Category: Newsletters

I realize that many people may not know or care who or what Matt Mullenweg and WordPress are, or why some people are upset about them, but after giving it a lot of thought (okay, about 10 minutes of thought) I decided to write about it anyway. I’m writing this newsletter in part for an audience — in other words, you the reader, and others like you — so when I’m deciding what to write about, I do try to take into account what you might be interested in reading about. But I’m also writing this newsletter for myself, and in this case what I care about trumps (sorry) what my readers may or may not be interested in. And I think this is about something important that goes beyond just WordPress.

Update: After publication, Matt sent me a message on Twitter with a link to a Google doc that lists some corrections and clarifications related to some of my comments here. My response is at the end of this post.

I care about Matt Mullenweg and WordPress for a number of reasons, some personal and some professional. On the personal side, I’ve been using WordPress to publish my blog for more than two decades now, and I’ve helped countless others with their WordPress-powered blogs and websites over the years. It has its quirks, but it is a great system. I’ve tried Drupal and Squarespace and literally everything else, and I keep coming back to WordPress. On the non-personal side, the Columbia Journalism Review — where I was the chief digital writer for about seven years, until a month or so ago — runs on WordPress, as do hundreds of thousands if not millions of other websites (WordPress likes to boast that it powers more than 40 percent of the sites on the web.)

Not long after I started using WordPress for my blog, which was in 2004 or so — after experimenting with Typepad and Blogger and other publishing systems — I cofounded a Web 2.0 conference in Toronto called Mesh, and one of the speakers we invited to the very first one was Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, who was then just 21 years old. I have a very clear memory of Matt sitting at a table with my friend Om Malik (whose Gigaom blog network I would later join) and others, while I tried to get a friend to stop using a local company’s terrible blog-publishing software and switch to WordPress.

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 Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?”

From Science.org: “In 2016, when the U.S. Congress unleashed a flood of new funding for Alzheimer’s disease research, the National Institute on Aging (NIA) tapped veteran brain researcher Eliezer Masliah as a key leader for the effort. He took the helm at the agency’s Division of Neuroscience, whose budget—$2.6 billion in the last fiscal year—dwarfs the rest of NIA combined. His roughly 800 research papers, many on how those conditions damage synapses, the junctions between neurons, have made him one of the most cited scientists in his field. However, a Science investigation has now found that scores of his lab studies are riddled with apparently falsified images used to show the presence of proteins and micrographs of brain tissue. Numerous images seem to have been inappropriately reused within and across papers, sometimes published years apart in different journals, describing divergent experimental conditions.”

A Lego fan has made a working version of a Turing machine out of Lego

From The Register: “A working Turing Machine was submitted to Lego Ideas, consisting of approximately 2,900 parts and a bucketload of extreme cleverness. The original machine was devised by mathematician Alan Turing in 1936. Turing’s idea was a hypothetical system that could simulate any computer algorithm. The design consisted of an infinitely long tape with symbols that could be moved left and right, a ‘head’ that could read the symbols and overwrite them with new ones, a finite control that described the machine’s state, and a table to link each combination of state and symbol to an instruction for what to do next. The Lego builder first came across the concept a few years ago and, despite it being an abstract model, decided to attempt making one. In addition to the constraints of making the device, there was also the challenge of fitting into the limits imposed by Lego Ideas. At the time of submission, this was 3,000 parts.”

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 top US health researcher falsified Alzheimer’s data”

From Nautilus: “If we ever contact extraterrestrials, we’ll have to find a way to understand them. Who are they? What are their intentions? What have they discovered that we haven’t? Olaf Witkowski thinks the only way to begin that dialogue is to try and kill them. Clearly, there are going to be major differences between us and them. Biological, technological, and cultural gaps are likely to be as wide as interstellar space itself. “The only way to communicate with a creature that is very different from you, and you can make no assumptions at all about how they encode language or meaning, is just killing them,” Witkowski says. He argues that the only universal basis of communication, the sole feature that all life shares, whatever its form is that life wants to live.”

Experts at the Van Gogh Museum have exposed three early fakes

From The Art Newspaper: “For decades Interior of a Restaurant was regarded as a second version of an authentic painting, Interior of the Grand Bouillon-Restaurant le Chalet, Paris. This was understandable, since Van Gogh would sometimes make another version of a composition. The second version of the restaurant scene, which only surfaced in the 1950s, was recently studied after its owner submitted it for possible authentication. The colours also included Manganese blue, a synthetic pigment only patented in 1935. In the original painting the red flowers can be identified as autumn begonias, which graced restaurant tables in November or early December 1887, when the picture was completed. The artist of the second version interpreted them as yellow sunflowers, which would have been over by the end of September.”

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 “If you meet a space alien you should try to kill them”

From the BBC: “The world’s longest treasure hunt appears to have come to an end, after an announcement in France that a buried statuette of a golden owl has finally been unearthed – after 31 years. The message was posted by Michel Becker, who illustrated the original Chouette d’Or (golden owl) book and sculpted the buried statuette in 1993. No further information about the site or the finder was available and Mr Becker was not contactable by telephone. Tens of thousands of people have taken part in the search, which has spawned a huge secondary literature in books and Internet sites. They have all been following 11 complicated puzzles set out in the first book by its creator, Max Valentin. When he died in 2009, Mr Becker took over the operation. A documentary on the treasure hunt said earlier this year that the value of the owl is estimated to be €150,000.”

Einstein invented a refrigerator with no moving parts that ran on butane

From Wikipedia: “From 1926 until 1934 Einstein and Szilárd collaborated on ways to improve home refrigeration technology. The two were motivated by contemporary newspaper reports of a Berlin family who had been killed when a seal in their refrigerator failed and leaked toxic fumes into their home. Einstein and Szilárd proposed that a device without moving parts would eliminate the potential for seal failure, and explored practical applications for different refrigeration cycles. Einstein had worked in the Swiss Patent Office, and used his experience to apply for valid patents for their inventions in several countries. The refrigerator was less efficient than existing appliances, although having no moving parts made it more reliable; the introduction of Freon made it even less attractive commercially and the Great Depression dried up funding.”

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Continue reading “The 30-year hunt for the Golden Owl treasure is finally over”

Over the past few years, it ‘s been hard to avoid the conclusion that smartphones, and in particular the use of social media such as Instagram and TikTok, have caused an epidemic of mental health and body image problems among young people, and in particular teenaged girls — problems that in some cases have led to suicide. A recent piece in The New Yorker is just the latest in a long line of such reports: in it, writer Andrew Solomon interviews distraught parents and relatives of a number of young people who have killed themselves, and in every case the culprit seems to be their excessive use of smartphones and specifically their use of social media, which many of those involved seem to believe caused or exacerbated their childrens’ anxiety and depression.

One of the girls who died by suicide spent all her time on Instagram and was convinced she was ugly and no one would ever love her, and it turned out that her feed was full of people talking about eating disorders and suicide. Her mother says that after reading about Frances Haugen, a whistleblower who leaked thousands of internal Facebook documents about the harms of social media, she became convinced that Instagram played a role in her daughter’s death, and decided to sue Meta. The article goes on to talk about rise in the rate of deaths by suicide between age 10 and age 24 in the US since 2007, and the fact that 53 percent of Americans believe that social media is responsible. And it talks about how social media produces a dopamine effect similar to nicotine or cocaine, and explains that this is why some people get addicted to using social media.

Before I go any further, there’s no question that the stories in the New Yorker piece are heart-wrenching. Solomon writes about visiting the childhood bedrooms of boys and girls in their teens or early twenties who struggled with anxiety and depression and in the end chose to kill themselves, and their parents tell him about the guilt they feel over things they could have done. Only a robot would be able to listen to those stories and not feel for those parents and those families, and I am not trying to downplay or minimize that. But after pages and pages of these stories — more than three quarters of the way through the article — comes what I think is an important point, when Solomon writes that “research has failed to demonstrate any definite causal link” between smartphone or social-media use and depression.

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 moral panic over social media and teen depression”

From The Smithsonian: “In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, “Wild Bill” Donovan, the leader of the Office of Strategic Services told his scientists to find a way to outfox the Axis enemies. In response, the scientists produced a number of dirty tricks, including explosive pancake mix, incendiary bombs strapped to live bats, truth drugs for eliciting information from prisoners of war, and a foul-smelling spray that mimicked the repulsive odor of fecal matter. But Operation Fantasia was the most desperate—and peculiar—of them all. Operation Fantasia was the brainchild of OSS psychological warfare strategist Ed Salinger, an eccentric businessman who had run an import/export business in Tokyo before the war. Operation Fantasia, he pitched the organization in 1943, would destroy Japanese morale by exposing soldiers and civilians to a Shinto portent of doom: kitsune, fox-shaped spirits with magical abilities.”

Two ranchers faked drought numbers to claim millions in crop insurance

From The Colorado Sun: “Into the spring of 2017, U.S. weather experts watching southeastern Colorado noticed something they’d never seen before. Storm clouds would gather over the thirsty sagebrush ranges surrounding tiny Colorado and Kansas towns like Springfield and Coolidge. On a normal day, the promising storms produced snow or rain that would fall onto a system of official weather stations at airstrips or town halls, into heated “tipping buckets.” When the teeter-totter buckets filled with a thimbleful of water, the seesaw tilted, dropping one miniature metal bucket downward to close an electrical circuit. One “tick” of the bucket, and a signal went out to National Weather Service sensors around the world that the High Plains had recorded one hundredth of an inch of water. But on many of those days, those buckets were not tipping.”

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 WWII plot to fight Japan with radioactive foxes”

From Scientific American: “Quantum physicists are familiar with wonky, seemingly nonsensical phenomena: atoms and molecules sometimes act as particles, sometimes as waves; particles can be connected to one another by a “spooky action at a distance,” even over great distances; and quantum objects can detach themselves from their properties like the Cheshire Cat from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland detaches itself from its grin. Now researchers led by Daniela Angulo of the University of Toronto have revealed another oddball quantum outcome: photons, wave-particles of light, can spend a negative amount of time zipping through a cloud of chilled atoms. In other words, photons can seem to exit a material before entering it.”

How North Korea’s Kim Jong-un assassinated his brother with a deadly nerve agent

From GQ: “When Kim Jong-nam was a boy, his father, the dictator of North Korea, sat him on his office chair and said, “When you grow up, this is where you’ll sit and give orders.” If the child had fulfilled that promise—if his half brother, Kim Jong-un, had not ultimately usurped his throne—he would have tyrannized 25 million people. His pudgy finger would have caressed the launch buttons of nukes. America and China would have debated how to manage him. But as Jong-nam glanced up at the departures board in the international airport of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the jostling crowd ignored him. He had become just another overweight 45-year-old, the bald spot that he usually hid with a cap showing through his remaining hair like a bull’s-eye.”

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 “Quantum physics experiment finds evidence of negative time”

Last month, Google was hit with a significant ruling in an antitrust case involving its dominance in the search business: A federal judge in the District of Columbia ruled that the payments that Google makes to Apple and other companies in return for being the default search engine — payments that totaled more than $20 billion dollars last year — are an unfair restraint on competition. Judge Mehta found that Google controls almost 90 percent of the search market, a figure that rises to nearly 95 percent for mobile devices, and that the company has used its monopoly to charge higher prices. “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote.

Less than a month later, Google is in court for a second antitrust trial, this one involving its control over online advertising. The case was launched in January of 2023 by the Department of Justice and eight states, including New York, New Jersey, and California (nine more states joined later). It states that Google “corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers and brokers to facilitate digital advertising.” The government concluded its main arguments last week and asked the court to force Google to sell off some of its ad technology.

Google deserves to lose

Predicting the outcome of this kind of trial is difficult at the best of times, but this one is especially difficult for a couple of reasons, including the fact that the way the courts interpret antitrust law is a moving target, combined with the reality that the online ad market is a complex animal — so complex that it makes online search look like a kid’s birthday party. That gives Google a lot of wiggle room to argue that it doesn’t have a monopoly in the legal sense of the word, and that even if it does, it hasn’t done anything anticompetitive to maintain that monopoly (simply having a monopoly is not illegal under US antitrust law — the government has to show that a company obtained the monopoly through illegal means, and/or used illegal methods to maintain it.)

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 “Why Google deserves to lose its advertising antitrust case”

From Cascadia News: “Robert Schock, 39, set off for a day run in the North Cascades at the end of July with minimal supplies and his dog. He was in an adventurous mood and wanted to piece together a big loop, possibly by way of Copper Ridge, which has stunning views of the North Cascade range. A generally nomadic person, he once lived in Mount Vernon and has hiked and camped in the Mount Baker area in the past. But he never returned to the trailhead. Family members and first responders were alerted to his disappearance in early August. After extensive searches of the remote, mountainous area, including by helicopter, most believed he would likely not be found alive. But on Aug. 30, young crew members of the Pacific Northwest Trail Association discovered Schock, dangerously emaciated and unable to move but still alive, lying on the rocky bank of the Chilliwack River. How did he manage to survive?”

Inside the island fortress built by America’s richest men

From Business Insider: “As we near the northwestern side of the island, I spot the bright red steel beams of “La Petite Clef,” the Mark di Suvero sculpture that towers 20 feet over the front lawn of the car magnate Norman Braman’s mansion. We glide past a modern palace hidden behind a dense cluster of palm trees, purchased for $50 million in 2019 by a mysterious LLC linked to the emir of Qatar. On the southwestern shore, we come upon the island’s most sought-after mansions. This is where the elite of the elite live: Tom Brady, Carl Icahn, and the neighborhood’s most recent arrival, Jeff Bezos. The wealth here is staggering — 25,000-square-foot mansions with ivy-strewn stucco walls, fronted by sprawling lawns and sleek yachts. Today, almost all the mansions appear to be empty. As we get closer to the shore, I start to notice the cameras. Many are connected to an Israeli-designed system capable of detecting passersby from half a mile away.”

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 lost in the woods for a month without food or shelter”

From The Cut: “Over the next six years, 8 Passengers would grow into one of the most-watched family YouTube channels of all time, amassing, at its peak, roughly 2.5 million subscribers and more than a billion views. Ruby and her husband, Kevin, distinguished themselves as a messy-but-wholesome alternative to the polished, world-traveling, Montessori-practicing parenting influencers taking over feeds. The most die-hard 8 Passengers fans not only followed along on YouTube but also gathered in dedicated online forums, where they analyzed the affairs of the Franke family, of which they had encyclopedic knowledge. These fans were, in late 2019, among the first to realize something was off. In 8 Passengers’ posts, Ruby appeared colder, they thought; the couple’s already stern parenting style had sharpened. Late in the summer of 2023, Ruby’s two youngest children, then ages 9 and 12 were found hundreds of miles from home. They were wounded and emaciated, the victims of abuse by Ruby and Hildebrandt.”

She set a new record by hiking the 2,197-mile Appalachian Trail in 40 days

From I Run Far: “On September 21, 2024, Tara Dower set a new overall supported fastest known time (FKT) on the Appalachian Trail, in a time of 40 days, 18 hours, and 5 minutes, to be confirmed. The Appalachian Trail stretches 2,197 miles from Mount Katahdin in Maine to Springer Mountain in Georgia, and travels through New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Oftentimes considered the original long-trail thru-hike, it’s an unrelenting path through the eastern U.S. The trail has 465,000 feet of elevation gain. Dower’s mark surpasses Karel Sabbe’s previous overall and men’s supported FKT of 41 days, 7 hours, and 39 minutes, which he set in 2018.”

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 former YouTube influencer is now in prison for child abuse”

From Atlas Obscura: “In the Danish Royal Library and the Bavarian State Library in Munich, rare medieval manuscripts depict something unusual, even for the Middle Ages—a man and woman fighting in a trial by combat. The man is drawn waist-deep in a hole armed with an edged club, while the woman circulates above, flinging what looks like a rock in a sock. Both are drawn with furrowed brows, fierce snarls, and bloodied limbs. Based on obscure 13th and 14th-century German, Austrian, and Swiss laws, these images show trials by combat, known as judicial duels. In a rape trial, the burden of proof fell on the victim, and without concrete evidence, a conviction was nearly impossible. According to 13th and 14th-century legal treatises, judicial duels between men and women only happened in cases of notnunft. The medieval law term describes rape, kidnapping, and sexual assault committed specifically against women.”

The CIA and KGB tried to blackmail this world leader with sex tapes but failed

From Medium: “In 1945, a man known simply by the name Sukarno became Indonesia’s first president after leading an independence movement against Dutch colonial rule. He entered office with overwhelming popular support and was widely regarded as a national hero. He brought with him a reputation for loving his country, and for loving women. In their more desperate but imaginative moments, spies for both governments tried to turn Sukarno’s famed sexual prowess against him. These efforts included a CIA-produced pornographic film and a “honey pot” scheme with KGB operatives dressed as flight attendants. Neither plan went well. Both of the spy agencies apparently misread a crucial aspect of Sukarno’s sexual proclivities — he never tried to hide those tendencies. If anything, he flaunted them. He once bragged to a U.S. diplomat that he was “a very physical man who needed sex every day,” and shocked his government hosts in Washington when he demanded they provide him with call girls during a visit.”

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 “Women in the Middle Ages could challenge their rapists to a duel”

From Bloomberg: “Advanced poker software is now widely available for a few hundred dollars. Forums are full of accusations about everyone from anonymous, low-stakes fish to sponsored professionals. All the big platforms promote a zero-tolerance policy, but no one seems to know how many bots are out there or where they come from. “It’s a scourge,” one gambling executive told me. When I started investigating poker bots, I came across an obscure chatroom thread posted by a whistleblower describing an operation so large it resembled an international corporation. It had a board of directors, training programs and an HR department—everything, it seemed, but a water cooler. Allegedly based in Siberia, the group was said to have absorbed all potential rivals in the region, becoming known as Bot Farm Corporation, or BF Corp. I decided to find out the truth about BF Corp., by following a trail of leaked internal emails, and by conducting interviews with players, gambling executives, security consultants and botmakers. When I finally tracked down BF’s Siberian creators, they agreed to an interview.”

Her children were sick and no one knew why. Was it forever chemicals on the farm?

From the New York Times: “Allison Jumper’s family was a picture of healthy living. Active kids. Wholesome meals. A freezer stocked with organic beef from her in-laws’ farm in Maine. Then in late 2020, she got a devastating call from her brother-in-law. High levels of harmful “forever chemicals” had been detected on their farm and in their cows’ milk, and they were getting shut down. At first, Mrs. Jumper worried only about her in-laws’ livelihoods. But soon, her mind went somewhere else: to her own children’s mysterious health issues, including startlingly high cholesterol levels. Unknown to them, her family’s beloved organic farm had been fertilized decades earlier with sewage sludge tainted by a dangerous class of chemicals linked to certain cancers, liver disease and a host of other health problems. Their cattle had grazed on contaminated pastures, making the beef and milk too dangerous to eat. Yet her family had been eating it for several years.”

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 Russian bot army that conquered online poker”

From New York: “In 1998, a prematurely silver-haired, baby-faced priest named C. John McCloskey was dispatched by Opus Dei, the secretive right-wing Roman Catholic group, to Washington, D.C., to minister to some of the world’s most powerful men. He arrived at the Catholic Information Center, which the organization runs, on K Street, the lobbying district of the nation’s capital. Father John is gone — removed from his post by a sex-abuse scandal, he died last year — but the CIC is still on K Street. it is focused on marshaling the people who have various forms of authority over the masses (Opus Dei reportedly calls them the “intellectuals”) to its various revanchist causes. The group targets, and attracts, people like Donald Trump’s current running mate, J.D. Vance, a convert to conservative Catholicism by way of Opus Dei–connected clergy and influencers. Opus Dei runs colleges and elite private schools as well as institutions like the CIC, all designed to attract and mold the influential.”

Doctors customize brain surgery so patient doesn’t lose his ability to play chess

From Scientific American: “Last year, when doctors told a patient that the headaches he was experiencing were due to a highly invasive brain tumor called a glioblastoma that could only be removed during a complex surgery, he had one very specific request. He wanted the surgeons to make sure to preserve his ability to play chess. The man, a then-45-year-old computer programmer, was identified only as “AB.” He had been playing the game as a hobby for 25 years and had achieved an Elo rating of 1,950, which is just one level below expert in the chess world. Surgeons performed a craniotomy, removing a piece of skull to expose a portion of AB’s left superior parietal lobe while he was awake. Next they touched a live electrode to different spots on the surface of his cerebral cortex, asking him to answer questions and complete tasks in order to determine whether his cognitive abilities remained intact at the targeted spot.”

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 “How a secretive right-wing Catholic cult took over DC”

When I read news and opinion pieces about TikTok, the video-sharing app owned by China-based ByteDance, it often reminds me of the old parable about the blind men and the elephant: when they touch the animal, each of the men touches a different part, and therefore he thinks it is something different — the one who touches the trunk thinks it is a snake, the one who touches the leg thinks it is a tree, and so on. In TikTok’s case, younger users who enjoy scrolling through the videos probably see it as a harmless distraction; older users who don’t spend any time on it probably think of it as a massive waste of time; and a number of legislators in Congress appear to see it as a dangerous psy-op designed by the Chinese government as a way of gathering data on American users and/or targeting them with misinformation and propaganda.

When I started writing this newsletter, I realized that I’ve been writing about the supposed dangers of TikTok, and the plans to either force ByteDance to sell or make TikTok illegal, for four years now. I first wrote about it for the Columbia Journalism Review in September of 2020, after then-president Donald Trump issued an executive order banning TikTok. Trump said he did it because the app “threatens the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,” but even at the time it was clear that the ban was driven by a desire to do hurt China, which had become an economic powerhouse. The US had blocked mergers involving Chinese companies and imposed sanctions on of Chinese firms like Huawei, a maker of telecom equipment, and China had retaliated by hacking into US federal databases and the credit agency Equifax.

Even then, security experts said that TikTok was no more of a data or privacy risk than Facebook or Google. “I am the first to yell from the rooftops when there is a glaring privacy issue somewhere. But we just have not found anything we could call a smoking gun in TikTok,” security expert Will Strafach told The Associated Press in 2020. Nevertheless, Trump’s order soon sparked a frenzy of attempts by US companies to acquire TikTok, immediately sparked a race to acquire TikTok’s assets before the September deadline, with Microsoft, Oracle, and Walmart all in the running. But those plans hit a roadblock when the Chinese government issued new restrictions on the sale or export of artificial-intelligence software, which would include TikTok’s recommendation algorithms.

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Continue reading “The crusade against TikTok is a ridiculous waste of time”

From The Conversation: “The rings of Saturn are some of the most famous and spectacular objects in the Solar System. Earth may once have had something similar. In a paper published last week in Earth & Planetary Science Letters, my colleagues and I present evidence that Earth may have had a ring. Around 466 million years ago, a lot of meteorites started hitting Earth. We know this because many impact craters formed in a geologically brief period. In the same period we also find deposits of limestone across Europe, Russia and China containing very high levels of debris from a certain type of meteorite. The meteorite debris in these sedimentary rocks show signs that they were exposed to space radiation for much less time than we see in meteorites that fall today. Using models of how Earth’s tectonic plates moved in the past, we mapped out where all these craters were when they first formed. We found all of the craters are on continents that were close to the equator in this period.”

He decided to bring his Army friends some beers — when they were in Vietnam

From Now I Know: “In 1968, troops from the United States, South Vietnam, and Laos met the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese in the Battle of Khe Sanh. There were nearly 100,000 combatants involved in the months-long skirmish, including 6,000 American Marines. Almost all of them were there to fight. But one of them, a Marine named Chickie Donohue, wasn’t. In fact, he wasn’t supposed to be there at all. He was just hoping to meet some friends and have a beer. In late 1967, Donohue was back in New York City, his hometown, drinking at a local bar. Antiwar protests had taken hold across the nation and the bartender — a former soldier named George “Colonel” Lynch (who was not, in fact, a colonel) wanted to do something to support the local boys serving in Vietnam. Half-jokingly, most likely, he suggested that someone should go to Vietnam and bring six of the bar’s regulars some beers. Donohue decided to turn the joke into reality.”

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Continue reading “Scientists say Earth may once have had a ring like Saturn”