Category: Newsletters

A beekeeper has been jailed for six months after she set swarms of her insects on sheriff’s deputies attempting to carry out an eviction at a friend’s house. Rebecca Woods insisted she only released her truckload of hives to allow the bees to enjoy the “lovely, flowering landscape” near the home of an elderly friend and cancer patient. But a district court in Springfield, Massachusetts, heard that Woods, 59, admitted under questioning that she was trying to save him from eviction by freeing the bees in the presence of the deputies who had shown up to serve papers. Several officers were stung on their heads and faces, and one required hospital treatment. One deputy is seen frantically waving his arms, trying to shoo the insects away. Woods, who put on her beekeeper’s suit during the incident, had driven up to the property with the hives stacked on a trailer pulled by her blue SUV, and proceeded to lift the lids of a number of them. (via The Guardian)

The company that owns the salvage rights to the Titanic wants to sell off artefacts

More than a century after the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, the company that owns exclusive salvage rights to the shipwreck wants to auction about 100 artifacts raised from the ocean floor during the first recovery effort nearly 40 years ago.The doomed vessel’s wreckage has been an object of fascination and controversy since it was found in 1985, and the newly proposed sale is already stirring fresh debate over the fate of the thousands of items pulled from the site.When the company, R.M.S. Titanic, last proposed selling artifacts, in 2016, it was struggling through bankruptcy and the plan drew objections from the U.S. and French governments, as well as from UNESCO and other cultural institutions. The latest potential sale was proposed in a document that R.M.S. submitted in March to the federal court in Norfolk, Va., which oversees the recovery effort and may have to approve the auction. (via the New York Times)

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Continue reading “Beekeeper jailed for opening the hives to protect a neighbor”

I could be wrong, but I feel like this post is going to be similar to the one I wrote recently about crypto stablecoins. I know some readers never got past the headline, because they were busy imagining all the bad things about crypto — the rug pulls and the graft and so on. One reader even pointed out that my post probably didn’t make it past many people’s spam filters, since the headline contained a word that many people and algorithms ignore on contact. So be it! In any case, this one is probably going to get an overwhelmingly negative response as well, because I think many people have already decided that AI is and always will be terrible — given things like the water use (which I wrote about here) and the plagiarism (which I wrote about here) and convincing people they are immortal or should unalive themselves, etc. (which I wrote about here). If you fall into that category you probably haven’t even made it this far, so I might as well just continue with my thesis: namely, that AI is doing some positive things.

I’ve been collecting examples of things that AI is doing that are clearly beneficial, either to an individual or to society in general — or if not inarguably beneficial then at least not obviously bad — and they have been piling up. I will freely admit here that some of these are still hypothetical, meaning AI has been used in research or hypothetical situations but has had some success that appears to be broadly applicable. One of the things that made me decide to write about it, despite my conviction that it will be unpopular, is a piece I read by someone named Carlo Iacono who writes a blog called Hybrid Horizons (from what I can gather, he is a university librarian from Australia). In the piece, Iacono argues that many of those writing about artificial intelligence have been looking at its effects on the wrong part of the world. Here’s an excerpt:

There is an app in Lagos that can tell you whether your malaria medication is real or counterfeit. It costs sixty dollars. It uses a spectrometer the size of a thumb drive and an AI algorithm trained on the molecular fingerprints of four hundred drugs. A pharmacist holds the device against a blister pack, waits twenty seconds, and the screen tells her whether the pills will treat a child’s fever or do nothing while the parasite multiplies. The company behind it was founded by a Nigerian pharmacist who, at fifteen, swallowed a counterfeit asthma medication and spent twenty-one days in a coma. He survived, studied at Yale, and built a system that now operates in over five thousand pharmacies across Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda. In 2024, it identified and removed 1.3 million counterfeit medications from the supply chain.

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Continue reading “Hear me out: AI also does things that are good”

Researchers from Cairo University and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have located two air-filled spaces within Giza’s Menkaure pyramid that hint at a possible secret entrance. The Menkaure pyramid is the smallest of the three main pyramids on Cairo’s Giza plateau. Built for the Fourth Dynasty ruler Menkaure, it was completed in the 26th century BC. It was excavated between 1906 to 1910, but has not been fully explored since then. Working within the ScanPyramids project, the research team used non-invasive ground-penetrating radar, ultrasound, and electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) to confirm the presence of voids behind this area. Their discovery supports the theory, suggested by researcher Stijn van den Hoven in 2019, that a second entrance might exist at that location. In 2023 it found a previously undiscovered corridor at the Great Pyramid of Giza using advanced scanning techniques. (via Art News)

Researchers built an AI chatbot that only knows the world before 1931

The internet’s chatbots have read every forum rant, leaked Slack log, and confident blog post your uncle ever wrote about chemtrails. The results are predictable: they reflect the state of the internet, and it isn’t pretty. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a chatbot that only draws on knowledge from before the internet, reality TV, or AI-slop content ever existed? Three researchers have created just that: a chatbot that hasn’t read anything published after 1930. Talkie is a 13-billion-parameter language model trained on digital scans of English-language texts published before the end of 1930. That cutoff aligns with the current US public domain year, meaning anything published until the end of that year is fair game and there are no lawsuits from irate IP-holders to worry about. You can download it from GitHub or chat with it through a web interface (via Malwarebytes)

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Continue reading “Secret chambers have been discovered in a Giza pyramid”

Here is the promise you and I must cling to across the thousands of words that follow: At some point within this text, I will reveal to you what—after 555 responses, 13,000 miles of travel, and months of monomaniacal research—I have determined to be the best free restaurant bread in America. I will not attempt to slither to the moral high ground, arguing that best is a meaningless measure, or insisting that all bread is dear in its own way. Even if you attempt to betray me—for instance, by merely scanning the text that follows for the phrase Here it is: the best free restaurant bread in America—I will uphold my end of the bargain. Though it strikes the ear as an insoluble query, there is a correct answer—right now, known only to God (and to me, an agent of his will), but erelong to the steadfast reader. (via The Atlantic)

A newspaper boy dropped a nickel on the ground and it popped open to reveal a microfilm

On June 22, 1953, a fourteen-year-old newspaper boy collecting for the Brooklyn Eagle was paid with a nickel that felt too light to him. When he dropped it on the ground, it popped open, revealing that it contained microfilm. The microfilm contained a series of numbers. After agent Louis Hahn of the FBI obtained the nickel and the microfilm, the agency tried to find out where the nickel had come from and what the numbers meant. On the microfilm, there were five digits together in each number, 21 sets of five in seven columns and another 20 sets in three columns, making a total of 207 sets. There was no key for the numbers. The FBI tried for nearly four years to find the origin of the nickel and the meaning of the numbers. It was only when KGB agent Reino Häyhänen chose to defect in May 1957 that the nickel was linked to the KGB. (via Wikipedia)

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Continue reading “A heroic quest to find the best free restaurant bread in the US”

Jack Parsons was one of the most influential figures in the history of the American space program. He also stood accused of espionage, and held a deep fascination with the occult. By 1939, Parsons and his wife Helen Parsons-Smith had fully embraced the teachings of the Ordo Templis Orientis, a central hub for Aleister Crowley’s spiritual and religious philosophy. Crowley taught that a Thelemite’s central ambition was to achieve a higher state of existence by embracing one’s “True Will,” or one’s ultimate purpose beyond selfishness or ego. In pursuit of that goal, many aspects of Parsons’s life blurred the boundaries between science and mysticism. As a Thelemite, he performed ritual magic, including banishing impure elements with pentagrams, invocating the power of the “Holy Guardian Angel,” and offering daily adorations to the sun. (via Supercluster)

These two women are twins but due to a rare event they have different fathers

Lavinia and Michelle know that those of us who haven’t shared a womb with a sibling can be fascinated by twins: their similarities, how they differ, whether there’s any kind of mysterious synergy between them. They aren’t identical twins. They share the same striking eyes, but the lower halves of their faces are different. Their personalities differ, too. But they share many things, including the almost inconceivable circumstances that brought them into the world, and which only came to light four years ago, when they were 45 and both took DNA tests from the genealogy firm Ancestry. Their results of those tests revealed something never before documented in British history. Lavinia and Michelle are twins who grew together in the same womb, were born from the same mother, and delivered within minutes of each other – but have different fathers. (via The Guardian)

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Continue reading “The occult history of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory”

Alan Robinson and Walter Macfarlane were born in Hawaii 15 months apart. The duo met in 6th grade and have been friends for 60 years. While they’ve shared a very close bond, they never thought they were related, until a DNA website revealed their relationship. Robinson was adopted, and Macfarlane did not know who his father was, so the pair were always searching individually for information on their families. For years, Macfarlane had tried unsuccessfully to find clues about his father. With the help of his daughter, they began sifting through matches he got on a DNA website. One of the top matches was username Robi737.  Macfarlane-Flores told KHON-TV, that her father’s best friend, Robinson, flew 737 airplanes for Aloha Airlines, and his nickname was Robi. The pair soon learned that they shared a birth mother. (via USA Today)

Archeologists have found honey in 3,000-year-old Egyptian tombs that is still edible

Modern archeologists, excavating ancient Egyptian tombs, have often found something unexpected amongst the tombs’ artifacts: pots of honey, thousands of years old, and yet still preserved. Through millennia, the archeologists discover, the food remains unspoiled, an unmistakable testament to the eternal shelf-life of honey. There are a few other examples of foods that keep–indefinitely–in their raw state: salt, sugar, dried rice are a few. But there’s something about honey; it can remain preserved in a completely edible form, and while you wouldn’t want to chow down on raw rice or straight salt, one could ostensibly dip into a thousand year old jar of honey and enjoy it, without preparation, as if it were a day old. Moreover, honey’s longevity lends it other properties – mainly medicinal – that other resilient foods don’t have. Which raises the question: what exactly makes honey such a special food? (via The Smithsonian)

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 “Friends for 60 years found out that they were brothers”

As the woman was reading, she heard an unfamiliar voice say, “Please don’t be afraid. I know it must be shocking for you to hear me speaking to you like this, but this is the easiest way I could think of. My friend and I used to work at the Children’s Hospital, Great Ormond Street, and we would like to help you.” The woman said the disembodied voice then attempted to convince her of its sincerity by providing three pieces of information and suggesting that she check their veracity as proof. The woman confirmed that they were correct. At the clinic, a psychiatrist diagnosed the woman with “functional hallucinatory psychosis.” The patient then went on vacation. Although she was still taking thioridazine, the voices came back, telling her she needed to go home immediately for medical treatment. These voices gave her the address of a hospital, and urged her to schedule a brain scan because she had a tumor. (via Live Science)

The time that Bruce Springsteen tried to break into Graceland while Elvis was there

Things were a lot different in 1976. For one thing, Bruce Springsteen wasn’t a huge star yet. For another, Elvis Presley, one of his biggest musical heroes, was still alive. All of this came crashing together on April 29 of that year, when Springsteen tried to get into Graceland, Presley’s mansion in Memphis. Springsteen took a late-night cab ride to the King’s home following his show in town supporting Born to Run, his third album and the one that would launch him into the spotlight. Noticing a light on inside, Springsteen jumped the gated wall and ran to the front door in hopes of meeting his lifelong idol. But security stopped Springsteen before he had a chance to even knock on the door and asked what was going on. Springsteen inquired, “Is Elvis home?” He was told, “No, Elvis isn’t home, he’s in Lake Tahoe” – which was true. It was also 3AM, so even if he was home, he probably wasn’t going to open his door. (via Ultimate Classic Rock)

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Continue reading “The voices told her she had a brain tumor and they were right”

The FBI is looking for any connections among the recent deaths and disappearances of at least 10 scientists who had ties to government science projects or other sensitive information. Those who have died or disappeared include a nuclear physicist and MIT professor fatally shot outside his Massachusetts residence, a retired Air Force general missing from his New Mexico home, and an aerospace engineer who disappeared during a hike in Los Angeles. The announcement comes after the cases were highlighted by President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers; growing online speculation hinted at a link between the incidents, although there is no known evidence of any connections among the individual researchers other than the nature of their respective jobs and the fact that none of the incidents occurred before 2022. The most recent case involves retired Air Force Maj. Gen. William Neil McCasland, who disappeared, along with a gun and his wallet, in February. (via Scientific American)

Meet the 82-year-old queen of jumping rope

It was a Wednesday morning in April, and Annie Judis had transformed the kitchen of her Beverly Hills mansion into a film set. With her iPhone balanced on a stand, the 82-year-old adjusted the lighting and smoothed her costume: an aqua spandex workout set that revealed a hint of cleavage, a matching head wrap and tinted glasses. When it was showtime, her housekeeper hit play on her adopted theme song, the peppy anthem “Good Morning,” by Max Frost. Smiling from ear to ear, Ms. Judis started jumping rope and didn’t stop for a full minute. “Come on, everybody, let’s move it, let’s go!” she said to the camera. She does this routine nearly every morning, greeting her 187,000 Instagram followers and reminding them: “You’re going to need that energy for the grandkids.” Ms. Judis currently holds the Guinness World Record for oldest competitive rope skipper. She also thrives on having an audience: If she doesn’t share a workout, she said, it’s like it never happened. (via the New York Times)

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Continue reading “FBI is looking into the suspicious deaths of 10 top scientists”

It was 2004. I was 31. I was up for several days on meth and drinking heavily for the past month or so. I decide to go rob a bank and take my son to Tijuana, Mexico to see my biological father – his new grandpa. I’ve recently been discharged from parole. I take this new freedom as a chance to use drugs uncontrollably and drink like a mad man. I sit down on my chair and snatch a piece of scratch paper off my desk and write a bank robbery note. Later, as we proceed with the trial, I sit in the courtroom in a suit and tie, looking as innocent as possible. The D.A. walks in with a huge poster board and easel. He turns to the audience, then back to the jury and asks the judge for permission to enter exhibit D. The judge grants this wish. It’s my banknote. Written in big bold black letters on a torn piece of a brown paper bag that I get from liquor stores. “Please give me all of your money,” it reads, “or i will tickle you to death put the money in the paper bag i have a pisol in my pocket. Have a nice day the paper bag bandit.” (via Dreamland)

Ancient damage from a kind of machine-gun discovered on the walls of Pompeii

In 89 B.C.E., Pompeii was under siege. An invading army of tens of thousands of soldiers led by Lucius Cornelius Sulla stormed the town’s walls with slings and catapults. The siege subdued the rebellious city back beneath the thumb of the Roman Republic. Recently discovered damage on Pompeii’s fortification walls likely resulted from this fateful siege — and some of it may have come from a deeply mysterious ancient “machine gun,” researchers reported recently. Excavations and surveys conducted since 2024 have revealed several clusters of gouges in Pompeii’s northern fortification walls that were pristinely preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in C.E. 79. The marks are arrayed in a way that suggests they may have been left by a repeating dart-thrower called a polybolos. “It was an antipersonnel weapon used to strike archers emerging from the battlements above and the postern below,” says study lead author Adriana Rossi. The machine “had been described in detail but had never before been unearthed in any archaeological find or material evidence.” (via Scientific American)

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Continue reading “A strange bank robbery with one of the great notes of all time”

In 1966, when seamstresses at the International Latex Corporation arrived at its new Apollo Suit shopfloor in Frederica, Delaware, they were essentially “taught to sew again from scratch.” And for good reason: Compared to the company’s bras and girdles, the craftsmanship needed to fashion a spacesuit was, in every sense, out of this world. The journey to this point had been improbable for a company whose grand name had initially belonged to a single founder and salesman, Abram Spanel, selling mail-order girdles through magazine ads. It was only thanks to one of Spanel’s first employees — his own TV repairman, MIT dropout Leonard (Lenny) Shepard — that ILC maintained a small “industrial” division researching government contracts. Shepard was optimistic that the firm’s expertise in rubber, nylon, and strapping could provide an answer to work in space. (via MIT Press)

Michael J. Fox and three other co-workers on a 1970’s TV show all got Parkinson’s

Canadian-born actor Michael J. Fox, while working on a CBC sitcom as a teenager, contracted a virus that some researchers say may have caused him to later develop Parkinson’s disease. Fox worked on show Leo and Me in Vancouver in 1977. Researchers studying the degenerative disease theorize that exposure to viruses or environmental toxins can trigger its onset years later. According to Dr. Donald Calne, director of the Neurodegenerative Disorders Centre at the University of B.C. Hospital, Parkinson’s can develop in clusters of people. Fox is one of four Leo and Me workers who have been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, which leads to muscle rigidity, tremors and involuntary movements. Japanese researchers have established that a virulent form of the flu, caused by a virus, can make its way into the same part of the brain that Parkinson’s attacks. (via the CBC)

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Continue reading “When a bra maker got the job of making the first NASA spacesuit”

Brown says he was unaware his mother sold cocaine to support the family and while away, he decided to fry chicken, a meal his mother taught him to cook. He grabbed a bag of what he believed was flour to coat the chicken. His mother would later return, elated he took initiative to cook dinner, but soon realized he mistook the bag of cocaine for flour. “I was 10. So I didn’t recognize the strange smell emanating from the pan,” Brown writes. “After I had taken a few bites and feeling weirder with each bite, my mother walked in. With horror she realized what I had done,” he wrote. “I fried chicken in her cocaine — a radical new addition to the family’s culinary offerings. Cocaine chicken.” Brown says his mother never explained to him what he did, but months later he figured it out. (via Vibe)

Dancer with motor neuron disease performs again through a digital avatar

A ballerina with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) says she was able to dance again after her brainwaves were used to power an avatar live on-stage in Amsterdam. Breanna Olson, a mother of three, found out two and a half years ago she had ALS, the most common form of motor neurone disease (MND) and which, with no known cure, weakens muscles and over time affects speech, swallowing and breathing. However, using sensors to measure the electrical activity transmitted from her brain, her motor signals could be converted into an digital avatar. Breanna used an electroencephalogram (or EEG) headset to capture her brain activity and specific motor signals associated with imagining certain dance movements. A brainwave interface translating these signals into computer instructions then allowed her to convey which of these movements she wanted her mixed-reality avatar to dance in real-time. (via the BBC)

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 “Bobby Brown fried chicken in cocaine when he was 10”

The driver, Kentucky cops say, had just left a liquor store, smelled of alcohol, and was found “partially slumped over” the controls of his brown vehicle. As a result, Jorge Hernandez, 48, was arrested for galloping under the influence (GUI) through a residential neighborhood in Bowling Green. According to an arrest report, an officer spotted the sagging Hernandez atop a horse around 6 PM Thursday. When Hernandez began to ride on the sidewalk, the cop performed a traffic stop. Hernandez reportedly smelled of alcohol, had bloodshot eyes, and his speech was slurred. He told police that he had just left a liquor store and was returning home. Tied to the horse’s saddle was a liquor store bag, the report states. He was arrested for operating a non-motor vehicle under the influence of intoxicants. The paperwork describes his vehicle’s make and model as “other.” The vehicle’s year is listed as 2024 and its color as brown. The report does not indicate who took custody of the equine post-arrest. (via The Smoking Gun)

Ohio’s “Serpent Mound” still fuels debate as America’s most mysterious earthwork

Located in Adams County, Ohio, the ancient site features a massive, undulating serpent whose coiled tail and gaping jaws have stood as an impressive monument to the Buckeye State’s ancient past, prompting serious investigations by archaeologists that have spanned nearly two centuries. First documented in the landmark work Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley in 1848 by Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis, the famous site features many peculiarities, including the large oval-shaped feature positioned within the serpent’s open mouth. “This oval is formed by an embankment of earth, without a perceptible opening,” Squier and Davis wrote, noting that the feature “is perfectly regular in outline” and “slightly elevated” while also containing an area of “large stones, much burned once, [that] existed in its center.” (via The Debrief)

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Continue reading “Kentucky cops arrest man for riding a horse while drunk”