From SFGate: “The evidence of Petro Zailenko’s quiet legacy can be found all over this corner of the Northern California redwood forest. Signs throughout Hendy Woods State Park, nestled deep in Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley along the Navarro River, bear his name and facts — or theories, at least — about him. They say he was a Russian immigrant born in 1914 who may have been wounded and captured by Nazis during World War II. They say that in the late 1950s or early 1960s, he jumped ship from a Russian fishing trawler in San Francisco and made his way north to Anderson Valley. There, he briefly worked at a lumber mill — until, apparently, someone asked to see his immigration papers. That’s when Zailenko fled into the woods, afraid he’d be deported. For the next 18 years, he lived among the redwoods and came to be known locally as the Hermit of Hendy Woods. When he died, the coroner listed his occupation as hermit and his address as a “Hollowed out tree stump in Hendy Woods State Park.”
Crocodiles have an extra aorta in their hearts to help them digest their huge meals
From ABC.au: “Crocodiles and alligators eat so much in a single meal that they need to divert gas-rich blood away from their lungs into their stomachs to digest it, US research suggests. The study, which was conducted in American alligators, shows they can eat 23% of their own mass at once. This is equivalent to a 60 kilogram woman eating 14 kilograms of beef – bones, teeth and all – in one sitting. The scientists focused on the extra left aorta that crocodilians have on the side of their otherwise very mammal-like hearts. Normally, blood pumped by the right side of the heart flows through the reptile’s pulmonary artery into the lungs, where a transfer of carbon dioxide occurs. But when a crocodile or alligator gorges this blood is shunted to the stomach instead. There, the carbon dioxide is converted into gastric acid, a digestive juice, and bicarbonate, which functions as a sort of built-in antacid when the time is right. The gastric acid boost means crocodilians produce 10 times more digestive juice than mammals.”
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From Tempo de Conhecer: “There is a book whose reading — or mere possession — proved fatal for many. Not because it contained subversive ideas but because the object itself was deadly. It is a 19th-century book known as Shadows from the Walls of Death — a dark title for an even more lethal content. The work was published in 1874 by Robert Kedzie, a physician and professor of chemistry in the United States. His goal was not to kill, but to warn. At the time, many household wallpapers contained arsenic-based pigments, especially the famous “Paris green.” The problem was that, over time and with humidity, these pigments released toxic gases, such as arsine, which could cause headaches, vomiting, seizures, and even death. Kedzie collected 86 authentic samples and bound them into a book. People who handled the book without protection began to fall ill, and there were reports of deaths linked to direct exposure to the book’s pages.”
We breathe through only one nostril at a time but scientists aren’t sure why
From Medical Discovery News: “most people don’t realize that when you breathe through your nose, you do so more from one nostril than the other and your body knows to switch to the other nostril every few hours. This nasal cycle is controlled by the autonomic nervous system which also controls things we don’t think about like heart rate and breathing. Our bodies deliberately send more blood to an erectile tissue between the two nostrils to increase its size and direct the air flowing through one of the nostrils. After a few hours, the airflow switches to the other nostril. Why do we do this? Some scientists believe the alternating airflow allows each nostril to maintain optimal moisture levels so no one side gets dried out. It may also protect against respiratory infections or allergies. Others believe it’s tied to our olfaction or sense of smell. It’s possible that the quicker and slower airflow in each nostril optimizes us to the vast range of smells. Some smells take longer to detect and transmit to the brain.
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From PBS: “It was Coney Island in the early 1900’s. Beyond the Four-Legged Woman, the sword swallowers, and “Lionel the Lion-Faced Man,” was an entirely different exhibit: rows of tiny, premature human babies living in glass incubators. Barkers, including a young Cary Grant, called out to passersby, enticing visitors to come see the preemies. Visitors paid a few coins to enter and would approach rows of incubators along the wall, peering through the glass windows at the tiny, shriveled preemie babies living inside. The brainchild of this exhibit was Dr. Martin Couney, an enigmatic figure in the history of medicine. A French-born doctor, Couney created and ran incubator-baby exhibits on the island from 1903 to the early 1940s, and though he died in relative obscurity, he is credited with saving the lives of thousands of the country’s premature babies.”
A park ranger on a hike in Texas accidentally discovered a brand new genus of plant
From Atlas Obscura: “Cathy Hoyt, the supervisory park ranger for Big Bend National Park, and volunteer botanist Deb Manley go for walks together once a month around Big Bend, which is in western Texas near the Mexico border. It’s a big park – over 800,000 acres. So in early March of 2024, they went out on their regular monthly walk to go look at some plants, but then they saw something they didn’t recognize. It was very small, less than the size of a quarter, tiny and fuzzy, with little ribbon-like flowers sticking up out of the middle that had pink and white stripes on them. So the first thing Manley did was consult a guidebook to plants in the area called, Flowering Plants of Trans-Pecos Texas and Adjacent Areas. But it wasn’t in there. Then she tried putting photos of this fuzzy little plant up on an app called iNaturalist, but nobody recognized it.”
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From Der Spiegel: “It’s two hours after midnight. The extreme mountaineer Kristin Harila is trudging through the death zone on K2, the second tallest mountain in the world, following the beam of her headlamp. To her left, the mountainside plunges almost vertically, hundreds of meters into the depths. Above her on the right is an enormous hanging glacier groaning and cracking menacingly in the freezing cold. She is only about 400 meters from the top. One final steep ascent and Harila will have reached her goal. The Norwegian woman is aiming to complete a staggering, record-breaking project. Within just three months, she has climbed all of the highest mountains in the Himalaya and Karakorum. When she reaches the peak of K2, Harila will have summitted all 14 8,000-meter peaks on the planet, faster than anyone ever before. But suddenly, their path is blocked. A man is hanging there from a rope. He is upside down.”
Scientists have discovered a superconductor hidden inside pencil lead
From SciTechDaily: “MIT scientists have identified a bizarre new material: a superconductor that also acts like a magnet. Using a special stacking of graphene layers from graphite, they observed this dual behavior — something thought to be impossible until now. For over a century, scientists believed that magnets and superconductors were fundamentally incompatible, like mixing oil with water. But a groundbreaking discovery from MIT physicists is now turning that idea on its head. In a recent study published in Nature, the research team revealed something remarkable: a new material called a chiral superconductor. It carries electricity with zero resistance, and it’s magnetic. This strange combination has never been observed in such a direct way before. Even more surprising? The researchers found this exotic behavior in a very familiar substance: graphite, the same material used in ordinary pencil lead.”
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I’ve never met Marc Andreessen, although at one time in the distant past we were Twitter friends — I enjoyed the long threads he used to do, and I wrote about a few of them at Gigaom in a previous lifetime (including one about how newspapers should “burn the boats” by getting rid of their print operations). I recall thanking him a number of years ago on the anniversary of the creation of Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, something I also wrote about recently at The Torment Nexus. And I’ve been thinking a lot lately (as I’m sure many other people are) about the future of the open web — something I also wrote about in another recent Torment Nexus newsletter. So it was interesting to come across an interview that Andreessen did with his a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz, in which he talked about his life before the web, and how he came to work at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Illinois, which started him on the path towards eventually becoming a billionaire venture capitalist.
I’m aware that being a billionaire — especially a tech billionaire — is somewhat problematic in this day and age, for a variety of reasons, and I know that some people think Marc is an bad person for other reasons. I don’t really have much to say about any of that, except to say that I don’t think being wealthy is inherently bad (although many wealthy people seem determined to prove me wrong), and I have no idea whether he is using his money for good or evil, or some combination of the two. All I know is that his invention of a graphical web browser (and subsequent iterations of it, like Netscape) changed my life, as it changed millions or possibly billions of other people’s lives around the world. So it was interesting to me to hear about how it came about, and along the way it reinforced one of my mottos, which is a variation on “better to be lucky than smart.” My version is: “it’s better to have good timing than be smart, but if possible, do both.”
Andreessen was clearly a good programmer, but he also happened to be in exactly the right place at the right time, and he hitched his wagon to an unassuming rock that would become a hurtling meteor, namely the internet and Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of hyperlinking and the web. This is reinforced throughout his discussion with Ben. As both note, he was a farm kid from the boonies in Wisconsin, more familiar with tractors than programming. But he was interested in computers and wound up at the University of Champaign-Urbana in Illinois and got a job at the NCSA, where they had some of the best computers — and the best internet connectivity — in the world. So there’s young Marc, using a Unix workstation that cost $50,000 in 1992 dollars (equivalent to about $115,000 now), with a fat internet connection from the NSFnet, which he gives credit to former vice-president Al Gore for helping to create.
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From the New York Times: “Interpol had been looking for a disgraced finance executive for weeks when Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist, found him, hiding in Belarus. He identified the secret police agents behind one of the most high-profile assassination plots of all: the 2020 poisoning of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. That revelation put Grozev in President Vladimir Putin’s cross hairs. He wanted Grozev killed, and to make it happen the Kremlin turned to none other than the fugitive financier, who had been recruited by Russian intelligence. The fugitive enlisted a team to begin the surveillance. The members of that team are behind bars now. The financier lives in Moscow, where several times a week he makes visits to the headquarters of the Russian secret police. Grozev — still very much alive — imagines the man trying to explain to his supervisors why he failed in his mission.”
He won the Nobel Prize for physics and then he changed his mind
From The Atlantic: “Adam Riess was 27 years old when he began the work that earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics, and just 41 when he received it. Earlier this year, Riess, who is now 55, pulled a graph-paper notebook off a bookshelf in his office at Johns Hopkins University so that I could see the yellowing page on which he’d made his famous calculations. He told me how these pen scratches led to a new theory of the universe. And then he told me why he now thinks that theory might be wrong. For nearly a century, astronomers have known that the universe is expanding, because the galaxies that we can see around us through telescopes are all rushing away. Riess studied how they moved. He very carefully measured the distance of each one from Earth, and when all the data came together, in 1998, the results surprised him. The galaxies were receding more quickly than expected. This “immediately suggested a profound conclusion,” he said.
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From MIT: “Arnhildur Pálmadóttir was around three years old when she saw a red sky from her living room window. A volcano was erupting about 25 miles away from where she lived on the northeastern coast of Iceland. Though it posed no immediate threat, its ominous presence seeped into her subconscious, populating her dreams with streaks of light in the night sky. Fifty years later, these “gloomy, strange dreams,” as Pálmadóttir now describes them, have led to a career as an architect with an extraordinary mission: to harness molten lava and build cities out of it. Pálmadóttir today lives in Reykjavik, where she runs her own architecture studio and the Icelandic branch of the Danish architecture company Lendager, which specializes in reusing building materials. The architect believes the lava that flows from a single eruption could yield enough building material to lay the foundations of an entire city. She has been researching this possibility for more than five years as part of a project she calls Lavaforming.”
Amelia Earhart was pushed to make riskier flights by her publicity-hungry husband
From The New Yorker: “Rather then spending time practicing in the powerful Electra, Earhart had been crisscrossing the country, giving lectures, making sponsorship appearances, and attending promotional events. For a while, she had a gig as the aviation editor at Cosmopolitan, in which she published a column about flying; she also launched a line of pilot-inspired women’s clothing. Seen from today’s perspective, Earhart was at once a pioneering aviator and a proto-influencer. Her husband of half a dozen years, George Palmer Putnam publicly blamed a blown tire, skirting any mention of pilot error. An heir to the Putnam publishing empire, he was more than Earhart’s husband; he was her manager, dealmaker, and publicist. Some found him dashing, but others thought of him as a hustler. He’d launched Earhart into fame with that Atlantic crossing in 1928 with the intention of publishing a quickie memoir.”
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From Damn Interesting: “Paris, 29 May 1832. All through the night, a young Frenchman named Évariste Galois stayed awake, quill in hand, frantically scrawling notes and equations across dozens of sheets of paper. He had only been studying mathematics seriously for a few years, but he had proven to be a veritable prodigy. After quickly exhausting the knowledge of his teachers, he’d branched out into his own research, extraordinarily prescient. By all rights, Galois ought to have been lauded and laurelled by the scientific community for his work. Above all, he should have been recognised and rewarded by France’s prestigious Academy of Sciences. But Galois—at least, by his own reckoning—had received little but dismissal from the mathematics community. Now he sat feverishly scribbling, trying to commit as many of his ideas to paper as possible.”
Williams Syndrome is like reverse autism: people who have it are almost too friendly
From the BBC: “Imagine walking down the street and feeling an overwhelming love and warmth for every single person that you met. That is a familiar experience for people with Williams Syndrome, a rare genetic condition that affects approximately 1 in 7,500 individuals. People with WS, often dubbed the ‘opposite of autism’, have an innate desire to hug and befriend total strangers. They are extremely affectionate, empathetic, talkative and gregarious. But there is a downside to being so friendly. Individuals often struggle to retain close friendships and are prone to isolation and loneliness. People with WS are also sometimes too open and trusting towards strangers, not realising when they are in danger, leaving them vulnerable to abuse and bullying. “It’s very easy for someone to fool a person with Williams Syndrome and take advantage of them, because they are so trusting,” says Alysson Muotri, a professor of paediatrics and cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California.”
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From The Guardian: “A Chinese paraglider who was accidentally propelled more than 8,000 metres high by an updraft has been banned from the activity for six months after a video of his ordeal went viral. Peng Yujiang began from an elevation of about 3,000m in the Qilian mountain range in northern China, where he intended to test a new second-hand equipment purchase without making a proper flight, according to an investigative report by the Gansu Provincial Aviation Sports Association. However about 20 minutes into his practice he was caught in a strong updraft, which sent him soaring more than 5,000m higher, in line with flight paths and nearly the height of Mount Everest. Video from Peng’s mounted camera showed him above the clouds and covered in icicles as the temperature dropped to a reported -35C, as he tried to control his equipment.”
The hats that Smurfs wear are connected to freed slaves and ancient Rome
From Pipeline Comics: “The hat that Smurfs wear, with a peak that is slumped over, isI called a Phrygian cap, and this style of headgear is over 2000 years old. Phrygis, in case your curious, is the name of an ancient group of people who lived in the Balkans region of eastern Europe — Greece, Turkey, Romania, etc. Their language and culture went extinct by the 5th century AD. Near the end, the Romans thought of them as being lazy and dull. The hat was adopted during the French Revolution as “the red cap of liberty” by the revolutionaries. And while the artist Peyo — creator of the Smurfs — was Belgian, he was working with French publishers, so drawing inspiration from a French symbol isn’t too crazy. The thing that Peyo maybe didn’t realize and the French revolutionaries definitely didn’t realize, though, is that it’s the wrong hat.”
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From the New York Times: “Kelly Wakefield, a professional gardener, was doing her spring cleanup of a public park in St. Albans, Vt., when she stumbled upon a mysterious metal box under a pile of leaves. She shook the box and heard the telltale jangle of coins. She opened the metal box and was floored by the bounty inside. She ran to her truck and drove straight to her mother’s house. What exactly had she found? Was any of it real? Did she need a lawyer? Wakefield, 46, soon learned that she had stumbled upon a treasure chest intentionally hidden by Michael Cloherty O’Connell, the author of two history books that led readers on scavenger hunts around the Northeast. The box contained coins, antiques, a Civil War-era bullet, a map and a note from the author himself. It is now in a safe deposit box, Wakefield said, and has yet to be appraised.”
Why we call dogs that are trained to help the blind “seeing eye” dogs
From Neatorama: “Have you ever wondered why a blind person’s guide dog is called a seeing eye dog instead of just a guide dog? That’s because they came came from the organization The Seeing Eye, founded in 1929 by Morris Frank. Frank lost his sight in one eye at age six, and the other at 16. He heard about an innovative program in Germany that trained dogs to guide blind people. Frank ended up going to Switzerland to work with dog trainer Dorothy Harrison Eustis and came back with a female German shepherd he named Buddy. The real innovation in training Buddy and other guide dogs was “intelligent disobedience.”Buddy was trained to disregard her owner’s commands when the situation called for it, such as in dangerous traffic. In 1928 Frank gave a demonstration in New York City to show reporters how Buddy could guide him safely in walking through Manhattan. The next year, Frank and Eustis opened the dog training program that’s still in operation today.”
Archeologists studied a Da Vinci sketch and found secret tunnels underneath a castle
From Popular Mechanics: “The artworks of Leonardo da Vinci are vast and storied. But even amongst such a well-studied body of work, there can still be a few surprises left to discover. And recently, a team of researchers discovered one of those surprises — one drawing of a castle tunnel from a 1400s-era castle. The drawing was of Sforza Castle, and it included depictions of numerous underground tunnels — tunnels that had never been found. The team — which included experts from Polytechnic University of Milan, Codevintec, and Sforza Castel—teamed up to employ ground-penetrating radar and laser scanning that mapped multiple feet under the castle. In doing so, they discovered not only that the tunnels Leonardo alluded to in his drawings existed, but that they may only be a small piece of an intricate system weaving throughout the site.”
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.
This 1,200-year-old school is the oldest continuously operating university
From Wikipedia: “The University of al-Qarawiyyin is located in Fez, Morocco. It was founded as a mosque by Fatima al-Fihri in 857–859 and subsequently became one of the leading spiritual and educational centers of the Islamic Golden Age. It was incorporated into Morocco’s modern state university system in 1963 and officially renamed “University of Al Quaraouiyine” two years later. The mosque building itself is also a significant complex of historical Moroccan and Islamic architecture that features elements from many different periods of Moroccan history. Scholars consider al-Qarawiyyin to have been effectively run as a madrasa until after World War II. UNESCO and the Guinness World Records, have cited al-Qarawiyyin as the oldest university or oldest continually operating higher learning institution in the world.”
There are dozens of Christian saints who would be considered transgender today
From The Conversation: “There are at least 34 documented stories of transgender saints’ lives from the early centuries of Christianity. Originally appearing in Latin or Greek, several stories of transgender saints made their way into vernacular languages. Of the 34 original saints, at least three gained widespread popularity in medieval Europe: St. Eugenia, St. Euphrosyne and St. Marinos. All three were born as women but cut their hair and put on men’s clothes to live as men and join monasteries. Eugenia, raised pagan, joined a monastery to learn more about Christianity and later became abbot. Euphrosyne joined a monastery to escape an unwanted suitor and spent the rest of his life there. Marinos, born Marina, decided to renounce womanhood and live with his father at the monastery as a man. Eugenia’s story appeared in two of the most popular manuscripts of their day – Ælfric’s “Lives of Saints” and “The Golden Legend.”
He had less than 30 seconds to sink a basketball from four different spots for $10,000
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters 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, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com
Let’s get this out of the way right up front: I don’t have an iPhone, I have a Pixel. And I run Windows and Linux on my desktops, not MacOS. That said, I am a longtime Macbook Air fan, having had more than half a dozen (including the one I am typing this on), and a longtime iPad owner. To me, the Macbook Air is an amazing device — there are some that can duplicate the specs, but the build quality is unparalleled. Same with the iPad: I have tried multiple Android tablets and none were as good. And when I first got an iPhone way back when (I had a BlackBerry before that, as any good Canadian would), I was blown away by how revolutionary it seemed. Inventing that device was the modern equivalent of inventing the wheel or the internal combustion engine — a spectacular stroke of genius that changed the world forever (for better or worse, depending on your perspective on smartphones). Steve Jobs was definitely a genius on multiple levels, although he could be somewhat problematic as a person.
In any case, none of that means I won’t criticize Apple when it deserves to be criticized, and there are plenty of times when that is true — for example, when the company brags about its commitment to privacy, but still hands over control of user data in China to the government, including access to the encryption keys. Or gives the National Security Agency in the US access to servers so the agency can mine that data in search of who knows what. Or is accused of benefitting from cheap supply chains where suppliers like Foxconn run what have been called “labour camps,” and other companies use children as young as seven years old to dig up the precious minerals involved.
The most recent glaring flaw in what is otherwise a great company was highlighted with a court decision earlier this month, but in reality it has been obvious (to me, at least, and I’m sure to many others) for quite some time. The court ruling was just the most recent event in a lawsuit that has been in progress now for almost five years. The decision came from Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, a district court judge in California who has been hearing the case since 2021. Without going back through the weeds on every aspect of this case, it was launched by Epic Games in 2020, and its target was the heart of the iPhone money machine: namely, the 30-percent fee Apple takes whenever a user buys anything through an app. Handling transactions outside of the app store in order to avoid this 30-percent fee can get an app maker suspended or banned.
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From National Library of Medicine: “The structure of modern residency programs in North America originated at Johns Hopkins Hospital during the last decade of the 19th century, under the aegis and influence of William Stewart Halsted. Halsted was a surgical innovator who greatly shaped surgical practice in the 20th century. As a young surgeon in New York, Halsted was a highly skilled, bold, fast and daring surgeon who was charismatic and sociable and excelled at teaching medical students. In Baltimore, he was a slow and meticulous surgeon who was a recluse and who avoided teaching medical students when possible. Between these 2 periods, Halsted and some colleagues accidentally became addicted to cocaine, when in late 1884 they, being aware of a new report that cocaine could be used as local anesthesia, experimented upon themselves.”
A group of chimpanzees have learned how to communicate over long distances
From La Brujula Verde: “A team of researchers documented a previously unseen behavior in a group of wild chimpanzees in the forests of Guinea-Bissau, Africa: the deliberate use of stones to produce sounds, which they interpret as a sophisticated form of long-distance communication. The team, led by biologist Sem van Loon, discovered that adult male chimpanzees repeatedly struck stones against tree trunks, leaving behind piles of these rocks at the base. Van Loon explains that this behavior, which she calls “stone-assisted drumming,” is a variant of a previously known practice in these primates. But there are differences, because while traditional drumming is usually preceded by silence and then bursts into loud sounds, in this new pattern the chimpanzees first emit loud vocalizations before striking the stones against the trees again.”
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From The Wrap: “A remote indigenous tribe Amazon tribe in Brazil has sued The New York Times, claiming a story about its first exposure to the internet has led to widespread reports that its members have become addicted to pornography. Filed last week in Los Angeles, the Marubo Tribe of the Javari Valley’s lawsuit also names TMZ and Yahoo as defendants and seeks at least $180 million from each. The sovereign community alleges the story, about the arrival of Starlink in 2024, falsely portrays its 2,000 people as unable to handle basic exposure to the internet, highlighting allegations that their youth had become consumed by pornography. “These statements were not only inflammatory but conveyed to the average reader that the Marubo people had descended into moral and social decline as a direct result of internet access,” the lawsuit says.
Japanese wrestler became a member of parliament and a hostage negotiator
From Grantland: “One of the best ways to appreciate the full glory of Antonio Inoki, the legendary Japanese professional wrestler, WWE Hall of Famer, and three-term member of his country’s parliament, is to Google image-search the phrase “Antonio Inoki bitch-slap.” You will see Inoki bitch-slapping the Japanese ambassador to Pakistan, a Cuban Olympian, a Japanese pop idol and member of the girl group SKE48, a man standing shirtless and in shorts in the snow, a 55-year-old female Japanese politician, the nationalistic former governor of Tokyo, a young Pakistani child, a man cradling an infant, a comedian, and scores of others. Fans, politicians, pop stars, and children from all over the world line up to receive his famed bitch-slap in the belief that it will invigorate them and transfer some of Inoki’s “burning fighting spirit.”
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From Public Seminar: “Electronic monitoring came into the criminal justice system not as a result of extensive research, but in part because a district judge in Albuquerque avidly pursued the idea in the 1970s. Judge Jack Love had read about the use of location tracking for livestock, and was further inspired by a Spiderman comic strip in which Kingpin forcibly slaps an “electronic radar device” onto Spiderman’s wrist so he can keep an eye on him. Motivated by a desire to keep people out of the brutal New Mexico prisons, Love convinced a computer salesman to design a similar device, and in 1983, a probation violator was the first to be fitted with one. States like California, for example, have done this to address prison overcrowding. Today, the number of people under electronic monitoring is actually quite small (about 200,000 at any given time) compared to the overall population under the umbrella of non-custodial corrections like parole.”
The Australian outback is being overrun by hundreds of thousands of feral camels
From National Geographic: “Jack Carmody has built a sizable YouTube following by showing his viewers what it takes to run a cattle station in the Australian outback—the rugged work of mending troughs, reinforcing fences, and shooting trespassers. Feral horses and donkeys, that is, and one particularly destructive invasive species: camels. Introduced in the 19th century to help colonists survey the country’s vast interior, the creatures are now wreaking havoc across the outback. Australia is now home to the world’s largest feral camel population, with estimates from several hundred thousand to as many as a million. Females can give birth every two years and live up to 40 years in the wild, meaning the number of camels can double every nine years. Weighing an average of 1,000 pounds, they roam in herds from fewer than 10 to several hundred, trampling ecosystems and destroying infrastructure. The creatures are voracious consumers of plants, competing with other wildlife and livestock.”
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If you’ve been following the news about Google’s I/O conference at all, you probably know that it was all about artificial intelligence — and that isn’t an exaggeration. Literally every announcement, every feature, and every app demonstration involved AI in some form or another. An autonomous AI agent called Project Astra; an AI-powered agent for writing computer code known as Jules; AI-authored “smart replies” in Gmail; an AI-powered web browsing service called Project Mariner; an AI shopping service that lets you try on clothes virtually; real-time AI-powered translation in Google Meet; an AI-powered image generator called Imagen; an AI-driven video generator called Veo; a service that blends all of these to make movies, called Flow; and of course AI in search, whether through the AI Overview at the top of a regular search, through a separate “AI Mode” search tab, or through the standalone Gemini AI app.
As Casey Newton wrote in his Platformer newsletter, Google didn’t explicitly talk about the implications of all of this AI machinery, either for its business model or for the future of the open web, but the conclusions are fairly obvious:
Snap out of this fever dream long enough and you can spot hints of the world that is coming into existence. Gmail is learning how to write in your voice, and will begin to do so later this year. The camera screen will chat with you while you are fixing your bike, telling you what to do every step of the way. NotebookLM will start generating TED talk-like videos of your PDFs for you to watch. An executive on stage says that before too long you will be able to generate a how-to video for almost any subject you like. And while the company continues to protest, it seems obvious that this new world will give you many fewer reasons to visit the open web. Google will generate the things you once searched for, and all the businesses that once relied on those searches will need a Plan B.
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