hypothetical situations but has had some success that appears to be broadly applicable. One of the things that made me decide to write about it, despite my conviction that it will be unpopular, is a piece I read by someone named Carlo Iacono who writes a blog called Hybrid Horizons (from what I can gather, he is a university librarian from Australia). In the piece, Iacono argues that many of those writing about artificial intelligence have been looking at its effects on the wrong part of the world. Here’s an excerpt:
There is an app in Lagos that can tell you whether your malaria medication is real or counterfeit. It costs sixty dollars. It uses a spectrometer the size of a thumb drive and an AI algorithm trained on the molecular fingerprints of four hundred drugs. A pharmacist holds the device against a blister pack, waits twenty seconds, and the screen tells her whether the pills will treat a child’s fever or do nothing while the parasite multiplies. The company behind it was founded by a Nigerian pharmacist who, at fifteen, swallowed a counterfeit asthma medication and spent twenty-one days in a coma. He survived, studied at Yale, and built a system that now operates in over five thousand pharmacies across Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda. In 2024, it identified and removed 1.3 million counterfeit medications from the supply chain.
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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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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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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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Alan Robinson and Walter Macfarlane were born in Hawaii 15 months apart. The duo met in 6th grade and have been friends for 60 years. While they’ve shared a very close bond, they never thought they were related, until a DNA website revealed their relationship. Robinson was adopted, and Macfarlane did not know who his father was, so the pair were always searching individually for information on their families. For years, Macfarlane had tried unsuccessfully to find clues about his father. With the help of his daughter, they began sifting through matches he got on a DNA website. One of the top matches was username Robi737. Macfarlane-Flores told KHON-TV, that her father’s best friend, Robinson, flew 737 airplanes for Aloha Airlines, and his nickname was Robi. The pair soon learned that they shared a birth mother. (via USA Today)
Archeologists have found honey in 3,000-year-old Egyptian tombs that is still edible
Modern archeologists, excavating ancient Egyptian tombs, have often found something unexpected amongst the tombs’ artifacts: pots of honey, thousands of years old, and yet still preserved. Through millennia, the archeologists discover, the food remains unspoiled, an unmistakable testament to the eternal shelf-life of honey. There are a few other examples of foods that keep–indefinitely–in their raw state: salt, sugar, dried rice are a few. But there’s something about honey; it can remain preserved in a completely edible form, and while you wouldn’t want to chow down on raw rice or straight salt, one could ostensibly dip into a thousand year old jar of honey and enjoy it, without preparation, as if it were a day old. Moreover, honey’s longevity lends it other properties – mainly medicinal – that other resilient foods don’t have. Which raises the question: what exactly makes honey such a special food? (via The Smithsonian)
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In case you aren’t terminally online, as the kids say, there’s a popular meme that uses a photo of a balding man with a steely gaze and the caption “Heartbreaking: The worst person you know just made a great point” (apparently the man’s name is Josep Maria García, and he is from Spain; the picture was taken in 2014 during a trip to Barcelona, during which he helped his photographer brother-in-law set up a photoshoot). I was reminded of this meme again while reading all of the coverage of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, which just started court proceedings in federal court in California. Some of you may remember that I wrote about this for The Torment Nexus, in November of 2024, and in that piece I argued that despite having a ton of terrible opinions about a wide range of things, Musk has a number of points in his OpenAI lawsuit that I think are worth considering. Believe me, I don’t like being in this position, but just because he is a difficult or terrible person doesn’t mean he doesn’t make some good points.
To recap, Musk originally sued OpenAI two years ago, accusing the company of breaching a contract by putting profits ahead of its original goal of developing artificial intelligence in the public interest. In particular, Musk alleged that the multibillion-dollar deal between OpenAI and Microsoft — which at the time gave the software company a stake in anything developed by OpenAI up until the achievement of what it called “artificial general intelligence,” or human-like abilities — contravened the company’s pledge to develop AI safely and to make the technology publicly available. The lawsuit came just a few months after OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman survived a boardroom coup in which a number of board members (all of whom have now left the company) tried to have him removed. Here’s how the New York Times described the Musk lawsuit:
Mr. Musk’s lawsuit said he became involved with OpenAI because it was created as a nonprofit to develop artificial intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.” A key component of that, the lawsuit said, was to make its technology open source, meaning that it would share the underlying software code with the world. Instead, the company created a for-profit business unit and restricted access to its technology. The lawsuit, which seeks a jury trial, accused OpenAI and Mr. Altman of being in breach of contract and violating fiduciary duty, as well as unfair business practices. Mr. Musk is asking that OpenAI be required to open up its technology to others and that Mr. Altman and others pay back Mr. Musk the money that Mr. Musk gave to the organization.
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As the woman was reading, she heard an unfamiliar voice say, “Please don’t be afraid. I know it must be shocking for you to hear me speaking to you like this, but this is the easiest way I could think of. My friend and I used to work at the Children’s Hospital, Great Ormond Street, and we would like to help you.” The woman said the disembodied voice then attempted to convince her of its sincerity by providing three pieces of information and suggesting that she check their veracity as proof. The woman confirmed that they were correct. At the clinic, a psychiatrist diagnosed the woman with “functional hallucinatory psychosis.” The patient then went on vacation. Although she was still taking thioridazine, the voices came back, telling her she needed to go home immediately for medical treatment. These voices gave her the address of a hospital, and urged her to schedule a brain scan because she had a tumor. (via Live Science)
The time that Bruce Springsteen tried to break into Graceland while Elvis was there
Things were a lot different in 1976. For one thing, Bruce Springsteen wasn’t a huge star yet. For another, Elvis Presley, one of his biggest musical heroes, was still alive. All of this came crashing together on April 29 of that year, when Springsteen tried to get into Graceland, Presley’s mansion in Memphis. Springsteen took a late-night cab ride to the King’s home following his show in town supporting Born to Run, his third album and the one that would launch him into the spotlight. Noticing a light on inside, Springsteen jumped the gated wall and ran to the front door in hopes of meeting his lifelong idol. But security stopped Springsteen before he had a chance to even knock on the door and asked what was going on. Springsteen inquired, “Is Elvis home?” He was told, “No, Elvis isn’t home, he’s in Lake Tahoe” – which was true. It was also 3AM, so even if he was home, he probably wasn’t going to open his door. (via Ultimate Classic Rock)
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The FBI is looking for any connections among the recent deaths and disappearances of at least 10 scientists who had ties to government science projects or other sensitive information. Those who have died or disappeared include a nuclear physicist and MIT professor fatally shot outside his Massachusetts residence, a retired Air Force general missing from his New Mexico home, and an aerospace engineer who disappeared during a hike in Los Angeles. The announcement comes after the cases were highlighted by President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers; growing online speculation hinted at a link between the incidents, although there is no known evidence of any connections among the individual researchers other than the nature of their respective jobs and the fact that none of the incidents occurred before 2022. The most recent case involves retired Air Force Maj. Gen. William Neil McCasland, who disappeared, along with a gun and his wallet, in February. (via Scientific American)
Meet the 82-year-old queen of jumping rope
It was a Wednesday morning in April, and Annie Judis had transformed the kitchen of her Beverly Hills mansion into a film set. With her iPhone balanced on a stand, the 82-year-old adjusted the lighting and smoothed her costume: an aqua spandex workout set that revealed a hint of cleavage, a matching head wrap and tinted glasses. When it was showtime, her housekeeper hit play on her adopted theme song, the peppy anthem “Good Morning,” by Max Frost. Smiling from ear to ear, Ms. Judis started jumping rope and didn’t stop for a full minute. “Come on, everybody, let’s move it, let’s go!” she said to the camera. She does this routine nearly every morning, greeting her 187,000 Instagram followers and reminding them: “You’re going to need that energy for the grandkids.” Ms. Judis currently holds the Guinness World Record for oldest competitive rope skipper. She also thrives on having an audience: If she doesn’t share a workout, she said, it’s like it never happened. (via the New York Times)
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It was 2004. I was 31. I was up for several days on meth and drinking heavily for the past month or so. I decide to go rob a bank and take my son to Tijuana, Mexico to see my biological father – his new grandpa. I’ve recently been discharged from parole. I take this new freedom as a chance to use drugs uncontrollably and drink like a mad man. I sit down on my chair and snatch a piece of scratch paper off my desk and write a bank robbery note. Later, as we proceed with the trial, I sit in the courtroom in a suit and tie, looking as innocent as possible. The D.A. walks in with a huge poster board and easel. He turns to the audience, then back to the jury and asks the judge for permission to enter exhibit D. The judge grants this wish. It’s my banknote. Written in big bold black letters on a torn piece of a brown paper bag that I get from liquor stores. “Please give me all of your money,” it reads, “or i will tickle you to death put the money in the paper bag i have a pisol in my pocket. Have a nice day the paper bag bandit.” (via Dreamland)
Ancient damage from a kind of machine-gun discovered on the walls of Pompeii
In 89 B.C.E., Pompeii was under siege. An invading army of tens of thousands of soldiers led by Lucius Cornelius Sulla stormed the town’s walls with slings and catapults. The siege subdued the rebellious city back beneath the thumb of the Roman Republic. Recently discovered damage on Pompeii’s fortification walls likely resulted from this fateful siege — and some of it may have come from a deeply mysterious ancient “machine gun,” researchers reported recently. Excavations and surveys conducted since 2024 have revealed several clusters of gouges in Pompeii’s northern fortification walls that were pristinely preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in C.E. 79. The marks are arrayed in a way that suggests they may have been left by a repeating dart-thrower called a polybolos. “It was an antipersonnel weapon used to strike archers emerging from the battlements above and the postern below,” says study lead author Adriana Rossi. The machine “had been described in detail but had never before been unearthed in any archaeological find or material evidence.” (via Scientific American)
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.
Before I even get started, I know that many of you may have already tuned out. Cryptocurrency? You mean the thing that gave birth to all those stupid NFTs of Bored Apes, and innumerable “rug pulls” where the founder of a coin disappeared with millions? The same thing Donald Trump and his family have used to steal, er… generate billions of dollars in alleged value? The thing where they don’t even know who actually created it, or who controls a wallet with about $135 billion in Bitcoin still in it? (No, it’s not the guy the New York Times just said it was, or the guy who keeps claiming it was him, or the guy who was on the cover of Newsweek back in 2014 who had the same name as the creator). Crypto is for hustle bros and drug deals on the Dark Web, right? Well, yes. But I still think there is one area that actually interests me — and others — and it is known as stablecoins. I realize this isn’t the usual kind of topic for this newsletter, but please bear with me while I try to explain why I find it so interesting (I am not selling anything).
First of all, what is a “stablecoin?” Simply put, it’s a cryptocurrency that is backed by some other “fiat” currency, like the US dollar, or by some collection of assets with a stable value (such as gold). And what is the point of doing this? Well, the most obvious point is in the name: unlike most cryptocurrencies, which have no underlying value and therefore can be extremely volatile, the value of most stablecoins (theoretically at least) trades in a range determined by the underlying fiat currency. However, the hard part is that just because you issue some crypto backed by a certain amount of hard assets like US dollars doesn’t mean that your currency is going to be as stable as you might want it to be. That’s because — as with every other currency, including US dollars — the stability of a currency is based on the level of trust that investors have that the value it claims to have is going to exist in the future. In other words, what the kids like to call “vibes.”
A great example of this is the company that has become one of the biggest players in stablecoins, an outfit called Tether, which has a market capitalization of more than $100 billion, and controls an estimated 70 percent of the stablecoin market, which has been growing extremely quickly (according to a report from the International Monetary Fund, the trading volume of stablecoins increased by more than 90 percent in 2024, and that trading was worth about $23 trillion). Tether is not a new guy on the block: it was founded in 2014, and in 2019 it passed Bitcoin as the most traded cryptocurrency in the world. But despite (or perhaps because of) its size and market power, Tether has been a lot more volatile in the past than something called a stablecoin should be. Why? Because of concerns that it didn’t have enough solid assets — either dollars, gold or US treasury certificates — to back up the value of all the cryptocurrency it had already issued.
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.
