Category: Newsletters

From Nautilus: “Five years ago, when neurosurgeon Marcelo Galarza saw images from jazz guitarist Pat Martino’s cerebral MRI, he was astonished. “I couldn’t believe how much of his left temporal lobe had been removed,” he said. Martino had brain surgery in 1980 to remove a tangle of malformed veins and arteries. At the time he was one of the most celebrated guitarists in jazz. Yet few people knew that Martino suffered epileptic seizures, crushing headaches, and depression. Locked in psychiatric wards, he withstood debilitating electroshock therapy. It wasn’t until 2007 that Martino had an MRI and not until recently that neuroscientists published their analyses of the images. Galarza’s astonishment, like that of medical scientists and music fans, arises from the fact that Martino recovered from surgery with a significant portion of his brain and his memory and other skills gone, but his guitar skills intact.”

If you buy shark meat in the US there’s a good chance it comes from an endangered species

From Phys.org: “A new study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has uncovered that shark meat sold in U.S. grocery stores, seafood markets, and online vendors often comes from endangered species and is frequently mislabeled. Researchers purchased and DNA barcoded 29 shark meat products to determine their species identity, finding that 93% of samples were ambiguously labeled and included meat from 11 different shark species. Among the species identified were the great hammerhead and scalloped hammerhead, both listed as Critically Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Despite global declines in shark populations, their meat was being sold to American consumers, sometimes for as little as $2.99 per pound. In their study published in Frontiers in Marine Science, the researchers found that of the 29 products tested, 27 were labeled simply as “shark” or “mako shark.”

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 had part of his brain removed but his musical ability remained”

When AI engines or LLMs (large-language models) such as ChatGPT started to become popular, one of the main concerns some people had was the widespread crawling and indexing of content that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic engaged in while training these models, and that this is a form of theft. As some readers are probably aware, I’ve written about this before for previous editions of The Torment Nexus, and I’ve argued that instead of theft or copyright infringement, this kind of indexing should be considered a fair use under US copyright law, just as Google’s scanning of millions of physical books was, because of the transformative nature of that use (one of the four factors that judges have to consider in order to make a fair-use ruling). There have been a couple of court decisions that suggest this might become legal precedent — with certain restrictions — but the Supreme Court has yet to weigh in on the question.

In addition to the numerous copyright-infringement lawsuits that have been launched by authors, publishers, and newspaper owners like the New York Times (which tried to negotiate a payment-for-indexing deal with OpenAI but failed to reach an agreement on price), there have been a number of attempts to foil the scraping and indexing bots that AI companies use to hoover up content. Some are of the “spanner in the spokes” variety, like the Iocaine Project, named after the tasteless poison in the movie The Princess Bride (Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line!). It is an open-source program that allows website owners to trap AI bots and scrapers in a kind of garbage-infested dead-end, where they are forced to go around and around indexing nonsense in a maze with no exit. Other attempts to foil the bots are a little more sophisticated, and Cloudflare has come up with several. But is the solution worse than the problem?

In case you’re not familiar with Cloudflare, it is what’s known as a CDN or content-delivery network, essentially a giant middleman that stands between your blog or website (or the sites and services of hundreds of thousands of corporations, governments and other entities) and the festering swamp of hackers and ne’er-do-wells that is the open internet. If you use Cloudflare, your site will load a lot faster — because the company caches it and then serves it from its own superfast network of servers — and is also protected from hacking attempts and DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks, and a host of other nasty behavior. In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that use Cloudflare for my website, but just for DNS hosting and rerouting, so that when you type in mathewingram dot com you get taken to the right website.

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 “Does Cloudflare want to protect the web or control it?”

From Nautilus: “In 2006, scientists coined the term “hyperthymesia” to describe cases in which people showed an ability to remember vivid details about events that happened to them throughout their lives, including exact times and dates. Since then, researchers have documented at least 100 cases of hyperthymesia in the literature. Almost uniformly, those who have the condition find the memories — which tend to be carefully indexed by date — intrusive, uncontrollable, and distressing. Which is why the recently published case study of a 17-year-old girl dubbed TL is commanding attention. Like others with hyperthymesia, she can provide an especially rich amount of perceptual, spatial, and temporal information. But unlike the others, she is able to organize these memories into a kind of “memory palace,” and can access them whenever she likes. Most of the memories are filed in virtual binders, according to theme and date.”

He was kidnapped at age 6 and found alive 70 years later thanks to a DNA test

From People: “A California boy who was lured away by a bandana-wearing woman while he played in a park in 1951 was found alive more than 70 years later — and is now a grandfather living on the east coast. Luis Armando Albino was just 6 years old when he vanished from a park in West Oakland, where he was playing with his brother, Roger, on Feb. 21, 1951. Albino was located in part because his niece took a DNA test that led her to an uncle that hadn’t been seen by his family in more than half a century. As Albino played with his brother, a woman wearing a red bandana lured him by promising to buy him candy. The woman spoke to the young Albino, who is of Puerto Rican descent, in Spanish. Instead of buying the boy candy, however, the woman flew him across the country to the east coast, where he was reportedly raised by another family. In 2020, Alequin decided to take an online DNA test and it reportedly had a 22% match.”

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 “This 17-year-old’s memory is as accurate as a computer”

From Global News: “A Prince George, B.C., man received a 90-day driving prohibition after he was spotted by police driving an unusual vehicle on a street on Friday morning. On Sept. 5, an officer was on patrol in the area of 15th Avenue and Nicholson Street at 9 a.m. when they spotted a man driving a pink toy car down the street. The toy appeared to be a Power Wheels Barbie Jeep Wrangler. Kasper Lincoln told Global News he’d borrowed the toy, which belongs to his roommate’s daughter, to go get a Slurpee. During the stop, the police officer believed the driver to be impaired and found that the driver had a suspended licence. The driver was arrested for prohibited driving and he then provided two breath samples that were both over the legal limit and was subsequently issued a 90-day driving prohibition, police said. Lincoln said he hadn’t had anything to drink that morning and had just woken up. He added that the Barbie Jeep was not impounded and had been returned to his roommate’s daughter.”

How the math of shuffling cards almost brought down an online poker empire

From Scientific American: “If you’ve ever shuffled a deck of playing cards, you’ve most likely created a unique deck. That is, you’re probably the only person who has ever arranged the cards in precisely that order. Although this claim sounds incredible, it’s a great illustration of how quickly large numbers can creep into everyday situations—with occasionally challenging consequences, as the developers of an online poker game painfully discovered in the late 1990s. The mathematics of card shuffling is quite easy to explain. To calculate how many arrangements 52 playing cards can have, you must go through all the possible shuffles. A standard deck can be arranged in 52 × 51 × 50 × … × 2 × 1 = 52! different ways. If you do the multiplication and round the answer, you will get a number with 67 zeros. That’s more than a quadrillion times as many ways to arrange these cards as there are atoms on Earth.”

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 was fined for driving a pink Barbie Jeep while intoxicated”

From History Workshop: “Africans crossed the Atlantic alongside the earliest Europeans, some trafficked in bondage, others navigating precarious forms of freedom. Yet recent scholarship, particularly since the turn of the century, is starting to give voice to the many Africans who have not been studied or considered important historical actors, erased by both colonial records and modern prejudice. Black conquistadors appear in various ship logs, retellings of expeditions, and even in some of the most famous Indigenous testimonies of the conquest – the Nahua codices. Juan Garrido was a firsthand witness to many critical events during the expansion of the Spanish Empire. But the document which makes Garrido so unique is his probanza, used to petition rewards from the king for service to the crown. This outstanding piece of evidence provides an insight into the life of a Black subject of the Spanish Empire.”

How a dead cat led to the Blue Angels aerobatic fighter-jet team getting quieter

From Substack: “This is the story of a heart-wrenching emotional loss needlessly compounded by unapologetic Constitutional violations. When a beloved family member was terrorized by the United States Navy’s Blue Angels, an American citizen exercised her Constitutional right to criticize her government’s role in her daughter’s suffering. In response, a cadre of emotionally fragile snowflakes masquerading as naval officers chose the coward’s path: they silenced this citizen’s speech, violated their oath to the Constitution, and brought disgrace upon the uniform they claim to honor. A year later, when that same vulnerable creature died after enduring yet another sonic assault during her final days on Earth, the Navy’s Constitutional betrayal compounded the tragedy — an American remained silenced, unable to voice her grief or otherwise hold her government accountable for its role in her family’s suffering.”

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 “This Black man was a Spanish conquistador in the 1500s”

From Wikipedia: “Hyraceum is the petrified and rock-like excrement composed of both urine and feces of the rock hyrax and closely related species. The rock hyrax defecates in the same location over generations, which may be sheltered in caves. These locations form middens that are composed of hyraceum and hyrax pellets, which can be petrified and preserved for over 50,000 years. It is also a sought-after material that has been used in both traditional South African medicine and perfumery. The material hardens and ages until it becomes a fairly sterile, rock-like material that contains compounds giving it an animalic, complex fermented scent that combines the elements of  musk, castoreum, civet, tobacco and agarwood. The material is harvested without disturbing the animals by digging strata of the brittle, resinous, irregular, blackish-brown stone; because animals are not harmed in its harvesting, it is often an ethical substitute for deer musk and civet, which require killing or inflicting pain on the animal.”

This Turkish hotel is suspended on metal beams over an archaeological dig

From Amusing Planet: “In 2009, a construction crew digging the foundation for a new hotel in Antakya, Turkey, made an astonishing discovery. They uncovered a vast mosaic dating back to Roman times, along with more than 35,000 artifacts spanning some 2,300 years from at least 13 different civilizations. Construction of the hotel was immediately put on hold, while a six-month excavation took place. Eleven years later, the 200-room Museum Hotel Antakya opened its doors. The hotel’s five floors are suspended on steel columns above the actual archeological site, where the 11,000 square feet Roman mosaic lay in-situ. The hotel’s lowest floor houses an open-air museum with glass floors and walkways providing a view of the mosaic and the various excavation pits. The guest rooms are stacked above this open space, hovering above the site in a stacked honeycomb structure, with glass windows directly overlooking the findings.”

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 “Thousand-year-old poop is a key ingredient in perfume”

A little over a year ago, things looked fairly bleak for Google on the legal front (and on other fronts, but we’ll get to that later). In August of last year, Judge Amit Mehta of the federal court for the District of Columbia handed down a decision in the US government’s antitrust case against the search giant that could not have been more blunt: “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” he ruled. This is the core tenet of modern antitrust law — not just the existence of a monopoly, but the employment of illegal methods in order to maintain that monopoly. In particular, Mehta ruled that the payments Google makes to Apple and other companies in return for being the default search engine in their browsers and on their devices — payments that totaled more than $20 billion dollars last year — were an unfair restraint on competition. So a slam-dunk decision in favor of competition, right? Google has to be broken up, has to sell off Chrome, has to stop paying Apple and others billions, etc. etc. Right? Well, no.

The judge’s definitive ruling certainly convinced some people that all of these remedies were both necessary and likely to occur, including Tim Wu — the Columbia Law professor (and former special assistant to Obama on competition policy) who came up with the term “net neutrality” back in the day. Wu wrote a piece for the New York Times that sounded like he was dancing on Google’s grave, and that the remedies listed above — selling off Chrome, dismantling the company’s search business, etc. — were almost a fait accompli (although he hedged his bets). But as it turns out, Mehta has done virtually none of those things in his decision on remedies, which came out late Tuesday. No forced sell-off of Chrome or Android. No end to the billion-dollar payments to Apple and others for search. No requirement to share real-time search-index data with competitors (although some sharing is required). Here’s how Bloomberg described it:

Alphabet Inc.’s Google will be required to share online search data with rivals while avoiding harsher penalties, including the forced sale of its Chrome business, a judge ruled in the biggest US antitrust case in almost three decades. Tuesday’s ruling represents a blow to the government, falling far short of the most severe remedies sought by antitrust enforcers after the court found Google illegally monopolized the search market. Judge Amit Mehta said he will bar Google from entering into exclusive contracts for distribution but would still allow the search giant to pay its partners — a key win for Apple Inc., which has received roughly $20 billion a year for making Google search the default on iPhones. The finding follows the Washington, DC, judge’s ruling last year that Google illegally monopolized the markets for online search and search advertising. Mehta held a three-week hearing in April to determine a fix.

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 “The Google antitrust decision isn’t popular but it’s the right one”

From Boing Boing: “For the first fourteen years of his life, Viraj Dhanda, who has autism and apraxia (a neurological condition that limits muscle movements and motor skills), was non-verbal, non-communicative, and assumed to be intellectually disabled. He was diagnosed with autism at age 2. It wasn’t until his father, Sumit, experimented with various communication and keyboard devices that Viraj could work with one part of his body with which he had sufficient dexterity — his right thumb — that he discovered that his son was far from intellectually disabled. He was brilliant. In less than three years, Viraj went from learning basic math to calculus. “I hated being labeled mentally disabled. People thought I was behavioral because I flopped on the floor, used my body to communicate, but what was I supposed to do?” Viraj Dhanda said. “I was desperate for the world to know that I had a fully functional brain.”

In the early 2000s a superhero named Shadow Hare fought crime in Cincinnati

From Wikipedia: “Shadow Hare (or Shadowhare) is the pseudonym of a vigilante superhero who operated in Cincinnati, Ohio from 2005-2010. He stated that he lived in Milford, Ohio. Wearing a handmade black suit with a stylized hare on the front, along with a cape and mask, he patrolled the streets looking for crimes in progress, and gave out meals to the homeless. Although not supported or endorsed by the Cincinnati Police Department, he cooperated with police, making citizen’s arrests when necessary. Shadow Hare claimed to be skilled in Shōrin-ryū and mixed martial arts, and carried mace, a taser, and handcuffs. He once received a dislocated shoulder while assisting a woman who was being robbed. He frequented Cincinnati public events, using his tagline “I see the shadows of shadows.” He received a fair amount of international internet and television news coverage, ranging from supportive to mocking.”

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 didn’t speak for 14 years and just got admitted to MIT”

From Boing Boing: “For the first fourteen years of his life, Viraj Dhanda, who has autism and apraxia (a neurological condition that limits muscle movements and motor skills), was non-verbal, non-communicative, and assumed to be intellectually disabled. He was diagnosed with autism at age 2. It wasn’t until his father, Sumit, experimented with various communication and keyboard devices that Viraj could work with one part of his body with which he had sufficient dexterity — his right thumb — that he discovered that his son was far from intellectually disabled. He was brilliant. In less than three years, Viraj went from learning basic math to calculus. “I hated being labeled mentally disabled. People thought I was behavioral because I flopped on the floor, used my body to communicate, but what was I supposed to do?” Viraj Dhanda said. “I was desperate for the world to know that I had a fully functional brain.”

In the early 2000s a superhero named Shadow Hare fought crime in Cincinnati

From Wikipedia: “Shadow Hare (or Shadowhare) is the pseudonym of a vigilante superhero who operated in Cincinnati, Ohio from 2005-2010. He stated that he lived in Milford, Ohio. Wearing a handmade black suit with a stylized hare on the front, along with a cape and mask, he patrolled the streets looking for crimes in progress, and gave out meals to the homeless. Although not supported or endorsed by the Cincinnati Police Department, he cooperated with police, making citizen’s arrests when necessary. Shadow Hare claimed to be skilled in Shōrin-ryū and mixed martial arts, and carried mace, a taser, and handcuffs. He once received a dislocated shoulder while assisting a woman who was being robbed. He frequented Cincinnati public events, using his tagline “I see the shadows of shadows.” He received a fair amount of international internet and television news coverage, ranging from supportive to mocking.”

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 didn’t speak for 14 years and just got admitted to MIT”

A little over a year ago, things looked fairly bleak for Google on the legal front (and on other fronts, but we’ll get to that later). In August of last year, Judge Amit Mehta of the federal court for the District of Columbia handed down a decision in the US government’s antitrust case against the search giant that could not have been more blunt: “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” he ruled. This is the core tenet of modern antitrust law — not just the existence of a monopoly, but the employment of illegal methods in order to maintain that monopoly. In particular, Mehta ruled that the payments Google makes to Apple and other companies in return for being the default search engine in their browsers and on their devices — payments that totaled more than $20 billion dollars last year — were an unfair restraint on competition. So a slam-dunk decision in favor of competition, right? Google has to be broken up, has to sell off Chrome, has to stop paying Apple and others billions, etc. etc. Right? Well, no.

The judge’s definitive ruling certainly convinced some people that all of these remedies were both necessary and likely to occur, including Tim Wu — the Columbia Law professor (and former special assistant to Obama on competition policy) who came up with the term “net neutrality” back in the day. Wu wrote a piece for the New York Times that sounded like he was dancing on Google’s grave, and that the remedies listed above — selling off Chrome, dismantling the company’s search business, etc. — were almost a fait accompli (although he hedged his bets). But as it turns out, Mehta has done virtually none of those things in his decision on remedies, which came out late Tuesday. No forced sell-off of Chrome or Android. No end to the billion-dollar payments to Apple and others for search. No requirement to share real-time search-index data with competitors (although some sharing is required). Here’s how Bloomberg described it:

Alphabet Inc.’s Google will be required to share online search data with rivals while avoiding harsher penalties, including the forced sale of its Chrome business, a judge ruled in the biggest US antitrust case in almost three decades. Tuesday’s ruling represents a blow to the government, falling far short of the most severe remedies sought by antitrust enforcers after the court found Google illegally monopolized the search market. Judge Amit Mehta said he will bar Google from entering into exclusive contracts for distribution but would still allow the search giant to pay its partners — a key win for Apple Inc., which has received roughly $20 billion a year for making Google search the default on iPhones. The finding follows the Washington, DC, judge’s ruling last year that Google illegally monopolized the markets for online search and search advertising. Mehta held a three-week hearing in April to determine a fix.

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 “The Google antitrust decision isn’t popular but it’s the right one”

From The Times: “The message from the stranger popped into my Instagram account on June 10, 2024. The sender was a man calling himself Charles Chen, who said he was an international student at Stanford. I checked his Instagram page. It featured photos of a young Chinese man with other young people at Stanford, in Newport Beach, California, and at other locations in the United States. I asked Charles where he was from. After a week of silence, he replied to say that he was from China. Then he asked if I spoke Chinese, and he posed the question in Mandarin. I’m studying East Asian affairs and I do speak Mandarin, but I had no idea how he could know this. Suddenly I felt on edge. I was beginning to suspect that Charles might be working for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and he could be trying to recruit me as a spy.”

Archaeologists excavated the Tower of London and found dozens of skeletons

From Popular Mechanics: “A rare dig into the soil of the famed Tower of London — the first excavation at the site in a generation — yielded two skeletons from around 1500. As archaeologists dug deeper into the ground, they found roughly 20 more burials, including one group grave likely tied to the 1348 “Black Death” plague. The dig began as a trial excavation in 2019 to prepare the on-site Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula for a new elevator. The archaeologists discovered the remains of two skeletons. Subsequent excavations outside the chapel as deep as 10 feet below the surface revealed everything from a 14^th-century Black Death group burial to three skeletons from the late 12^th or early 13^th centuries buried in coffins—an unusually expensive burial for that time. The Tower of London was built alongside the River Thames in the 1070s as a royal palace. It also served as a prison for high-status individuals (including King Henry VI).”

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 “Student says a Chinese agent tried to recruit her as a spy”

From The Times: “The message from the stranger popped into my Instagram account on June 10, 2024. The sender was a man calling himself Charles Chen, who said he was an international student at Stanford. I checked his Instagram page. It featured photos of a young Chinese man with other young people at Stanford, in Newport Beach, California, and at other locations in the United States. I asked Charles where he was from. After a week of silence, he replied to say that he was from China. Then he asked if I spoke Chinese, and he posed the question in Mandarin. I’m studying East Asian affairs and I do speak Mandarin, but I had no idea how he could know this. Suddenly I felt on edge. I was beginning to suspect that Charles might be working for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and he could be trying to recruit me as a spy.”

Archaeologists excavated the Tower of London and found dozens of skeletons

From Popular Mechanics: “A rare dig into the soil of the famed Tower of London — the first excavation at the site in a generation — yielded two skeletons from around 1500. As archaeologists dug deeper into the ground, they found roughly 20 more burials, including one group grave likely tied to the 1348 “Black Death” plague. The dig began as a trial excavation in 2019 to prepare the on-site Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula for a new elevator. The archaeologists discovered the remains of two skeletons. Subsequent excavations outside the chapel as deep as 10 feet below the surface revealed everything from a 14^th-century Black Death group burial to three skeletons from the late 12^th or early 13^th centuries buried in coffins—an unusually expensive burial for that time. The Tower of London was built alongside the River Thames in the 1070s as a royal palace. It also served as a prison for high-status individuals (including King Henry VI).”

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 “Student says a Chinese agent tried to recruit her as a spy”

From NBC: “Finland’s air force, now part of NATO, still flies swastikas on a handful of unit flags — but is preparing to phase them out, largely to avoid awkwardness with its Western allies. The history of the Finnish air force’s use of the swastika, which since the 20th century has largely been associated with Nazi tyranny and hate groups, is more complex than at first appearance. Finland’s air force adopted the swastika emblem in 1918 soon after country gained its independence after more than a century of Imperial Russian rule. Count Eric von Rosen of neighboring Sweden donated Finland’s first military plane in 1918, which bore his personal symbol, the swastika. The Finnish air force soon after adopted a blue swastika on a white background as the national insignia on all its planes from 1918 to 1945. Von Rosen was the brother-in-law of Hermann Goering, a decorated World War I German fighter pilot who became an early Nazi Party member. Goering went on to lead Germany’s Luftwaffe.”

Making a single ounce of Phoenician purple required the mucus of 250,000 snails

From Emergence: “According to the ancient Phoenicians, a dog chewed a mollusk and its tongue turned bright purple, and its human owners noticed. Tyrian purple was the most rare and expensive pigment in human history and is at least four thousand years old. To make one ounce of Tyrian purple pigment, harvest the hypobranchial gland mucus of 250,000 predatory murex sea snails. To do this, some say boil them for days, some say crush the snails and let them bake in the sun, and some say ferment their liquids in vats of urine. Ancient Mexicans also created this purple from snails they called tixinda, but they learned how to milk the mucus from the snails and return the creatures safely to the Pacific without killing them. The few remaining snail dyers — only nineteen Mixtec people legally permitted to do so as of 2011 — harvest once every moon cycle between October and March. On the Internet, you can buy one genuine snail-sourced ounce of Tyrian purple pigment for $115,098.97, plus tax.”

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 “Why does Finland have the swastika on some of its flags?”

From NBC: “Finland’s air force, now part of NATO, still flies swastikas on a handful of unit flags — but is preparing to phase them out, largely to avoid awkwardness with its Western allies. The history of the Finnish air force’s use of the swastika, which since the 20th century has largely been associated with Nazi tyranny and hate groups, is more complex than at first appearance. Finland’s air force adopted the swastika emblem in 1918 soon after country gained its independence after more than a century of Imperial Russian rule. Count Eric von Rosen of neighboring Sweden donated Finland’s first military plane in 1918, which bore his personal symbol, the swastika. The Finnish air force soon after adopted a blue swastika on a white background as the national insignia on all its planes from 1918 to 1945. Von Rosen was the brother-in-law of Hermann Goering, a decorated World War I German fighter pilot who became an early Nazi Party member. Goering went on to lead Germany’s Luftwaffe.”

Making a single ounce of Phoenician purple required the mucus of 250,000 snails

From Emergence: “According to the ancient Phoenicians, a dog chewed a mollusk and its tongue turned bright purple, and its human owners noticed. Tyrian purple was the most rare and expensive pigment in human history and is at least four thousand years old. To make one ounce of Tyrian purple pigment, harvest the hypobranchial gland mucus of 250,000 predatory murex sea snails. To do this, some say boil them for days, some say crush the snails and let them bake in the sun, and some say ferment their liquids in vats of urine. Ancient Mexicans also created this purple from snails they called tixinda, but they learned how to milk the mucus from the snails and return the creatures safely to the Pacific without killing them. The few remaining snail dyers — only nineteen Mixtec people legally permitted to do so as of 2011 — harvest once every moon cycle between October and March. On the Internet, you can buy one genuine snail-sourced ounce of Tyrian purple pigment for $115,098.97, plus tax.”

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 “Why does Finland have the swastika on some of its flags?”

From Kottke: “Giles Clement, also known as Polymatt, decided he was going to make a 3.5” floppy disk from scratch — and actually did. In a YouTube video where he breaks down the process, he says: “I’m not sure how many of you have actually cracked one of these things open and taken a look inside, but it’s actually a little bit more complex than I expected. Recreating a shell isn’t going to be the tough part. It’s actually this: recreating the media itself with some PET film and a bunch of chemicals. These disks are incredibly thin, and the magnetic film itself is measured in microns. It’s going to be quite the feat in order to figure out how to apply something that thin.” The same creator also made a fully functioning wristwatch from scratch, including making two milling machines and designing the typeface used for the numerals and printing on the watch.”

Some IMAX 70mm movies such as Oppenheimer are powered by a PalmPilot emulator

From Ars Technica: “As shown in IMAX’s TikTok video, the 70 mm print for Oppenheimer is so large that they had to extend their film platter. That’s fascinating and all, but so is the emulated 2002 PDA apparently running things. The m130 wasn’t even top of the line when it came out in 2002. It debuted at $279 with a 2-inch, 160×160 screen and a 33 Motorola Dragonball VZ processor. But that was just the magic needed for IMAX’s purposes, and so it hasn’t changed a thing. The only difference is that it’s using emulations in at least some cases. The video shows the PDA emulated on a 10.1-inch Windows tablet for businesses. The PDA emulation controls the theater’s Quick Turn Reel Units (where workers load the physical film reels). A company spokesperson said the original units operated on PalmPilots, so IMAX designed an emulator that mimics the look and feel of a PalmPilot to keep it familiar for IMAX film projectionists.”

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 made a floppy disk from scratch in his basement”