Category: Uncategorized

Many people struggle to successfully climb Mount Everest. Lhakpa Sherpa has climbed Mount Everest 10 times, the most ascents ever by a woman. Unlike the routines of most climbers, who drop into specialized training for months or even years, Lhakpa’s training regimen takes place at a Whole Foods in West Hartford, Conn., where she carries large stacks of boxed fruits and vegetables. Occasionally, she hikes to the top of the 6,288-foot Mount Washington. The first time Lhakpa touched Himalayan blue ice, she was barefoot. One of 11 children born to a shepherd and homemaker in the village of Makalu, Nepal, she grew up on the slopes of Mount Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest peak at 27,825 feet.

An interview with a living vampire

Anne Helen Petersen talks with Kathleen McLaughlin about her new book, Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America’s Blood Industry, and her personal connection to blood donation: “I started getting sick in weird ways, and sometimes disabled, with what was for about five years a mystery illness. Basically, my hands and feet would go numb, and it got progressively more difficult to walk or to use my hands over a period of months. I was diagnosed with a rare disorder in which my immune system attacks healthy parts of my body. The treatment that works is periodic infusions of a drug made from isolated parts of other peoples’ blood.”

Continue reading “The queen of Everest works at Whole Foods”

I caught sight of this at the Globe and Mail site — the words “anonymous coward” in the header after I logged in — and it made me laugh. This is a term I stole from Slashdot when I was helping to design the Globe’s social strategy back in 2008 or so. My idea was that there would be a kind of tier system for users who joined the Globe, so they could “level up” the way one does in video games, by providing more information about themselves so that we could create a kind of social network. One of the perks of being a member was that you could use your real name. Until then, you were an “anonymous coward” 🙂

Gunnar Lundberg writes: “Thousands of people attempt to “thru-hike” the Appalachian Trail by traversing its entirety in a calendar year. According to historical stats, only one in four will succeed. The trail stretches for 2,193 miles, from northern Georgia to the middle of Maine, snaking its way through fourteen states in the eastern United States. Hikers cover anywhere from ten to forty miles per day, and the average thru-hike takes six months. During my five months on the trail, I encountered snow, straight winds, floods, heat waves, water shortages, black bears, and rattlesnakes. One day the heat rash was so painful. I laid on top of my sleeping bag and cried myself to sleep.”

Ancient Roman mosaic offers a different ending to the Trojan War

The discovery of a previously unknown Roman villa in rural Rutland, England, during the 2020 lockdown was one of the archaeological stories of the year. Villas are emblematic features of the Roman countryside, and many are known across Britain. But this new discovery is unique. It has what could be considered the most significant Roman mosaic discovery in the past century at its heart. The mosaic tells a grim tale of revenge from near the end of the Trojan War, famously described in Homer’s Iliad. It is the only known representation of the Trojan War from Roman Britain and tells the story in an unusual “comic strip” style.

Continue reading “Walking off grief on the Appalachian Trail”

In a video made in 1956, GM showed us what they thought driving a car would be like two decades in the future: jet-powered cars would follow a magnetic strip to their destination on single-lane superhighways, all going about 30 miles an hour, guided by men in control towers, while the family sang songs. The …

Continue reading “Here’s what General Motors thought driving would be like in the future”
http://dlvr.it/ShvmCy

The late 19th century in Europe saw the emergence of the hazy style of the Impressionists, which privileged mood and light over fine details. While this monumental shift has long been attributed to shifting stylistic preferences, a new study argues that it was also due to a change in the environment’s appearance: As the Industrial Revolution engulfed London and Paris in smog, the world literally became blurrier. Climate scientists Anna Lea Albright of the Sorbonne University and École Normale Supérieure in Paris and Peter Huybers of Harvard University researched this phenomenon by focusing mainly on 60 oil paintings by J.M.W. Turner and 38 works by Claude Monet.

What some young girls thought of the Apollo space program in 1971

There are a lot of myths about the Apollo space program. Chief among them is that most Americans fervently supported the space program’s enormous costs. In reality, most Americans of the 1960s thought the Apollo space program wasn’t a good use of taxpayer funds, with many people asking why that money wasn’t being spent to fight homelessness or hunger in the U.S.—the same criticisms you hear today. One of the girls quoted in the article in the Billings Gazette newspaper, 11-year-old Betsy Longo, expressed a similar sentiment. “I don’t think they should use so much money to go to the moon,” Longo said. “They should use it to stop cancer and help people here on Earth.”

Continue reading “Did air pollution help create the Impressionists?”

On January 7, 2021, the day after rioters stormed the Capitol, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—which was not then, but is now, known as Meta—suspended Donald Trump’s accounts on those platforms, because, the company said, there was a risk that he would encourage further violence. Meta suspended Trump’s accounts indefinitely, but, as I wrote for CJR at the time, the company’s Oversight Board, an arms-length body of advisors that reviews Meta’s content decisions, said a few months later that this was arbitrary, since Meta did not then have a detailed policy for suspensions of public figures. The board advised Meta to come up with one, and the company subsequently said that it would review Trump’s suspension in two years. Last week, with its time up, Meta announced that it would reinstate Trump’s accounts at some point “in the coming weeks.” They appear to have been restored already, although Trump has yet to post. (He has an exclusivity deal with his own social network, Truth Social, but is reportedly planning a return to Twitter and Facebook). At time of writing, the most recent post on his Facebook page is from January 6, 2021, asking everyone at the Capitol to “remain peaceful.”

Last week, Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs (and a former deputy prime minister of the UK), wrote in a blog post that the company believes that “open debate and the free flow of ideas are important values,” and that the public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying, “the good, the bad and the ugly.” Clegg said that Meta had gone through an elaborate process to “assess whether the serious risk to public safety that existed in January 2021” had receded, including an evaluation of the current environment according to the company’s Crisis Policy Protocol, a process by which it tries to “assess on and off-platform risks of imminent harm and respond with specific policy and product actions”, along with “expert assessments on the current security environment.” The conclusion? That the risk had receded. Not that Meta is giving Trump carte blanche on his return. His accounts will henceforth be subject to what Clegg called “new guardrails,” including restrictions on posts that might contribute to “the sort of risk that materialized on January 6, such as content that delegitimizes an upcoming election.”

Clegg’s post, however, didn’t say anything about what would happen should Trump delegitimize a past election, which is something that he does all the time—and a Meta spokesperson subsequently confirmed to CNN’s Oliver Darcy that the company will allow Trump to post about the 2020 election without consequences. And, since Trump is now a candidate, his account will not be not subject to fact-checking by Meta, a decision the company made even before allowing his return, also according to CNN. Charlie Warzel, of The Atlantic, writes that Trump “has offered zero evidence that he changed during his social-media exile” and will likely use Facebook to whip up partisan resentment upon his return. If anything, Warzel argues, Trump’s posts on Truth Social suggest that he “has become more erratic, angry, and conspiratorial.”

Continue reading “Trump and Facebook: The platform is trying to have it both ways”

Janet Vertesi writes about trying to go to Disneyland with her family while remaining anonymous: “Once upon a time, you could just go to Disneyland. You could get tickets at the gates, stand in line for rides, buy food and tchotchkes, even pick up copies of your favorite Disney movies at a local store. It wasn’t even that long ago. The last time I visited, in 2010, the company didn’t record what I ate for dinner or detect that I went on Pirates of the Caribbean five times. It was none of their business. But sometime in the last few years, tracking and tracing became their business. Like many corporations out there, Walt Disney Studios spent the last decade transforming into a data company.”

$500 million Ponzi scheme preyed on Mormons

The Las Vegas attorney, then 49, had been anticipating this visit for months, he would tell an FBI hostage negotiator. He’d already drafted letters to his wife and four children, explaining what he could and describing how much he loved them. On this Thursday in March, Beasley knew his time was up. He placed the letters upstairs on the desk in his office. Then, alone in the house, he went to the front door. One of the agents — identified only as “J.M.” in a detailedcriminal complaint filed March 4 in the U.S. District Court of Nevada — opened his suit jacket and flashed his badge. Beasley stepped fully into the doorway. He held a loaded pistol against his head.

Continue reading “Going to Disneyland without giving them your data”

Authorities in Western Australia are searching for a radioactive capsule, which they believe fell off a truck while being transported. The capsule is smaller than a penny, while the search zone is a stretch of vast desert highway about as long as California’s coastline. The capsule, a small silver cylinder measuring 0.3 inches by 0.2 inches, came from a Rio Tinto mine and formed a part of a sensor used in mining. It contains a small amount of cesium-137 and is dangerously radioactive, according to the authorities. An hour of exposure at about a meter away is the equivalent of having 10 X-rays, and prolonged contact can cause skin burns, acute radiation sickness and cancer, they said.

The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is coining new words to describe our world

From Clive Thompson: “The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is a project started by two artists and anthropologists, Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante. They founded it in 2014 specifically for the purpose of collecting, translating and creating a new vocabulary for the Anthropocene. In essence, they devote themselves to coining new words to help describe the new dislocations, emotions, and phenomena being caused by global warming and global weirding. They’ve traveled around the world, setting up an official-looking table — at which they sit, often wearing matching uniforms — and talk to members of the public about their climate experiences, working with them to craft new words.”

Continue reading “Australians scour the desert for radioactive capsule”

People often think they know what causes chronic depression. Surveys indicate that more than 80% of the public blames a “chemical imbalance” in the brain. The unbalanced brain chemical in question is serotonin, an important neurotransmitter with fabled “feel-good” effects. But the causes of depression go far beyond serotonin deficiency. Clinical studies have repeatedly concluded that the role of serotonin in depression has been overstated. Indeed, the entire premise of the chemical-imbalance theory may be wrong, despite the relief that Prozac seems to bring.

The Montreal Mafia murders: Blood, gore, cannolis, and hockey bags

On the morning they were arrested for allegedly burning bodies as part of a series of Mafia murders, Marie-Josée Viau and Guy Dion had already finished breakfast and packed their daughter off to elementary school. A Mother’s Day card hung on the fridge next to family photographs. Viau, 44, didn’t have to go to her shift at the roadside poutine restaurant until later that day, so she tried baking something new: blueberry phyllo puffs. The pastries were still on the stove top when police arrived at 9:56 a.m. on October 16, 2019. “We’re normal people,” Viau swore to the arresting officers. “We didn’t kill anyone.” But undercover recordings made by investigators told a different tale.

Continue reading “Popular theories about depression are wrong”

In a recent interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which has an estimated audience of 11 million listeners per episode on Spotify, a guest from Alaska presented an explosive discovery: There are tens of thousands of priceless woolly mammoth tusks lying on the river floor. “I’m going to start a bone rush,” the guest, John Reeves, a fossil collector and gold miner, announced. The podcast episode, which aired Dec. 30, was an instant sensation. Without hesitation, teams of men and women from around the country drove, flew and floated to New York City for a chance at finding a many-thousands-year-old artifact that could be worth at least six figures. “You can’t win the lottery if you don’t play,” said one.

Scientists are training ants to sniff out cancer

Ants live in a world of odor. Some species are completely blind. Others rely so heavily on scent that ones that lose track of a pheromone trail march in a circle, until dying of exhaustion. Ants have such a refined sense of smell, in fact, that researchers are now training them to detect the scent of human cancer cells. A study published this week highlights a keen ant sense and underscores how someday we may use sharp-nosed animals — or, in the case of ants, sharp-antennaed — to detect tumors quickly and cheaply. That’s important because the sooner that cancer is found, the better the chances of recovery. “The results are very promising,” said Baptiste Piqueret, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology who co-wrote the paper.

Continue reading “Are there mammoth tusks in Manhattan’s East River?”

In his book “Along the Road,” published in 1925, Aldous Huxley imagined a future in which everyone would have more leisure time — and he wasn’t optimistic about the idea:

“If, to-morrow or a couple of generations hence, it were made possible for all human beings to lead the life of leisure which is now led only by a few, the results, so far as I can see, would be as follows: There would be an enormous increase in the demand for such time-killers and substitutes for thought as newspapers, films, fiction, cheap means of communication and wireless telephones; to put it in more general terms, there would be an increase in the demand for sport and art. The interest in the fine art of love-making would be widely extended. And enormous numbers of people, hitherto immune from these mental and moral diseases, would be affiicted by boredom, depression and universal dissatisfaction. The fact is that, brought up as they are at present, the majority of human beings can hardly fail to devote their leisure to occupations which, if not positively vicious, are at least stupid, futile and, what is worse, secretly realized to be futile.”

When the doctor in Alabama saw what a hornet sting had done to Eli Schlageter, his advice to Eli’s parents was unequivocal: Get an EpiPen. But they were stunned to learn that a single dose of the lifesaving drug, used to treat severe allergic reactions, cost $800 — even with insurance coverage. So the pharmacist in the small farming town of Geraldine turned to an envelope full of carefully folded hundred-dollar bills from an anonymous donor. Every month for more than a decade, a local farmer made anonymous cash donations to the pharmacy, aiming to help neighbors struggling to pay for prescription medication. They learned of his good deed only after he died at 80 in January.

Women in the age of polar exploration

Opportunities were restricted during the so-called Heroic Age, but women still dreamed of exploration… and sometimes managed to reach the polar regions. Ernest Shackleton, known for his expeditions to Antarctica, received a letter from three women eager to join his crew. “We are three strong healthy girls,” they explained. “Willing to undergo any hardships that you yourself undergo.” They even offered to trade their “feminine garb” for “masculine attire” if their clothes proved to be a hindrance. In 1806, Isobel Gunn disguised herself as a man named John Fubbister so she could join an expedition with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Her secret was only discovered when she got sick and went to her supervisor, Alexander Henry, for help.

Continue reading “This farmer secretly paid for his neighbors prescriptions”

Last weekend, the Indian government ordered YouTube to remove clips from a BBC documentary. It sent a similar order to Twitter, telling that platform to remove any tweets that featured links to those clips and pointing to more than fifty specific posts that had done so. The documentary, called India: The Modi Question, covers, in part, a series of violent riots in the western Indian state of Gujarat in 2002. More than a thousand people died—most of them Muslims. The documentary features quotes from UK government correspondence that described the riots as having had “all the hallmarks of an ethnic cleansing” and held Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist who was then the chief minister of Gujarat, “directly responsible.” Modi is now India’s prime minister.

According to the orders from India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the clips from the documentary and the tweets referring to them were to be removed under information technology laws that the Modi government implemented in 2021. According to one report, senior officials from different branches of the government reviewed the documentary and found it to be “an attempt to cast aspersions on the authority and credibility of the Supreme Court of India, sow divisions among various Indian communities, and make unsubstantiated allegations regarding the actions of foreign governments in India.” (The Supreme Court had previously cleared Modi of blame for the riots.) One official told The Hindu that the documentary undermined “the sovereignty and integrity of India,” and had the potential to “adversely impact public order within the country.”

India has several laws that give officials the authority to order information providers to remove or block access to content, including the Information Technology Act of 2000, which allows the government to block content “in the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India, security of the State, and public order.” The additional law that the Modi government passed in 2021 bills itself as a “digital media ethics code” that requires social media platforms to take down content within thirty-six hours of receiving a government order, and to otherwise assist law enforcement agencies with their inquiries. Foreign social-media companies are also required to employ a local staffer who can handle such official requests. Some critics have referred to this as a “hostage-taking law,” on the grounds that these local employees could end up in prison should their employer refuse to play ball.

Continue reading “A BBC documentary highlights growing social-media censorship in India”

Earth’s inner core has recently stopped spinning, and may now be reversing the direction of its rotation, according to a surprising new study that probed the deepest reaches of our planet with seismic waves from earthquakes. The results suggest that Earth’s center pauses and reverses direction on a periodic cycle lasting about 60 to 70 years, a discovery that might solve longstanding mysteries about climate and geological phenomena that occur on a similar timeframe, and that affect life on our planet. But while it sounds like the plot of a disaster movie, most scientists think this periodic spin switch is a normal part of its behavior that does not pose risks for life on our planet.

The Wright Brothers’ flight wasn’t the first

We’reused to thinking that the Wright brothers flew the first powered flight, but Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft – the definitive source for airplane-related facts – says a 1901 flight by Connecticut aviation pioneer Gustave Whitehead was the first successful powered flight in history, beating the Wright brothers’ first flight by more than two years. Jane’s has traditionally backed the Wright Brothers as first in flight, but now they say the evidence for Whitehead’s flight is strong enough for the publication to reverse course and recognize it as the first successful powered flight. Jane’s Editor Paul Jackson describes what happened in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on August 14, 1901.

Continue reading “Earth’s core has stopped and may be reversing direction”

Eleven pairs of shoes were dangling over the New York City skyline. It was September of 1932, as the Great Depression was reaching its height. Unemployment and uncertainty could be felt throughout the city and the entire country. But on West 49th Street, a pillar of hope was under construction: the art deco skyscraper that would come to be known as 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The ironworkers constructing its 70 floors were taking a break, sharing boxed lunches and cigarettes. They appeared to be completely unfazed by the location of this break: a narrow steel beam jutting out into the sky, hundreds of feet above the pavement. But this iconic photo is not really what it appears to be.

What happens when anaesthesia fails

Donna Penner’s panic attacks began after a small medical procedure that she had before her 45th birthday. She was working in the accountancy department of a local trucking company and had just celebrated the wedding of one of her daughters. But she had been having severe bleeding and pain during her period, and her family physician had suggested that they investigate the causes with exploratory surgery. It should have been a routine procedure, but, for reasons that are far from clear, the general anaesthetic failed. Rather than lying in peaceful oblivion, she woke up just before the surgeon made the first cut into her abdomen.

Continue reading “An iconic photo of American workers is not what it seems”