From CBS News: “Jan Dell is a former chemical engineer who has spent years telling an inconvenient truth about plastics. “So many people, they see the recyclable label, and they put it in the recycle bin,” she said. “But the vast majority of plastics are not recycled.” About 48 million tons of plastic waste is generated in the U.S. each year; only 5 to 6 percent of it is actually recycled, according to the Department of Energy. The rest ends up in landfills or is burned. Dell founded a non-profit, The Last Beach Cleanup, to fight plastic pollution. Inside her garage in Southern California is all sorts of plastic with those little arrows on it that make us think they can be recycled. But, she said, “You’re being lied to.” Those so-called chasing arrows started showing up on plastic products in 1988, part of a push to convince the public that plastic waste wasn’t a problem because it can be recycled. Davis Allen, an investigative researcher, said the industry didn’t need for recycling to work: “They needed people to believe that it was working.”
Boat fish don’t count: Inside the dangerous and secretive world of extreme fishing
From The Atlantic: “Brandon Sausele is 27 years old. Shaggy-haired, tattooed, and muscular, he is a devoted practitioner of an extreme sport known as “wetsuiting,” which is both easy to describe and impossible for the uninitiated to understand. When I was first getting into the sport a few years ago, the advice I received from another fisherman was simply: Don’t. Wetsuiting is a form of saltwater fishing that involves wearing a wetsuit and wading or swimming out to offshore rocks—almost exclusively at night, often during storms—to access deeper water or faster currents than can be reached in traditional waders. The quarry are striped bass, a fish that migrates every spring to as far north as Maine, and the largest come close to shore at night. Stripers prefer inclement weather and rough water, which make ambushing their prey easier, but also make conditions more dangerous for the men—wetsuiters are nearly all men—who chase them.”
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Ohio wasn’t legally a US state until 1953
From Athens News: “We were taught that Ohio was admitted to the United States on March 1, 1803, the first state carved out of the Northwest Territory. So why, then, was there legislation passed in Congress in 1953 granting statehood to Ohio? And why did President Eisenhower sign that legislation on Aug. 7, 1953, thereby making Ohio a state? It turns out that in 1952, some school teachers went to Washington in 1952 to get copies of documents related to Ohio becoming a state, in anticipation of the 150th anniversary of Ohio’s statehood. They asked the Library of Congress for those documents, but the librarian of Congress couldn’t find one of them. The meeting of the 7th Congress in 1802 signed a law “authorizing the inhabitants of Ohio to form a constitution and state government, and admission of Ohio into the Union,” but Congress neglected to approve the Ohio constitution, which they were required to do if Ohio were to be a state. The librarian of Congress couldn’t find that legislation because it didn’t exist.”
Was this hermit mathematician a forgotten genius or a lonely madman?
From The Guardian: “The hermit’s name was Alexander Grothendieck. Born in 1928, he arrived in France from Germany as a refugee in 1939, and went on to revolutionise postwar mathematics as Einstein had physics a generation earlier. Moving beyond distinct disciplines such as geometry, algebra and topology, he worked in pursuit of a deeper, universal language to unify them all. At the heart of his work was a new conception of space, liberating it from the Euclidean tyranny of fixed points and bringing it into the 20th-century universe of relativity and probability. Then, in 1970, Grothendieck quit. Resigning from France’s elite Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques – in protest at funding it received from the ministry of defence – put an end to his high-level mathematics career. In 1991, he left his home underneath Provence’s Mont Ventoux and disappeared.”
Agatha Christie was the first Western woman to stand up on a surfboard
From AgathaChristie.com: “What image is conjured up in your head when you think of Agatha Christie? Perhaps it’s one of an older lady, with a sparkling brooch? Or, that famous photo of her surrounded by lots of her novels? We are willing to bet the first photo that comes to mind isn’t this one though, of a 31-year-old Christie enjoying the surf in South Africa. In fact, Agatha Christie was a very keen surfer, a sport she experienced for the first time in 1922, whilst on a trip with her first husband Archie. She is thought to be the first Western woman to stand up on a surfboard! She revelled in the details of the boards in South Africa, and wrote repeatedly of her desire to improve her surfing skills in letters to her mother. It has only been in the last three decades that women’s participation in the sport has increased. Women now make up 20 to 30 percent of surfers, but it has previously been dominated by men. It seems Christie did not let that put her off.”
He left his career as a firefighter to care for a herd of elephants
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com