Category: Newsletters

From The Guardian: “For years, scientists have known that several species spontaneously align their bodies with the earth’s magnetic field when engaging in certain behaviours. A team of 12 scientists from universities in Germany and the Czech Republic came together in a unique study that observed 37 breeds of dog over a two-year period. Exactly 1,893 defecations and 5,582 urinations later, the team reach one incredible finding: “dogs preferred to excrete with the body being aligned along the north–south axis.” Dogs join cattle, roe deer, red deer, hunting red foxes, red foxes, coyotes and grey wolves as yet another mammal to have a mechanism of “magnetoreception.” Although their behaviour was only evident under calm conditions, it was a breakthrough in demonstrating changes in dog behaviour in response to the Earth’s magnetic field.”

Scientists still aren’t sure exactly how the world’s most popular pain reliever works

From Scientific American: “You’re unlikely to open a medicine cabinet in the U.S. without seeing a bottle of Tylenol, the brand name of a pain reliever and fever reducer also sold generically as acetaminophen. A health care trade association estimates that 52 million consumers use a product containing acetaminophen  every week in the U.S. The drug is in the news after Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., head of the Department of Health and Human Services, implied that acetaminophen that is taken when a person is pregnant can cause autism in that person’s offspring. His statements run counter to the most conclusive scientific evidence to date. The drug is safe and effective when used as directed, but there is something surprising about it: no one is certain how acetaminophen works to relieve pain and fever. There are at least two theories about the mechanism of the drug, which was first  synthesized in the late 1800s, but debate continues.”

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 “Dogs line up with Earth’s magnetic field when they poop”

From TechSpot: “In a freak series of seemingly random events, a Switch owner’s pet fish accessed his eShop account and added funds to it using his credit card. The crime was caught on video during an unsupervised live stream. Hundreds of viewers watched as the little fish stole their owner’s identity while he was gone. The entire heist started as an experiment to see if fish could complete Pokémon Scarlet and Violet unassisted. To do it, Japanese YouTuber “Mutekimaru Channel” set up a webcam focused on his fish bowl. Motion-tracking software monitored the fish as they swam across an overlaid grid populated with controller inputs. If a fish paused or changed direction, the correlating controller input registered in the game. Mutekimaru had done this experiment before. In 2020, his fish successfully completed the test, finishing Pokémon Sapphire in about 3,195 hours — something an actively playing human could do in around 30. However, this time around, things did not go as quite as planned.”

Why the Russians decapitated Major Tom after his last space mission

From Nautilus: “It was a little before 7 in the morning in western Russia when Major Tom reentered the atmosphere. Though he had no window to see the approaching Earth, the return had been announced earlier that day, when the braking engines were activated for six minutes, and his recovery capsule separated from the rest of the spacecraft. After having endured 30 days in space, it was about time to come back. As soon as the capsule reached the atmosphere, the heating and the G forces began. Major Tom was thrown against the roof of his compartment while the air slowed the capsule and the outside temperature rose to about 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius). At 7:11 a.m. on Sunday, May 19, 2013, the Bion-M1 spacecraft finally landed in the green field of a Russian farm. Alexander Andreev-Andrievskiy would arrive 10 minutes later. The 30-year-old biologist had been awake all night worrying. “I was very anxious,” he told me. “I did not know if the mice were doing well.”

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

Continue reading “How a pet fish committed bank fraud using a Nintendo Switch”

From Nautilus: “Nikola Tesla — the Serbian-American scientist famous for designing the alternating current motor and the Tesla coil — had, for years, regularly been spotted skulking through the nighttime streets of midtown Manhattan, feeding the birds at all hours. He was known to keep baskets in his room as nests, along with caches of homemade seed mix, and to leave his windows perpetually open so the birds could come and go. Once, he was arrested for trying to lasso an injured homing pigeon in the plaza of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and had to convince the officers that he was — or had been — one of the most famous inventors in the world. It had been years since he’d produced a successful invention. He was gaunt and broke, having been kicked out of a string of hotels. Tesla said that he and one bird could speak to one another mind to mind, and that sometimes beams of light would shoot from her eyes.”

He built a fully-functional web server that runs on a disposable vape pen

From Bogdan the Geek: “The idea of hosting a web server on a vape didn’t come to me instantly. In fact, I have been playing around with them for a while. Semi-hosting is basically syscalls for embedded ARM microcontrollers. YMost people just use this to get some logs printed from the microcontroller, but they are actually bi-directional. If you are older than me, you might remember a time before Wi-Fi and Ethernet, the dark ages, when you had to use dial-up modems to get online. You might also know that the ghosts of those modems still linger all around us. Almost all USB serial devices actually emulate those modems: a 56k modem is just 57600 baud serial device. Data between some of these modems was transmitted using a protocol called SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol). This may not come as a surprise, but Linux supports SLIP.”

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 “Tesla thought he could talk telepathically with a pigeon”

From The Guardian: “When I first discovered chess, after watching the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer on HBO, I was a nine-year-old kid living in a tiny village in the mountains of Arizona. Searching for Bobby Fischer was to me what Star Wars was for kids a few years older. I was dirt poor. Tonto Village, where my sister, my brother and I lived, had nothing but dirt roads, and we’d run around barefoot most of the time. We’d disappear in the forest for hours, playing cops and robbers, building magnificent forts, making our own worlds. For most children, the challenge of living in such a small, remote place would be loneliness, only having a handful of others like yourself to play with. But that was never the case in Tonto Village. On any given summer day, there were probably around 100 of us, all under the age of 12, running around shirtless and barefoot in the dusty streets and hills and streams and forests, because we were all being raised in the Church of Immortal Consciousness – a cult.”

Two families came up with a dangerous plan to escape from East Germany in the 1970s

From Damn Interesting: “As night fell over the East German town of Pössneck on the evening of 14 September 1979, most of the town’s citizens were busy getting ready for bed. But not Günter Wetzel. The mason was in his attic, hunched over an old motor-driven sewing machine, desperately working to complete his secret project. Wetzel and his friend H. Peter Strelzyk and their families had been working on their plan for more than a year and a half, and by now the authorities were looking for them. Earlier in the day, a strong wind had arisen from the north. These were exactly the conditions that the two families had been waiting for. Around 10:00pm, Wetzel put the finishing touches on the massive patchwork project, then rounded up Strelzyk and prepared to leave. Two hours later the families were en route to a predetermined clearing on a hill. The other components of their project⁠⁠—a steel platform, a homemade gas burner, and a powerful fan⁠⁠—were already packed and ready to go. It was time.”

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 chess prodigy but he was trapped in a religious cult”

If you’ve been following the online discourse at all (and I would encourage you not to do too much of that, especially now) you may have seen a number of journalists and other commentators arguing that the blame for a big part of the unrest that we are seeing in the United States should be laid at the feet of social media (if social media had feet). Tools like X and Instagram and TikTok and Bluesky, or so the theory goes, serve only to inflame political divisions and empower the loudest and stupidest opinions out there. When combined with the bots — some of which appear to be driven by foreign agents who want to sow discord wherever possible — and the algorithms that seek engagement above all else, the whole system becomes a chaos engine, critics say. As some loyal readers of The Torment Nexus may know, I don’t really buy this argument, at least not entirely, and I went into some of the reasons why in a recent piece. But does social media help to enflame some of the political divisions and hatreds that already exist? No question.

Given all of this debate, I was fascinated to watch what happened recently in Nepal. You can read a lot more about the background to the events there at the usual news sites, including the New York Times and CNN, but the short version is that a popular uprising appears to have been ignited in part by the government’s decision in early September to ban more than 25 social-media platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, both of which are very popular with Nepalese citizens, especially younger people. The nominal reason for the ban was that the social platforms had failed to meet a requirement to register with the government — something that a number of other countries including Turkey and Brazil have also implemented in the past. Nepal’s government justified the rule and the subsequent ban in the same way that these other countries did: by arguing that the social-media platforms are filled with fake news and hate speech.

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 “On Nepal’s Discord election and social-media driven uprisings”

From Engelsberg Ideas: “The first winter was the bloodiest. Some estimates suggest that Rosa Zemlyachka’s crew shot as many as 96,000 people in the space of four months (a tenth of the total population). Though Bela Kun’s attempt at revolution in Hungary had collapsed, he remained true to Lenin’s cause; in Soviet Sevastopol, he was credited with shooting 8,000 people in one week. Gender, it seems, was no bar to common sadism, but Rosalia was housewife enough to be concerned about the wanton use of bullets. Her solution disgusted even some Bolsheviks. Instead of shooting unarmed Whites, she tied them up on makeshift barges (or even just a few thin planks) and drowned them wholesale in the Black Sea. Lenin was delighted – hence her coveted Order of the Red Banner – and her return to civilian life was smoothed by national acclaim.”

Denzel Washington paid for Chadwick Boseman to attend theater school at Oxford

From Entertainment.ie: “Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman revealed in an interview in Rolling Stone magazine that Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington paid for a then unknown Boseman to study at the University of Oxford. It came about when Boseman was in college and Phylicia Rashad, star of The Cosby Show, was his mentor. The actor applied to a summer program to study theatre at Oxford and while he was accepted, he couldn’t afford to go so Rashad called upon some friends in the entertainment business to help out. Boseman later realised that Washington was the one who financed his trip, although he kept it secret because he wanted to talk to Denzel about it first. He got the opportunity at the New York premiere of Black Panther and Denzel’s reaction was priceless, telling Boseman, “Oh so that’s why I’m here, you owe me money!”

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 executed thousands and her nickname was Demon”

From the Las Vegas Review Journal: “Groucho Marx called Alice Cooper ‘Coop,’ the way he used to do with actor Gary Cooper. He and the rock star met while dueting on ‘Lidia the Tattooed Lady’ at a Frank Sinatra birthday party. They became friends while living in Beverly Hills. Groucho had insomnia and would call Coop to hang out. “He had a chair next to his bed with a six pack of Budweiser, and we would sit and watch old movies,” Cooper recalls. “And then pretty soon, after about two movies were over, I’d look over and he’d be in his beret and his cigar and he’d finally go to sleep. I’d put out his cigar, turn out the lights and go home. And the next night, one o’clock in the morning: ‘Hey Coop, can’t sleep, come on over.’” It was Groucho who dubbed Alice’s horror-comedy concerts ‘vaudeville,’ a classification Alice immediately knew was right.”

She became the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by disguising herself as a man

From La Brujula Verde: “During the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, a dozen statues were inaugurated in honor of French women who stood out in different fields. The most well-known are Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Veil, and Christine de Pizan, but there is a lesser-known figure after whom a Maritime Affairs vessel had been named two years earlier, and who was also featured on a postage stamp in the Great Travelers collection. We are talking about Jeanne Baret (or Barret), a young woman from Burgundy who managed to embark on Bougainville’s famous naval expedition disguised as a man and thus became the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. She achieved this by posing as the assistant of Philibert Commerson, the voyage’s naturalist. Barret and Commerson had been a couple for years, but the presence of women aboard ships of the French Royal Navy was strictly forbidden, hence the need for disguise and to pretend they had not known each other before the voyage.”

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 Groucho Marx couldn’t sleep he would ask Alice Cooper over”

From Hacker News: “Nicole Eagan, the CEO of cybersecurity company Darktrace, told attendees at an event in London how cybercriminals hacked an unnamed casino through its Internet-connected thermometer in an aquarium in the lobby of the casino. According to what Eagan claimed, the hackers exploited a vulnerability in the thermostat to get a foothold in the network. Once there, they managed to access the casino’s high-roller database of gamblers and pulled it back across the network, out the thermostat, and up to the cloud. “There’s a lot of internet-of-things devices, everything from thermostats, refrigeration systems, HVAC systems, to people who bring in their Alexa devices into the offices,” Eagan told the attendees at the conference. “There’s just a lot of IoT. It expands the attack surface, and most of this isn’t covered by traditional defenses.”

Octegenarian nuns left their retirement home and moved back into their abandoned convent

From the BBC: “Three Austrian nuns in their 80s have run away from the retirement home where they were placed and gone back to their former convent. Sister Bernadette, 88, Sister Regina, 86, and Sister Rita, 82, are the last three nuns at the Kloster Goldenstein convent in Elsbethen, just outside Salzburg. They regained access with the help of former students and a locksmith. Church authorities are not happy – but the nuns are. The three nuns have spent much of their lives at Schloss Goldenstein, a castle which has been a convent and a private girls’ school since 1877. Sister Bernadette attended the school herself, arriving as a teenager in 1948. Sister Regina arrived at the convent in 1958, and Sister Rita four years later. All three went on to work at the school as teachers for many years. Sister Regina was headmistress. But the numbers of nuns dwindled. In 2022, the building was taken over by the Archdiocese of Salzburg. The community was officially dissolved at the beginning of 2024.”

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 casino got hacked through an internet-connected fish tank”

From The Assembly: “Freddie Wayne Huff walked into the federal courthouse in Greensboro flanked by U.S. marshals. That Huff was once one of the finest drug interdiction officers in the country, responsible for millions of dollars in drug and cash seizures, was not in dispute this afternoon. Everyone — his legal team, the judge, even the prosecutor — commended his 12-year career as a Lexington police officer and later as a state trooper. Yet they were bewildered by his transformation from drug interdiction officer to drug kingpin. Using his knowledge gained from a decade of busting drug runners, Huff exploited law enforcement procedures to save cartels millions of dollars and catapult himself to the top of North Carolina’s drug trade.   For five years, from 2016 until his arrest in 2021, Huff ran a sprawling drug empire, stretching 1,400 miles from the Mexican border to North Carolina and fueled by a network of unlikely accomplices: a former cell tower technician, U.S. Army veterans, a former Marine Corps sergeant.”

Why did a billionaire software developer’s super-yacht suddenly capsize?

From Wired: “In the predawn hours of August 19, 2024, bolts of lightning began to fork through the purple-black clouds above the Mediterranean. From the rail of a 184-foot vessel, a 22-year-old named Matthew Griffiths took out his phone to record a video. The British deckhand was just a week and a half into his first official yacht job, and he wasn’t on just any boat. The yacht, the $40 million Bayesian, was a star of the superyacht world, considered to be a feat of minimal design and precision engineering. Below deck, the yacht’s owner, Michael Lynch, had every reason to be sleeping soundly. Months earlier, Lynch had walked out of a San Francisco federal courthouse a free man, acquitted of all charges in one of the largest fraud cases in Silicon Valley history. Lynch had built his fortune on understanding probability, on turning the unlikely into the possible. He had named his yacht Bayesian in honor of the statistical theorem that made him a billionaire, after the sale of his company Autonomy.”

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 went from drug-busting cop to drug trafficking kingpin”

From Slate: “29-year-old Taylor Stanberry was the grand prize winner at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s 2025 Florida Python Challenge. The 10-day competition is a conservation event held in the Everglades to fight the invasive Burmese python population in South Florida. The pythons are believed to have been initially introduced through the pet trade and are now  threatening the native wildlife. (All captured snakes are killed.) Stanberry caught 60 pythons — three times the number of last year’s winner — and collected $10,000. “Everyone thinks that pythons just throw themselves at me because I post the good moments online,” Stanberry said, “but every night is hit-or-miss. I could go to the same area seven days in a row — one night I might catch nothing, and another night, I could nab 10 pythons in an hour. I just catch them with my bare hands — no equipment or anything.”

This cassette tape made of DNA can store every piece of music that has ever been recorded

From New Scientist: “Retro cassette tapes may be making a comeback, with a DNA twist. While DNA has been used as an information storage medium before, researchers have now combined this with the convenience and look of a 1980s cassette tape, creating what they are calling a DNA cassette.Xingyu Jiang at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Guangdong, China, and his colleagues created the cassette by printing synthetic DNA molecules on to a plastic tape. “We can design its sequence so that the order of the DNA bases (A, T, C, G) represents digital information, just like 0s and 1s in a computer,” he says. This means it can store any type of digital file, whether text, image, audio or video. While a traditional cassette tape could boast around 12 songs on each side, 100 metres of the new DNA cassette tape can hold more than 3 billion pieces of music, at 10 megabytes a song. The total data storage capacity is 36 petabytes of data – equivalent to 36,000 terabyte hard drives.”

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 caught 60 pythons with her bare hands and won $10,000”

From Nautilus: “Five years ago, when neurosurgeon Marcelo Galarza saw images from jazz guitarist Pat Martino’s cerebral MRI, he was astonished. “I couldn’t believe how much of his left temporal lobe had been removed,” he said. Martino had brain surgery in 1980 to remove a tangle of malformed veins and arteries. At the time he was one of the most celebrated guitarists in jazz. Yet few people knew that Martino suffered epileptic seizures, crushing headaches, and depression. Locked in psychiatric wards, he withstood debilitating electroshock therapy. It wasn’t until 2007 that Martino had an MRI and not until recently that neuroscientists published their analyses of the images. Galarza’s astonishment, like that of medical scientists and music fans, arises from the fact that Martino recovered from surgery with a significant portion of his brain and his memory and other skills gone, but his guitar skills intact.”

If you buy shark meat in the US there’s a good chance it comes from an endangered species

From Phys.org: “A new study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has uncovered that shark meat sold in U.S. grocery stores, seafood markets, and online vendors often comes from endangered species and is frequently mislabeled. Researchers purchased and DNA barcoded 29 shark meat products to determine their species identity, finding that 93% of samples were ambiguously labeled and included meat from 11 different shark species. Among the species identified were the great hammerhead and scalloped hammerhead, both listed as Critically Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Despite global declines in shark populations, their meat was being sold to American consumers, sometimes for as little as $2.99 per pound. In their study published in Frontiers in Marine Science, the researchers found that of the 29 products tested, 27 were labeled simply as “shark” or “mako shark.”

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 had part of his brain removed but his musical ability remained”

When AI engines or LLMs (large-language models) such as ChatGPT started to become popular, one of the main concerns some people had was the widespread crawling and indexing of content that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic engaged in while training these models, and that this is a form of theft. As some readers are probably aware, I’ve written about this before for previous editions of The Torment Nexus, and I’ve argued that instead of theft or copyright infringement, this kind of indexing should be considered a fair use under US copyright law, just as Google’s scanning of millions of physical books was, because of the transformative nature of that use (one of the four factors that judges have to consider in order to make a fair-use ruling). There have been a couple of court decisions that suggest this might become legal precedent — with certain restrictions — but the Supreme Court has yet to weigh in on the question.

In addition to the numerous copyright-infringement lawsuits that have been launched by authors, publishers, and newspaper owners like the New York Times (which tried to negotiate a payment-for-indexing deal with OpenAI but failed to reach an agreement on price), there have been a number of attempts to foil the scraping and indexing bots that AI companies use to hoover up content. Some are of the “spanner in the spokes” variety, like the Iocaine Project, named after the tasteless poison in the movie The Princess Bride (Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line!). It is an open-source program that allows website owners to trap AI bots and scrapers in a kind of garbage-infested dead-end, where they are forced to go around and around indexing nonsense in a maze with no exit. Other attempts to foil the bots are a little more sophisticated, and Cloudflare has come up with several. But is the solution worse than the problem?

In case you’re not familiar with Cloudflare, it is what’s known as a CDN or content-delivery network, essentially a giant middleman that stands between your blog or website (or the sites and services of hundreds of thousands of corporations, governments and other entities) and the festering swamp of hackers and ne’er-do-wells that is the open internet. If you use Cloudflare, your site will load a lot faster — because the company caches it and then serves it from its own superfast network of servers — and is also protected from hacking attempts and DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks, and a host of other nasty behavior. In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that use Cloudflare for my website, but just for DNS hosting and rerouting, so that when you type in mathewingram dot com you get taken to the right website.

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 “Does Cloudflare want to protect the web or control it?”

From Nautilus: “In 2006, scientists coined the term “hyperthymesia” to describe cases in which people showed an ability to remember vivid details about events that happened to them throughout their lives, including exact times and dates. Since then, researchers have documented at least 100 cases of hyperthymesia in the literature. Almost uniformly, those who have the condition find the memories — which tend to be carefully indexed by date — intrusive, uncontrollable, and distressing. Which is why the recently published case study of a 17-year-old girl dubbed TL is commanding attention. Like others with hyperthymesia, she can provide an especially rich amount of perceptual, spatial, and temporal information. But unlike the others, she is able to organize these memories into a kind of “memory palace,” and can access them whenever she likes. Most of the memories are filed in virtual binders, according to theme and date.”

He was kidnapped at age 6 and found alive 70 years later thanks to a DNA test

From People: “A California boy who was lured away by a bandana-wearing woman while he played in a park in 1951 was found alive more than 70 years later — and is now a grandfather living on the east coast. Luis Armando Albino was just 6 years old when he vanished from a park in West Oakland, where he was playing with his brother, Roger, on Feb. 21, 1951. Albino was located in part because his niece took a DNA test that led her to an uncle that hadn’t been seen by his family in more than half a century. As Albino played with his brother, a woman wearing a red bandana lured him by promising to buy him candy. The woman spoke to the young Albino, who is of Puerto Rican descent, in Spanish. Instead of buying the boy candy, however, the woman flew him across the country to the east coast, where he was reportedly raised by another family. In 2020, Alequin decided to take an online DNA test and it reportedly had a 22% match.”

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 “This 17-year-old’s memory is as accurate as a computer”

From Global News: “A Prince George, B.C., man received a 90-day driving prohibition after he was spotted by police driving an unusual vehicle on a street on Friday morning. On Sept. 5, an officer was on patrol in the area of 15th Avenue and Nicholson Street at 9 a.m. when they spotted a man driving a pink toy car down the street. The toy appeared to be a Power Wheels Barbie Jeep Wrangler. Kasper Lincoln told Global News he’d borrowed the toy, which belongs to his roommate’s daughter, to go get a Slurpee. During the stop, the police officer believed the driver to be impaired and found that the driver had a suspended licence. The driver was arrested for prohibited driving and he then provided two breath samples that were both over the legal limit and was subsequently issued a 90-day driving prohibition, police said. Lincoln said he hadn’t had anything to drink that morning and had just woken up. He added that the Barbie Jeep was not impounded and had been returned to his roommate’s daughter.”

How the math of shuffling cards almost brought down an online poker empire

From Scientific American: “If you’ve ever shuffled a deck of playing cards, you’ve most likely created a unique deck. That is, you’re probably the only person who has ever arranged the cards in precisely that order. Although this claim sounds incredible, it’s a great illustration of how quickly large numbers can creep into everyday situations—with occasionally challenging consequences, as the developers of an online poker game painfully discovered in the late 1990s. The mathematics of card shuffling is quite easy to explain. To calculate how many arrangements 52 playing cards can have, you must go through all the possible shuffles. A standard deck can be arranged in 52 × 51 × 50 × … × 2 × 1 = 52! different ways. If you do the multiplication and round the answer, you will get a number with 67 zeros. That’s more than a quadrillion times as many ways to arrange these cards as there are atoms on Earth.”

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 fined for driving a pink Barbie Jeep while intoxicated”

From History Workshop: “Africans crossed the Atlantic alongside the earliest Europeans, some trafficked in bondage, others navigating precarious forms of freedom. Yet recent scholarship, particularly since the turn of the century, is starting to give voice to the many Africans who have not been studied or considered important historical actors, erased by both colonial records and modern prejudice. Black conquistadors appear in various ship logs, retellings of expeditions, and even in some of the most famous Indigenous testimonies of the conquest – the Nahua codices. Juan Garrido was a firsthand witness to many critical events during the expansion of the Spanish Empire. But the document which makes Garrido so unique is his probanza, used to petition rewards from the king for service to the crown. This outstanding piece of evidence provides an insight into the life of a Black subject of the Spanish Empire.”

How a dead cat led to the Blue Angels aerobatic fighter-jet team getting quieter

From Substack: “This is the story of a heart-wrenching emotional loss needlessly compounded by unapologetic Constitutional violations. When a beloved family member was terrorized by the United States Navy’s Blue Angels, an American citizen exercised her Constitutional right to criticize her government’s role in her daughter’s suffering. In response, a cadre of emotionally fragile snowflakes masquerading as naval officers chose the coward’s path: they silenced this citizen’s speech, violated their oath to the Constitution, and brought disgrace upon the uniform they claim to honor. A year later, when that same vulnerable creature died after enduring yet another sonic assault during her final days on Earth, the Navy’s Constitutional betrayal compounded the tragedy — an American remained silenced, unable to voice her grief or otherwise hold her government accountable for its role in her family’s suffering.”

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 “This Black man was a Spanish conquistador in the 1500s”