Category: Newsletters

In January of 2016, Avner Harari strolled out of a Tel Aviv prison for the umpteenth time and announced he was finally going straight. The convicted assassin had spent 40 of his 61 years behind bars and had cultivated a reputation as the Israeli mafia’s “Terminator”. Now, Harari hoped that people might forget the six mobsters that police allege he whacked, as he unveiled an unlikely career change. Harari had spent his most recent prison term crooning songs in the Mizrahi style, a Middle-Eastern music. His lilting voice was so angelic that inmates nicknamed him the Nightingale. Free from his cage after serving 37 months for firing an anti-tank missile at a rival crime boss and six years for conspiring to shoot another with a silencer, he released two tender ballads. But Harari’s record bombed. And 17 days after his release, a series of terrible explosions rocked Tel Aviv. (via the FT)

No one knows where the founder of the Nation of Islam was from or how he died

Wallace Fard Muhammad appeared in Detroit in 1930, where he founded a new religious movement that came to be called the Nation of Islam. Both his origin and fate are uncertain. Nation of Islam tradition holds that Fard was born in Mecca, while scholars have considered a wide variety of possible origins and backgrounds. In the 1960s, the FBI identified Fard as “Wallie Dodd Ford”, a Los Angeles restaurateur who had spent three years in prison in California for the sale of a narcotic; The Nation of Islam disputes the identification, while most scholars accept it. Fard disappeared in 1934. Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad maintained that Fard had been deported, while others speculated that Fard may have died by foul play or due to complications from his diabetes. (via Wikipedia)

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 a mafia assassin but what he really wanted was to be a pop star”

Does it feel like you are living in a bubble? According to a lot of experts, you are — a bubble created by hysteria related to a little thing known as artificial intelligence, which you may have heard of. Even Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI — and therefore the man who many people feel has inflated this bubble more or less singlehandedly — has admitted that we are in a bit of a bubble right now. And when the bubble inflaters admit we are in a bubble, you know it’s real, right? But then, smart financial and tech analysts have been warning about bubble-like (bubblicious?) conditions for some time now. In July, the chief economist at Apollo Global Management, a massive hedge fund, warned that the top 10 AI-related stocks were completely detached from reality, and that the bubble around AI was worse than the investment hype around internet stocks in the late 1990s, just before the dot-com stock-market crash. An estimated five trillion dollars in theoretical market value was vaporized almost overnight between 2000 and 2002.

It may feel sometimes as though AI products and companies and stocks have been around for a long time, but ChatGPT was launched less than three years ago. At first, it seemed like a harmless toy, and the company that created it, OpenAI, was also seen as mostly harmless — a nonprofit, research-oriented outfit. That impression changed quickly, however, as OpenAI started to do large funding deals with Microsoft and others, and then there was the whole boardroom “let’s get rid of Sam Altman” drama in 2023, which ended with a bunch of people leaving and Altman retaining control (I wrote about it here if you’re interested in more background). That was in part about whether AI research was proceeding too quickly and whether AI would ultimately achieve human-like intelligence — known in the biz as AGI — and then turn evil and destroy humanity (I wrote about this as well for Torment Nexus). Suffice it to say that no one really cares about any of that any more, everyone is racing towards AGI as quickly as possible so they can cash in.

From an investment point of view, after crypto currency failed to ignite a big enough pile of money for tech investors, a lot of that greedy money poured into AI investments, and found its way to several of the big names, including Nvidia, the chip-maker whose graphics processing units (GPUs) were once used primarily for playing video games, but now are acquired by the truckload in order to power giant AI server farms that have to boil the ocean in order to produce AI “slop” (as the kids like to call it) like videos of Karl Marx breakdancing or Albert Einstein talking about the new iPhone or painter Bob Ross standing in his studio playing Call of Duty, or SpongeBob SquarePants flying an airplane into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. Nvidia’s market value is close to $5 trillion, or about the same as all the vaporized market value in the entire dot-com bubble. OpenAI, which has done some new rounds of funding, is worth about $500 billion, the most valuable private company in the world, and possibly in history.

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 “Sometimes bubbles can be good”

Why do astronauts leave things behind on the Moon? There are many reasons. Often, it is to make room for Moon rocks to be taken back to Earth. As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin began their return journey to Earth, they disposed of anything they didn’t need. This included the tube that the US flag had been rolled up in, the TV camera they’d used to send footage back to Earth, and the tools they’d used to gather moon rock and dust. In doing this, they created a ‘toss zone’, which lies to the west of the Apollo 11 landing site. In the Apollo missions that followed, many things were left on the Moon, adding up to an estimated 400,000 pounds of stuff. There are a total of 96 bags of human waste on the Moon. Scientists are keen to one day bring this back to Earth, to study how its time on the Moon has affected it, but for now it sits in bags. (via RMG)

Scientists were baffled because she only had half a brain but had perfect vision

Scientists discovered how a 10-year-old girl born with half a brain is able to see normally through one eye. The youngster, from Germany, has both fields of vision in one eye and is the only known case of its kind in the world. Researchers used an MRI to reveal how the girl’s brain had rewired itself in order to process information from the right and left visual fields in spite of her not having a whole brain. The right hemisphere in the girl’s brain failed to develop in the womb. Normally, the left and right fields of vision are processed and mapped by opposite sides of the brain, but scans showed that retinal nerve fibres that should go to the right hemisphere of the brain diverted to the left. Further, the researchers found that within the visual cortex of the left hemisphere, which creates an internal map of the right field of vision, ‘islands’ had been formed within it to specifically deal with, and map out, the left visual field. (via U of Glasgow)

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 “There are 96 bags of human waste sitting on the Moon”

In 1934, Leon Dionne called a local newspaper in Ontario, Canada and asked how much it would cost to print a birth announcement for his brother’s five daughters, all born to the same mother in one delivery earlier that day. At the time, the world had rarely witnessed the medical marvel of quintuplets. The identical sisters became a media sensation. The Ontario government took legal guardianship of the quints and housing them in a nursery called Quintland, which quickly became a roadside attraction that drew nearly three million spectators. By 1938, the quints were bringing in as much as 25 million Canadian dollars in tourism revenue annually, but for the quintuplets, it came at a cost. They spent half of their childhood in a so-called “baby zoo.” A trust fund they were promised was mismanaged, with just a fraction remaining by the time they entered adulthood and their personal lives were mired in tragedy. (via The Smithsonian)

At 15 years old he hacked NASA’s network and stole its space-station software

In 2000, a 16-year-old from Miami pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in a detention facility. The juvenile, whose was known on the Internet as “c0mrade,” admitted in U.S. District Court in Miami that he was responsible for computer intrusions from August 23, 1999, to October 27, 1999, into a military computer network used by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, an agency of the Department of Defense charged with reducing the threat to the U.S. and its allies from nuclear, biological, chemical, conventional and special weapons. In addition to the computer intrusions at DOD, on June 29 and 30, 1999, “c0mrade” illegally accessed a total of 13 NASA computers located at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., using two different ISPs to originate the attacks. As part of his unauthorized access, he obtained and downloaded proprietary software from NASA valued at approximately $1.7 million. (via Justice.gov)

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 Dionne Quintuplets were famous but it ruined their lives”

A Polish adventure skier has made history by becoming the first person to climb up and ski down Mount Everest without the use of additional oxygen. The ascent was Andrzej Bargiel’s third attempt at climbing Everest – the tallest mountain on earth at 29,032ft high – after dangerous conditions forced the 37-year-old to abandon earlier attempts in 2019 and 2022. More than 6,000 people have climbed the mountain, but only about 200 have done it without additional bottled oxygen. A few people have skied back down, but never a continuous downhill without supplementary oxygen. It took nearly 16 hours on Monday for Bargiel to climb through the “death zone”, which is above 8,000 meters where oxygen levels are dangerously low. At the top of the mountain the air is so thin that climbers only get about a third of the oxygen available at sea level. This can cause brain damage, fluid in the lungs, and even death. (via The Guardian)

The oldest and one of the weirdest musical instruments ever invented

Stalactites hang tight to the ceiling, and stalagmites push up with might from the floor: this is a mnemonic device you may once have learned. It would surely be called to mind by a visit to Luray Caverns in the American state of Virginia, home of the Great Stalacpipe Organ. Not long after the discovery of Luray Caverns itself in 1878, its stalactites were found to resonate through the underground space in an almost musical fashion when struck — a property Leland W. Sprinkle took to its logical conclusion in the mid-nineteen fifties. Conception was one thing, but execution quite another: it took him three years to locate just the right stalactites, shave them down to ring out at just the right frequency, and rig them up with electronically activated, keyboard-controlled mallets. This was not hard for the technically minded Sprinkle, who worked at the Pentagon as a mathematician and electronics scientist. (via Open Culture)

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 just climbed and then skied down Everest without oxygen”

“I first heard of Hit Man in May 1999, when I was a young journalist in Philadelphia. Paladin Press’s insurance company had just settled with the victims’ families for undisclosed millions, a decision that made international headlines. The case was unprecedented; never before had a publisher been accused of “aiding and abetting” murder through the publication of a book. Major media organizations that had rallied to Paladin’s defense — including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Society of Professional Journalists — now pondered the ramifications for free speech. Lost in most of the discussion was Hit Man’s mysterious author. Only one detail about her life had come to light so far: She was a divorced mother of two living in a trailer park in Florida. I grew obsessed with her. How did this woman come to write a murder manual? What had happened in her life to bring her to that point?” Vanity Fair

She claimed to be a German princess and her trial for bigamy started a publishing boom

“In early June of 1663, Mary Carleton was tried for bigamy in London’s Old Bailey. A figure of considerable public fascination, Mary had been “viewed” by an estimated five hundred visitors while in prison awaiting trial.¹ Officially, she stood accused of having wed John Carleton in London while already married to John Steadman, a shoemaker, in Canterbury. (Over the course of the trial, the possible existence of a third husband, a Dover surgeon named Day, emerged.) Unofficially, she stood accused in the court of public opinion of a far more interesting cheat: impersonating a fabulously wealthy foreigner in order to lure the hapless Carleton — a lawyer’s clerk, eighteen years old — into marriage. Though Mary herself modestly claimed noble rather than royal birth, she became widely known as the German Princess. Mary Carleton’s exploits produced a publishing boom: 1663 alone witnessed the printing of more than a dozen pamphlets about the case, a pair of autobiographical self-defenses by Mary herself, two rebuttals by John, and printed reports of the trial.” Public Domain Review

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Continue reading “Her manual for hitmen became a major First Amendment case”

From Scientific American: “Frances Glessner Lee discovered her true calling later in life. An heiress without formal schooling, she was in her 50s when she transformed her fascination with true crime and medicine into the foundation of a new field: forensic science. In the late 1920s she drew inspiration from a family friend, a medical examiner who was involved in notorious cases—including the infamous trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. For Glessner Lee, the puzzle of untangling the truth about violent deaths proved irresistible. She recognized that solving crimes demanded both rigorous methods and professional training. She helped found the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard. Her most unusual teaching tool: intricately crafted dollhouse dioramas that depicted grisly crime scenes. She pioneered new death investigation techniques, forged unlikely alliances, faced social and cultural obstacles, and helped foster what would become our lasting obsession with true crime.”

Scientists have created prototypes of human embryos from skin cells

From the BBC: “US scientists have, for the first time, made early-stage human embryos by manipulating DNA taken from people’s skin cells and then fertilising it with sperm. The technique could overcome infertility due to old age or disease, by using almost any cell in the body as the starting point for life. It could even allow same-sex couples to have a genetically related child. The method requires significant refinement – which could take at least a decade – before a fertility clinic could even consider using it. Experts said it was an impressive breakthrough, but there needed to be an open discussion with the public about what science was making possible. The Oregon Health and Science University research team’s technique takes the nucleus – which houses a copy of the entire genetic code needed to build the body – out of a skin cell. This is then placed inside a donor egg that has been stripped of its genetic instructions.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “She pioneered the field of forensic science using dolls”

If you pay attention to the news at all, you may have seen a host of alarming headlines recently about how the number of Americans who say they read for pleasure has declined sharply over the past 20 years, from a peak of 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. That conclusion comes from a study done by a number of sociologists at the University of Florida, who looked at two decades worth of responses to a benchmark survey called the American Time Use Survey, which asks 10,000 randomly selected Americans every year how they spent the day prior to when they took the survey. The Florida researchers looked at how many people said they read “for personal interest,” including books, magazines, newspapers, audiobooks, and e-readers (they also asked how many read a book with a child). It’s worth noting that — like a lot of consumer surveys — the American Time Use Survey relies on people answering the questions truthfully, and because of the way it is conducted, it also relies on people who are a) willing to pick up the phone when it’s an unknown number, and b) willing to answer a survey.

This dramatic decline in the numbers of people reading for pleasure is “deeply concerning,” according to one of the study’s co-authors, who called reading “a low-barrier, high-impact way to engage creatively and improve quality of life.” According to some neuroscientists, reading not only stimulates your brain in ways that other types of pleasure or activity don’t, but it can also lower your blood pressure, reduce stress, help with sleeping, and even help you live longer. Other experts noted that in addition to the data cited by the Florida study, different studies have shown that there has been a generational decline in students reading for fun, which some argue is a result of social-media addiction, poor literacy training, overly busy after-school scheduling by parents, or some combination of all three. For others, this decline in reading is part of a disturbing trend that they believer represents the dawn of a “post-literate” society, a return to the largely oral cultures of primitive societies, and therefore pretty much represents the end of modern civilization as we know 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 “So what’s so great about reading books?”

From Rolling Stone: “On March 19, 2000, Florian Reither stepped out of the 91st floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center through a hollowed-out window and stood on a makeshift wooden balcony. This vertiginous performance wasn’t the act of a brazen stuntman, crazed trespasser, or suicidal employee. It was the work of the Austrian art collective known as Gelitin, which consists of Florian Reither, Ali Janka, Wolfgang Gantner, and Tobias Urban. Titled the B-Thing, the feat saw the four men, now all in their fifties, secretly construct a balcony inside the World Trade Center, temporarily attach it, and briefly stand on top of it, floating dreamily above New York City. In the 25 years since, those involved have largely avoided speaking about the event again. Outside of esoteric circles, it’s still relatively obscure. For a long time, many skeptics believed it never even happened and claimed that it was a hoax on a vast scale.”

A prop from the movie Citizen Kane that was going to be thrown out sold for $15 million

From the BBC: “A prop central to the celebrated opening scene of Citizen Kane – widely regarded as one of the best films ever made – has sold at auction for $14.75m. The wooden Rosebud sled, one of at least three known to have survived, was long thought to have been lost until it was given to director Joe Dante in 1984, saving it from destruction. It is now the second most expensive piece of memorabilia to have ever been sold – a pair of ruby slippers used in The Wizard of Oz sold for $32m in December. The version sold on Thursday had not been seen for many years until it ended up in the hands of Dante. He told Heritage auctions how he was making the film Explorers in 1984 on the same studio that was formerly owned by RKO Radio Pictures, which produced Citizen Kane. Dante said crews were on site clearing out storage areas when one worker, who knew he liked vintage films, asked if he wanted it.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “They built a balcony on the WTC and started a conspiracy theory”

From Popular Mechanics: “Megan Barroso was looking forward to her Fourth of July plans in 2001. Perhaps because the 20-year-old Moorpark College student had no intention to be alone: She was going to attend a friend’s family barbecue in the suburbs northwest of Los Angeles, then watch the fireworks with friends at Silver Strand Beach. The gatherings began to blend into one another, in the way college-age social events do: The friends got milkshakes; they ended up at another party at a friend’s house in Thousand Oaks. Somebody sprinkled red glitter over everyone’s heads.Around 2:45 a.m., the group decided to head home. Barroso departed in her Pontiac Sunfire, a rental she was driving while her car was in the shop, and drove about 15 minutes before a friend called to let her know she’d accidentally left with someone else’s cellphone in her purse. Barroso turned around to bring the phone back. She never made it.”

How did an expensive Ferrari sports car wind up buried in someone’s backyard?

From Now I Know: “In early 1978, a couple of boys were hanging out in their yard in Los Angeles, digging in the dirt. Their family had just moved into the home – a rental – a few months earlier, and the kids were exploring as kids do. As they dug, they hit something oddly metallic and definitely not something that should have been buried in their yard: a 1974 Dino 246 GTS, an expensive sports car made by Ferrari. The car was wrapped in plastic, albeit imperfectly. Towels were stuffed in the exhaust pipe, as if to keep soil-dwelling bugs from getting in. There was even a carpet placed along part of the top of the car, to protect it from, well, who knows what. It looked like whoever buried the car had tried to preserve it, in hopes of recovering it later. But who, and why? And how do you bury a fancy sports car in the middle of Los Angeles without anyone noticing?”

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 glitter helped solve a brutal crime in California”

From Wikipedia: “The Mocking of Christ is a small 13th-century panel painting by the Italian artist Cimabue. It depicts the mocking of Jesus and is one of three panels known from Cimabue’s Diptych of Devotion. The painting was discovered hanging above the hotplate in the kitchen of an elderly woman living in Compiègne, northern France. The woman was in her nineties and was selling the house, which had been built in the 1960s, and moving from the area. Ahead of the move in June 2019 the owner called in a local auctioneer to determine if any of her possessions were worth selling; the remainder were to be thrown away. The work was put up for auction in 2019 and reached a hammer price of 19.5 million Euros, which reached 24 million Euros once selling fees were included. The winning bid was placed on behalf of two anonymous collectors, and set a new world record for a pre-1500 artwork sold at auction.”

A shipwreck eluded searchers for 139 years but citizen scientists found it in two hours

From the Smithsonian: “On September 15, 1886, the F.J. King was transporting a load of iron ore across Lake Michigan when the ship encountered a storm and started leaking. The crew tried to pump out the water, but the three-masted schooner eventually became so flooded that Captain William Griffin ordered everyone to abandon ship. They clambered onto the ship’s yawl boat and headed for shore, where they were later picked up by a nearby schooner, La Petite. In the early morning hours, they watched the F.J. King sink bow-first beneath the waves. For decades, shipwreck hunters searched for the vessel without success. The F.J. King proved so elusive she even earned a reputation as a “ghost ship.” Brendon Baillod, president of the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association, led the efforts to find the F.J. King along with his research partner Bob Jaeck. They decided to invite 20 citizen scientists and historians along for the search, to share in the excitement of looking for a missing wreck.”

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 painting worth $30 million was almost thrown in the trash”

From Air Mail: “Nick’s storied surname, sterling credentials, and high-level associations put him in the upper reaches of the American establishment. After graduating from Yale Law School in 1987 and clerking on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, he became a partner in the Los Angeles office of Perkins Coie. Nick founded the Rockefeller Asia Advisory Group, RockVest Development, Rockefeller Pacific Ventures, Rockefeller Resources International, and the Rockefeller International Fund. He mingled with George and Barbara Bush, had the Reagans’ private numbers at both their home in Bel Air and their ranch in Santa Barbara. He was a Davos man, naturally, appearing on an Asia-related panel there with Klaus Schwab, founder of the elite business conclave. But after he died, when Kim phoned the Rockefeller Global Family Office, in New York — a call that dozens of people should have made over the previous 40 years — she was told that Nick was “not recognized as a member of the Rockefeller family.”

Venus flytraps are only native to the Carolinas and one woman is on a crusade to save them

From Garden & Gun: “The plant should be called the Carolina spidertrap, because it’s got nothing to do with Venus and hardly, if ever, catches flies. The most common victims are wolf and lynx spiders, carpenter ants, and daddy long-legs. For reasons biologists still don’t fully understand, flytraps’ native range is limited to a roughly eighty-mile strip of the eastern Carolinas, concentrated in North Carolina. Today they are known and grown the world over, turning up in botanical gardens, in the home collections of carnivorous plant enthusiasts, and in pop culture. Like many highly specialized species, they are fighting extinction as development steadily encroaches. They once grew in stunning abundance across their small range. Today, less than one hundred distinct populations remain in North Carolina, half of them harboring fewer than five hundred plants and some with less than a dozen. Still, some hotspots exist, and the rapidly growing town of Boiling Spring Lakes is one of them.”

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 “For 40 years he convinced everyone he was a Rockefeller”

From LitHub: “When Bruce Lee met Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a month after the 1968 national college basketball championship, he was still known as Lew Alcindor, the most hyped young basketball star in history. Weeks after the 1967 championship, the NCAA banned the dunk — in what became known as the “Alcindor rule” — an effort he believed was racist. One night after watching a Zatoichi flick, he was struck by the idea that the blind swordsman’s grace, control, and precision might be exactly what he needed. Instead of brute force, he thought, I will slide and roll and slip by them without fouling. In New York City, Alcindor started training in aikido. That fall Alcindor visited the Black Belt offices to meet a fellow aikido adept, Mito Uyehara, and ask him if he knew someone with whom he could continue his martial arts training. Alcindor had become especially curious about tai chi. “This guy Bruce Lee—he’s really good at it,” Mito told him. “He knows more about those things than I do.”

Wine experts can tell fake wines apart from the real thing because of the atomic bomb

From the Kitchen Sisters: “In a laboratory, deep under a mile high stretch of the Alps on the French-Italian border, Philippe Hubert, a physicist at the University of Bordeaux, tests a suspect bottle of wine.“I put the bottle close to the detector. Then I close the shielding and we start to record the gamma rays,” says Hubert. “We are looking for radioactivity in the wine. Most of the time the collectors send me bottles of wine because they want to know if it is fake or not.” What Hubert is looking for is the radioactive isotope cesium-137, which doesn’t exist in nature but was produced by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and by the Cold War nuclear tests done by both the US and Russia. The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor also released a lot of cesium-137. “It is in the atmosphere,” says Hubert. “And with rain this radioactivity falls on the grapes. When you make the wine this comes into the wine.”

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 “Kareem Abdul-Jabbar trained in martial arts with Bruce Lee”

The current battle over regulating speech online seems new, in part because the Trump government and its allies are going to extreme lengths to police speech about the murder of Charlie Kirk (a man who trumpeted the benefits of free speech, but is now the reason why people are losing their jobs for saying negative things about him). This is a twisted situation, to be sure, a kind of right-wing pretzel logic that many Trump acolytes seem to be able to internalize without even noticing that their position contradicts itself in multiple ways. But it is only the latest bizarre spin on a struggle that has been going on almost since the internet was invented: How should we – internet users as well as technological entities like social-media platforms and political entities like governments – behave in a world where the problem is not how to protect free speech, but how to cope with an excess of speech, especially one driven by algorithms whose internal workings we have little knowledge of and even less control over.

I’m bringing all this up not just because of the Charlie Kirk situation, which is quite obviously a case of “Free speech for me but not for thee,” but because YouTube just announced that it is going to reinstate the accounts that it banned for spreading disinformation, whether about the dangers of COVID-19, the results of the 2020 election, or about the riots on January 6th. One of the accounts that was banned, of course, belonged to the current president of the United States, whose account was blocked because he posted comments that were perceived as inciting violence (his account was restored in 2023). YouTube’s decision also comes at the same time as it is fighting a lawsuit launched by Trump over the ban on his account, and the company has no doubt been following other lawsuits in which Meta, X, ABC and Paramount all paid huge sums of money even though there was arguably no legal basis whatsoever for Trump’s claims.

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Continue reading “It’s not that we lack free speech it’s that there’s too much of it”

From Ironic Sans: “George Nissen didn’t invent the first ever trampoline, but he popularized trampolines for sports and recreation from the 1950s through the 1980s, and came up with new designs. One story tells how George and his son Ron tried to get a trampoline up to the top of one of the Great Pyramids in Egypt. At some point in its history, the very top of the Great Pyramid of Khufu was taken off, and left the top of the pyramid with a flat surface. In 1977, since Ron and George were going to be in Egypt for a trampoline event anyway, they wondered if they could get one up to the top of the pyramid. They carried a mini-trampoline to the top of the pyramid, where 63 year old George Nissen did flips. But that wasn’t the dream. The dream was a full-size trampoline. Inspired by how the pyramid had been built one stone at a time, they came up with a way to bring a full size trampoline to the top of the pyramid in pieces.”

She didn’t know what it was like to see the world in three dimensions until one day she did

From NPR: “Dr. Oliver Sacks, famous author and neuroscientist, was at a party a few years ago and he was introduced to another neuroscientist named Susan Barry. They got talking and she said that she had been born cross-eyed, so she had never been able to see with both eyes at the same time – no stereoscopic vision. Sacks asked if she could imagine what it’s like to see the world with two eyes, and she said yes. Three months later she wrote him a letter and said she was wrong, and described how she had started training her brain to see in three dimensions and it had suddenly worked. After three weeks, one morning she got into her car. She glanced down at the steering wheel and the steering wheel was floating in front of the dashboard. “It was in its own three-dimensional space,” she wrote. “I had never had that type of perception before and I didn’t believe it, cause I knew that this was impossible. So I tried to put it out of my mind.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “They carried a trampoline up one of the Great Pyramids”