Category: Newsletters

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.”

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 “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”

From Weird Universe: “In 1961, the French patent office granted Robert-Oropei Martino a patent for a method of placing advertisements on fish. From his patent: “It is known that the effect of advertising is largely determined by the medium chosen for it. It is recognized that advertising carried out on a mobile medium, in particular rotating, attracts much more attention than the same advertising on a fixed medium. According to the present invention, a particularly effective advertisement is produced by having it carried by fish in an aquarium, pond or other. It is obviously possible to imagine many ways of having advertising carried by fish. According to the invention, a corset is preferably used, made to the dimensions of the subject in a material that is sufficiently flexible not to hinder it, and which is closed on it by any appropriate means.”

The close ties between the modern art movement in the US and the CIA

From JSTOR Daily: “The preeminent Cultural Cold Warrior, Thomas W. Braden, who served as MoMA’s executive secretary from 1948-1949, later joined the CIA in 1950 to supervise its cultural activities. The relationship between Modern Art and American diplomacy began during WWII, when the Museum of Modern Art was mobilized for the war effort. MoMA was founded in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. A decade later, her son Nelson Rockefeller became president of the Museum. In 1940, while he was still President of MoMA, Rockefeller was appointed the Roosevelt Administration’s Coordinator of Inter-American affairs. The Museum followed suit. MoMA fulfilled 38 government contracts for cultural materials during the Second World War, and mounted 19 exhibitions of contemporary American painting for the Coordinator’s office, which were exhibited throughout Latin America.” 

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 French government gave him a patent for advertising on fish”

From The Guardian: “A man who had gone into cardiac arrest and been declared brain dead woke up as surgeons in his home state of Kentucky were in the middle of harvesting his organs for donation, his family has told media outlets. As reported Thursday by both National Public Radio and the Kentucky news station WKYT, the case of Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II is under investigation by state and federal government officials. Officials within the US’s organ-procurement system insist there are safeguards in place to prevent such episodes. Hoover’s sister, Donna Rhorer, recounted how Hoover was taken to Baptist health hospital because of a drug overdose. Doctors soon told Rhorer and her relatives that Hoover lacked any reflexes or brain activity, and they ultimately decided to remove him from life support.”

The secretive dynasty that controls the Boar’s Head meat company

From the New York Times: “In May 2022, the chief financial officer of Boar’s Head, the processed meat company, was asked a simple question under oath.“Who is the C.E.O. of Boar’s Head?”“I’m not sure,” he replied.“Who do you believe to be the C.E.O. of Boar’s Head?” the lawyer persisted.The executive, Steve Kourelakos, who had worked at the company for more than two decades and was being deposed in a lawsuit between owners, repeated his answer: “I’m not sure.”It is odd, to say the least, when a top executive of a company claims not to know who his boss is. And Boar’s Head is no fly-by-night enterprise. The company is one of the country’s most recognizable deli-meat brands; it generates what employees and others estimate as roughly $3 billion in annual revenue and employs thousands of people.”

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 “Man declared dead wakes up during organ harvesting”

From Sherwood News: “Last year, observers detected an anomaly on the daily balance sheet of the US Treasury Department: a $7 billion estate- and gift-tax payment. John Ricco, now an analyst at Yale University’s Budget Lab, first spotted the huge receipt. “The degree by which this payment exceeds others in modern history — it’s not just, ‘Oh, this was the biggest one by 20%,’” Ricco said later. This was the biggest one by a factor of seven.  Based on estimates of the average tax rate on estates, the February 2023 payment implied the death of someone possessing a fortune between $17.5 and $40 billion. Last year, I published a brief story about the statistical mystery and had nearly forgotten about it months later when I got a phone call. The voice on the other end of the line was calling about my mysterious billionaire.”

A climber’s remains have been found 100 years after he disappeared on Everest

From National Geographic: “When they spotted it, there was no mistaking what they were looking at: a boot melting out of the ice. As they drew closer, they could tell the cracked leather was old and worn, and the sole was studded and bracketed with the diamond-patterned steel hobnails of a bygone era of climbing.  In September, on the broad expanse of the Central Rongbuk Glacier, below the north face of Mount Everest, a National Geographic documentary team that included the photographer and director Jimmy Chin, along with filmmakers and climbers Erich Roepke and Mark Fisher, examined the boot more closely. Inside, they discovered a foot, remains that they instantly recognized as belonging to Andrew Comyn Irvine, or Sandy, as he was known, who vanished 100 years ago with the famed climber George Mallory.”

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 “Who died and paid the US gov’t $7 billion in estate tax?”

From The Warzone: “Details about the weapons in America’s nuclear arsenal, especially regarding their warheads, remain some of the most secretive elements America’s nuclear weapons enterprise. There is no better example of this than a material that the US Department of Energy has used to build thermonuclear warheads, also known as hydrogen bombs, that is so secret that no one knows exactly what it does or exactly what it’s made of, and that is only ever referred to publicly by a codename, Fogbank. Experts believe that Fogbank is an aerogel, a category of ultralight gels in which a traditionally liquid component is instead a gas. Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on missiles and nuclear weapons, says the codename Fogbank might be derived from nicknames for aerogels, such as “frozen smoke” and “San Franciso fog.”

The history of orchids is also the history of colonialism

From Longreads: “Orchid mania didn’t begin with lady’s slippers. It began with exotic specimens, introduced to English gardeners and noblemen in the late 18th century. While many of them had seen botanical drawings of tropical orchids, the live specimens were something else entirely. Their strangely shaped flowers and bright colors sparked a fixation that came to exemplify the values of the period, for the heroic white adventurer who risks his life to harvest the knowledge and beauty of other lands, returning victorious to his home after striding across harsh landscapes, battling his way through jungles, and fighting man and beast to achieve his goals. The orchid stood for supremacy — of knowledge, of culture, of whiteness.” 

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 “Warheads use a secret material known only as Fogbank”

Like many, I’ve been fascinated by the speed with which artificial intelligence has taken over the spotlight as the technology that everyone is either excited by, confused by, or terrified by (or possibly all three). Part of that, I think, has to do with the speed at which the group of things we call AI have been evolving — it’s hard to believe that the term AI was mostly restricted to academic circles as recently as 2022, when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released in the wild. Then came visual AI engines like DALL-E and Midjourney, which generated some hilarious photographs and video clips, like the widely-lampooned video of an AI version of Will Smith trying to eat spaghetti, which is alternately laughable and also creepy, in a way that only AI art seems to be. ChatGPT and other AI engines based on large language models routinely generated nonsensical results — or “hallucinations,” as some call them — where they just make things up out of thin air.

Within a matter of months, however, those same AI chatbots were producing high-quality transcriptions and summaries, and the AI photo and video engines were generating incredibly lifelike pictures of things that don’t exist, and videos of people and animals that are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. I recently took a test that Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten sent to his newsletter readers, which presented them with pictures and asked which ones were generated by AI and which by humans, and I have zero confidence that I got any of them right. ChatGPT’s various iterations, meanwhile, have not only aced the Turing test (which determines whether an AI is able to mimic being human) but the LSAT and a number of other tests. It’s true that AI engines like Google’s have told people to do stupid thing like eat rocks, but the speed with which their output has become almost indistinguishable from human content is staggering.

I should mention up front that I am well aware of the controversy over where AI engines get all the information they use to generate video and photos and text — the idea that their scraping or indexing of books and news articles is theft, and they should either pay for it or be prevented from using it. If I were an artist whose name has become a prompt for generating images that look like his work, I might think differently. But for me, the act of indexing content (as I’ve argued for the Columbia Journalism Review) is not that different from what a search engine like Google does, which I believe should qualify as fair use under the law (and has in previous cases such as the Google Books case and the Perfect 10 case.) Whether the Supreme Court agrees with me remains to be seen, of course, but that is my belief. I’m not going to argue about that here, however, because that is a separate question from the one I’m interested in exploring right now.

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 “Is AI going to save us or kill us? Even the experts don’t agree”

From LitHub: “Not only was Mark Twain (née Samuel Langhorne Clemens on this day in 1835) an inventor of good stories and witty rejoinders, he was a literal inventor—of both successful and not-so-successful items. Over the course of his life, he registered three patents: the first, in 1871, was for an “Improvement in adjustable and detachable straps for garments,” meant to be an alternative to suspenders, which Clemens apparently found uncomfortable. The invention didn’t catch on for any of its intended pantaloon purposes, but as it turned out the advantages were obvious, at least for a certain item Twain didn’t even think of. “This clever invention only caught on for one snug garment: the bra,” wrote Rebecca Greenfield in The Atlantic. “A clasp is all that secures that elastic band. So not-so-dexterous ladies and gents, you can thank Mark Twain.”

Classrooms without walls: A forgotten age of open-air schools

From Messy Nessy Chic: “In the early 20th century, open air schools became fairly common in Northern Europe, originally designed to prevent and combat the widespread rise of tuberculosis that occurred in the period leading up to the Second World War. Schools were built on the concept that exposure to fresh air, good ventilation and exposure to the outside were paramount! The idea quickly became popular and an open air school movement was introduced for healthy children too, encouraging all students to be outdoors as much as possible. It all started with the creation of the Waldeschule (literally, “forest school”), built in Charlottenburg, Germany in 1904 and designed to provide its students with the most exposure to the sun. Classes were taught in the surrounding forest, which was believed to help build independence and self-esteem.”

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 “Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain invented the bra clasp”

From The Guardian: “A fugitive father and his three children have been spotted together for the first time in nearly three years, along the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island. Just before Christmas 2021, Tom Phillips fled into the Waikato wilderness with his children Ember, now 8, Maverick, now 9, and Jayda, now 11, following a dispute with their mother. Phillips has not been seen since last November after he allegedly stole a quad bike from a rural property and broke into a shop in Piopio. CCTV footage showed two figures on a street, believed to be him and one of the children. But a breakthrough in the search for the family came when the group was seen together last Thursday on Marokopa farmland, in New Zealand’s Waikato region, after a chance encounter with teenage pig hunters who pulled out their phones and began filming.”

The enduring mystery of the Loretto Chapel’s circular staircase

From Atlas Obscura: “It’s considered a miracle, an engineering marvel, and even a scientific anomaly, depending who you ask. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, the helix-shaped spiral staircase at Loretto Chapel has long puzzled visitors, including architects and physicists. There are several unknowns surrounding the staircase and its late-19th-century origins. First off: how was the 20-foot structure, which includes two 360-degree turns, built without the use of nails or other support? And how has it never wavered, despite so much use, after all these years? Also unknown is the type of wood used to build the staircase, and who built it in the first place. Neither the carpenter nor their materials have ever been identified. There are numerous conflicting theories, and roughly 250,000 visitors marvel at the chapel and its mystifyingly unsupported spirals each year.”

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 “A father is seen with his children three years after they vanished”

From the FT: “There was nothing to suggest that October 22 1966 would be anything other than a typically dismal Saturday at Wormwood Scrubs, a dingy Victorian prison in north-west London. Late that afternoon, inmate 455 told a guard that the idea of spending his free time watching TV with the other high-security prisoners in D Hall was a “farce” and he’d prefer to read in his cell. He then made his way to the second-floor landing, where he squeezed through a broken window and shimmied down the outside wall into the exercise yard between 6pm and 7pm. An accomplice waited in a hiding place on Artillery Road nearby. After a brief burst of communication over walkie-talkie, a handmade rope ladder fell into the yard as the jail settled down to a weekly film night. The most audacious prison break in British history had begun.”

Sammy Basso, the longest survivor of rapid ageing disease, dies at 28

From the CBC: “Sammy Basso lived longer than anyone else with his disease, but his death at the age 28 still came as a shock to those who knew and loved him. Basso, a molecular biologist from Italy, died on Oct. 5. He was the longest known survivor of progeria, a rare genetic disease that causes rapid aging. Many people who have it don’t make it past their teens. He dedicated his life to studying and raising awareness about progeria in the hopes that future generations would not have to go through what he did. Those who knew him say he was not only committed to the cause, but also funny and kind, a brilliant conversationalist, the life of a party, and someone who extolled the kind of joie-de-vivre that comes from knowing all too well that every second counts.”

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 “It took 25 years to solve this British prison break”