Month: July 2024

From Literary Hub: “It was a fine early summer afternoon in England, and the port at Chelsea was just slipping out of sight when Benjamin Franklin—­at the urging of his fellow passengers—­kicked off his buckled shoes and tossed aside his heavy jacket. John Wygate, a fellow printer whom Franklin had taught to swim, had been regaling the gentlemen aboard the ferry with stories of Franklin’s fishlike agility in the water and the peculiar aquatic tricks he could perform. They had spent the morning viewing taxidermied crocodiles and rattlesnakes at Don Saltero’s curiosities shop and weren’t ready for the day’s amusements to end, even as they headed back to Blackfriars. Franklin likely put on a good show of modesty, demurring at first to the group’s excited requests for a demonstration, but was no doubt secretly pleased as he undressed for his dip in the Thames—­he loved both an audience and any excuse to get in the water.”

This computerized love-letter generator was a precursor to ChatGPT

From JSTOR Daily: “In the early 1950s, small, peculiar love letters were pinned up on the walls of the computing lab at the University of Manchester. The history behind them is even stranger; examples of the world’s first computer-generated writing, they’re signed by MUC, the acronym for the Manchester University Computer. In 1952, decades before ChatGPT’s computer generated writing was integrated into mainstream media outlets, two gay men—Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey—essentially invented AI writing. Alongside Turing, Strachey worked on several experiments with Artificial Intelligence: a computer that could sing songs, one of the world’s first computer games, and an algorithm to write gender-neutral mash notes that screamed with longing.”

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Continue reading “That time Ben Franklin jumped naked into the Thames river”

From Hackaday: “The Brennan Monorail was a train from the early 1900’s that seemed to defy the laws of physics. Not only did it keep itself perfectly balanced on a single rail, but it mysteriously leaned into corners without any driver input. This was a real invention – and it was unveiled to the public in 1910 by its inventor Louis Brennan. The idea was that using a single rail instead of two would make trains faster and railways cheaper to build. His train could take corners at greater speeds without being thrown off the tracks and railways would only need half the material. Unlike the monorails we’re familiar with today, which wrap themselves around tracks built high in the air, Brennan’s monorail could run on existing tracks. Although it looked a bit sketchy, it was very stable. At the heart of the train was a gyroscope that would correct the train’s tilt before the passengers noticed. This was a mind-blowing piece of engineering, especially for 1910.”

From Paul Kedrosky: “Something strange has happened to the word “delve” in the last two years. Its usage has exploded in everything from Amazon reviews, to undergraduate essays, to academic papers. There were, for example, more papers with the word “delve” in them in 2022 and 2023 together than in the prior 500 years combined. Everyone is on the delve train. It all has to do with a weird quirk of large language models (LLMs), understanding which requires a trip back through the Lord of the Rings, early American settlements, a 17th-century pastor, and Milton. Delving into something is a grandiloquent cliché and a quest for implied certainty. But it is also a cultural signifier, one with a thousand years of history at the intersection of religion, politics, science, risk, and literature, and one that is now being reflected back to us. Models are channeling all that history, in which is embedded our uneasy relationship with technology.”

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Continue reading “The 1910 monorail that used gyroscopes to stay upright”

From Vice: “One day last spring, near an old rural cemetery in southern Brazil, a black man named Marcelo Gomes held up the corners of a Confederate flag to pose for a cell-phone photo. After the picture was taken, Gomes said he saw no problem with a black man paying homage to the history of the Confederate States of America. “American culture is a beautiful culture,” he said. Some of his friends had Confederate blood. Gomes had joined some 2,000 Brazilians at the annual festa of the Fraternidade Descendência Americana, the brotherhood of Confederate descendants in Brazil, on a plot near the town of Americana, which was settled by Southern defectors 150 years ago. On the morning of the festa, a public-address system was blaring the Confederate song ‘Stonewall Jackson’s Way’ and Brazilians in ten-gallon hats and leather jackets called out greetings.”

Two cities received millions of dollars from Benjamin Franklin 200 years after he died

From Why Is This Interesting: “Imagine waking up one day to find out that someone from the past had left you a vast sum of money. Not just the recent past, but hundreds of years ago. Now, imagine they left you £1,000 at the time, but because it was compounding, it’s now worth millions.  That’s what happened to the city of Philadelphia & Boston, who in 1887 both received the equivalent of millions of dollars today, from none other than the long-deceased Benjamin Franklin. Then, a hundred years later, in 1987, the two cities received an additional $2m and $4.5m respectively. You see, Benjamin Franklin had declared in his will that a sum of money be left in a trust for 200 years. The resulting funds were only to be used to help out young tradesmen in either city, to help them access initial capital to make their start. After 100 years, the cities were to receive 75% of the funds, with the rest to continue compounding for another 100 years.”

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Continue reading “The Brazilian town where the American Confederacy lives on”