Month: May 2023

Brynn Holland writes for The History Channel: “James Barry began his military career on July 6, 1813, as a Hospital Assistant in the British Army, and was soon promoted to Assistant Staff Surgeon, equivalent to lieutenant. He then served in Cape Town, South Africa, for 10 years where he befriended the governor, Lord Charles Somerset. Barry was known for his short, hot temper. Patients, superiors, army captains and even Florence Nightingale herself were on the receiving end of his anger. He threw medicine bottles and even participated in a duel. But his medical skills were unprecedented. He was the first to perform a successful caesarean section in the British Empire where both the mother and child survived. Dr. Barry died from dysentery on July 25, 1865. His last wishes were to be buried in the clothes he died in, without his body being washed—wishes that were not followed. When the nurse undressed the body, she discovered female anatomy and tell-tale stretch marks from pregnancy.”

How an accountant in India was recognized as a mathematical prodigy

Stephen Wolfram, who published his first scientific paper at 15 and got a PhD in theoretical physics at the age of 20, writes about the man known as Ramanujan: “I have for many years received a steady trickle of messages that make bold claims but give little or no backup for what they say. But in the end I try to at least skim them—in large part because I remember the story of Ramanujan.  On about January 31, 1913 a mathematician named G. H. Hardy in Cambridge received a package of papers with a cover letter that began: “Dear Sir, I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only £20 per annum. I am now about 23 years of age….” and went on to say that its author had made “startling” progress on a theory of divergent series in mathematics, and had all but solved the longstanding problem of the distribution of prime numbers.”

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Continue reading “The extraordinary secret life of Dr. James Barry”

Clive Thompson writes: “By now, we all know the problems of greenhouse gases. Burning fossil fuels creates CO2 — with methane sometimes as side product as well — and it traps the sun’s heat. The result: Global warming, and all the weirding of climate that comes with it. We moderns have known this since the 80s. But the basic idea behind greenhouse gases was discovered over a century earlier — by a female suffragette who, in 1856, did some ingenious scientific experiments. When she wrote up her work, she neatly and pithily predicted the possibility that we’d one day cook the planet. Eunice Foote was born in 1819 on a farm in Connecticut, and raised in Bloomfield, New York. In that period of history, few women received good technical educations, but Foote was an exception: Her parents sent her to the Troy Female Seminary, where she learned advanced math and science.”

This little known member of the Van Gogh family was crucial to Vincent’s success

Sheehan Quirke, also known as The Cultural Tutor, writes: “Johanna is the least famous of the van Goghs. Vincent might just be the world’s best-known artist. Then there’s Theo, his devoted brother, without whose support Vincent could never have done what he did. And, finally, we have Jo. She was born Johanna Gezina Bonger in 1862, the daughter of an insurance broker. She studied English and became a teacher at a girls’ school in the Netherlands. In 1884 she was introduced to Theo van Gogh by her brother. Theo was immediately taken, but it was five years later that he proposed. Jo said yes and they were married in early 1889. That same year, Vincent died, and Theo also died just six months later. What did Jo do? She inherited all of Vincent’s (then valueless) paintings and took them with her to the Netherlands. Although Vincent had sold only one painting in his lifetime and died a nobody, Jo was committed to sharing Vincent’s artistic genius with the world.”

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Continue reading “This 19th-century woman predicted global warming”

Stephen Rodrick writes for GQ magazine: “The guru was late. Very late. This was odd, because the guru is all about being ten minutes early. Show up tardy to one of his sessions and you will be stuck outside of enlightenment with your shoes in your hand. I thought about getting mad or, more specifically, hangry. It was my sixth day without meat or coffee on this week-long yoga retreat in rural Tennessee, and my contraband stash of caffeine pills and prosciutto had long been exhausted. Just then came the hellish noise of an engine, and a motorcycle rose over a crest. It was the guru. He rode toward us, his blue robe and white beard flowing behind him, and brought his Ducati to a stop so that it would be perfectly framed behind him on camera.”

The head of a virus database appears to have invented an alter ego

From Martin Enserink and Jon Cohen in Science magazine: “When Jeremy Kamil started to sequence samples of the coronavirus in the spring of 2020, it was clear where he should deposit the genetic data: in GISAID, a long-running database for influenza genomes. Kamil, a virologist at Louisiana State University’s (LSU’s) Health Sciences Center Shreveport, says he quickly struck up a friendly relationship with a Steven Meyers, who used a gisaid.org email address. The two often exchanged emails and talked on the phone, sometimes for hours, about the pandemic and data sharing. Meyers said he had previously worked at Time Warner and had changed jobs after his boss at that company, Peter Bogner, launched GISAID in 2008. Meyers was born in Germany and living in Santa Monica, California, just like Bogner, whom he would call “our big boss” and “the Big Cheese.” Over time, things got a little weird, Kamil says. Emails he sent to Meyers were sometimes answered from Bogner’s email account.”

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Continue reading “An inside look at Sadhguru, the internet’s favorite mystic”

This is an excerpt from a book by Clancy Martin, called “How Not to Kill Yourself.” It comes from the excellent Small Bow newsletter by former Gawker editor AJ Delaurio. (Trigger warning should be obvious).

“I make my own suffering so much worse when I struggle against the suffering, when I think the suffering is somehow a sign of something else or has to be turned off or is the cause for me to panic, to freak out, to attack or run away. For me the worst kind of suffering, the real ‘I want to kill myself’ kind of suffering, is always that second kind, the Freaking-Out-Over-Suffering kind of suffering. Sometimes that manifests as self-loathing. Sometimes that manifests itself as anxiety or despair. Sometimes that manifests itself as a kind of terrible claustrophobic panic. But it is always the second dart, not the first. So, if I can just tell myself, when I am struck by the first dart, let yourself feel that dart. Don’t do anything more about it. Just let that dart stab you. Then I may very well be a rabbit with his neck caught in a wire snare, but at least I’m not decapitating myself with my scramble against it.”

From the New York Times: “Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future. On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.

Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work. “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Dr. Hinton said during a lengthy interview last week in the dining room of his home in Toronto, a short walk from where he and his students made their breakthrough. His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.””

From a recent edition of the always excellent Griefbacon newsletter, written by Helena Fitzgerald, which you should all subscribe to:

“The first time I thought in posts—the first time I imagined my fears and desires, my crushes and my worries, playing out in the immediate future specifically on social media—was during a winter break when I was twenty or so, on vacation with my family. Obsessing over someone who’d broken up with me, I filtered every experience I had and every beautiful thing I saw through how I would post about it, and the reaction I hoped those posts might compel. That was the first time I can remember living in the way I’ve lived since then. Online had seeped into my real-time emotional life; it was like realizing you’re fluent in a language when you wake up from a dream in which you were speaking it.”

“I say all the time that I miss the internet, but I use the internet to say it. All I really mean is that I miss a different version of myself. I miss when I knew less; I miss when there was more time. Despite being engaged in the act of shedding at every moment from birth, we don’t notice what we’ve shed until no part of it clings to us any longer. This is merely forward motion— not a tragedy, not a triumph, not a hardship, and not a miracle. We live in planned obsolescence, learning the new technology just in time for the newer technology to outpace it and render those skills useless. Whatever I thought the internet was is already long over, something the newest generation of novelty seekers has never seen, and would likely not even recognize.”