Author: Mathew Ingram

From the WSJ: “Nontra Yantaprasert couldn’t wait to take her husband’s shorter and easier-to-pronounce last name. She didn’t know what kinds of problems it would cause.His last name is Null, the same word used by computer scientists to mean “no value” or “invalid value.” The Nulls of the world, it turns out, endure a lifetime of website bouncebacks, processing errors and declarations by customer-service representatives that their accounts don’t exist. After becoming a Null, she was due to travel to India in 2014 on a nonrefundable flight for a friend’s marriage, but her visa hadn’t arrived in the mail. The Indian consulate told her it had tried multiple times but the computer system couldn’t process her last name, she said. Null was first coined 60 years ago by a British computer scientist and has since been incorporated into many of the systems that make American commerce run, from hotel reservation sites to government agencies.”

This French widow created the modern champagne market almost singlehandedly

From the Smithsonian: “Highlighted by its distinctive gold-yellow label, a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne is hard to ignore. In 2012, it was the second highest selling brand of champagne in the world, with 1,474,000 nine-liter cases sold worldwide. But Veuve Clicquot wasn’t always so successful: if it weren’t for the efforts of a cunning 19th-century business mind, the champagne might never have existed. That remarkable mind belonged to the eponymous Widow (veuve in French0) Clicquot, one of the world’s first international businesswomen, who brought her wine business back from the brink of destruction and invented a process that helped create the modern champagne market as we know it. By the time she died in 1866, Veuve Clicquot was exporting champagne to the far reaches of the world, from Lapland to the United States.”

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Continue reading “When your last name is Null nothing works properly”

From The New Yorker: “For Wilson Bentley, the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century microphotographic innovator and bona-fide snowflake obsessive, contemplating the dazzling panoply of kaleidoscopic snow-crystal formations was a pastime that never lost its lustre. In fact, it is through Bentley’s encyclopedic collection of more than five thousand snowflake photographs, a portion of which are now housed in the Smithsonian Institution, that we got the notion of snowflakes’ singularity in the first place. Bentley was born in 1865 and raised on a farm in Jericho, Vermont. His father and brother spent their days tending to the property. Bentley was expected to pitch in, too, but he was more interested in studying the land than in working it. He became enthralled with a microscope given to him by his mother, a former schoolteacher, and discovered that each snowflake had its own careful and fleeting geometry.”

Archaeologists have found the first pharaoh’s tomb in more than a hundred years

From the BBC: “Egyptologists have discovered the first tomb of a pharaoh since Tutankhamun’s was uncovered over a century ago. King Thutmose II’s tomb was the last undiscovered royal tomb of the 18th Egyptian dynasty. A British-Egyptian team has located it in the Western Valleys of the Theban Necropoli. Researchers had thought the burial chambers of the 18th dynasty pharaohs were more than 2km away, closer to the Valley of the Kings. The crew found it in an area associated with the resting places of royal women, but when they got into the burial chamber they found it decorated – the sign of a pharaoh. Dr Litherland said the discovery solved the mystery of where the tombs of early 18th dynasty kings are located. Researchers found Thutmose II’s mummified remains two centuries ago but its original burial site had never been located.”

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Continue reading “He invented a new way to take photographs of snowflakes”

If you’ve been following court cases that relate to artificial intelligence, you probably saw some headlines about a recent federal court decision in the US District Court for Delaware, in a copyright-infringement case filed by Thomson Reuters against a company called Ross Intelligence. I saw headlines that claimed this was a “landmark ruling” and a “major win” for content creators, that the AI industry was on the ropes, that this decision marked a turning point in the debate over copyright and artificial intelligence, that fair use is over as a defense for AI training, etc. etc. Is this accurate? Not really. It is definitely true that the court’s ruling is the first significant federal decision related to AI and copyright. But there are a number of reasons why this case doesn’t have as much impact on AI and copyright as the headlines might lead you to believe.

Before I continue, I should note my bias on the question of AI and copyright: Faithful readers of Torment Nexus will recall that in a previous post, I discussed the issue of whether the indexing of content by AI engines should be considered fair use. As I tried to argue in that post, it’s my view that it should. Do LLMs scrape and ingest copyrighted content in large quantities, in most cases without permission? Yes. Do they use this content to generate responses to questions or prompts that relate to the topics discussed in the original versions of that content? Yes. Nevertheless, I believe — as a number of copyright and intellectual property experts do — that this activity should fall under the fair-use exception in US copyright law, for a number of reasons outlined in that post. I’ll get to some of that later, I just wanted to get my bias up front before I continue.

First, some of the facts related to this particular case: Thomson Reuters, which operates the Reuters news-wire service, also owns a number of professional databases that make up the majority of its business. One of those is called Westlaw, and it’s fascinating to me that for years the company had what amounted to a monopoly on the method of citing legal cases in US courts. It seems bizarre now, but Westlaw owned a copyright that covered the system of page-numbering used in US courts, so you literally couldn’t even refer to a previous case for precedent without infringing on Westlaw’s copyright, and the company spent years suing everyone who tried to use it without paying for it — like Lexis-Nexis, a competing legal database. That monopoly over page numbering was mostly dismantled in the late 1990s, but Westlaw still has a copyright on the way cases are summarized, something known as “headnotes.”

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Continue reading “Breaking down a federal court’s ruling on AI and copyright”

From CNN: “The patient consulted a doctor about a chronic cough that was concerning him. During his first couple months of treatment, he was diagnosed with pneumonia, thickening and stiffness in the right lung, and bronchiectasis, or damage of the breathing tubes. When the patient finally reached Munavvar’s clinic at the age of 47, they ran multiple tests, including a CAT scan, and conducted a white light bronchoscopy, a procedure involving the insertion of a scope inside the airways to view the lungs. The doctor noticed extensive shadowing and a thickening lump in the lower right lung. These symptoms, along with the spread of a bacterial infection in the pockets of the lower right lung, led his team to believe that the man had a tumor, which needed prompt removal. But when doctors performed surgery on a man to remove what they suspected to be a carcinoma, they instead found a toy traffic cone he had swallowed in 1974.”

The poet John Milton coined almost twice as many words as William Shakespeare

From The Guardian: “To many scholars he is still the sublime English poet. But John Milton deserves to be remembered for rather more than Paradise Lost. According to Gavin Alexander, a lecturer in English at Cambridge university and fellow of Milton’s alma mater, Christ’s College, who has trawled the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for evidence, Milton is responsible for introducing approximately 630 words to the English language, making him the country’s greatest neologist, ahead of Ben Jonson with 558, John Donne with 342 and Shakespeare with 229. Without the great poet there would be no liturgical, debauchery, besottedly, unhealthily, padlock, dismissive, terrific, embellishing, fragrance, didactic or love-lorn. And certainly no complacency.”

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Continue reading “A lung tumor turned out to be a toy he swallowed 40 years ago”

From MIT: “Later this month, Intuitive Machines, the private company behind the first commercial lander that touched down on the moon, will launch a second lunar mission from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The plan is to deploy a lander, a rover, and hopper to explore a site near the lunar south pole that could harbor water ice, and to put a communications satellite on lunar orbit. But the mission will also bring something that’s never been installed on the moon or anywhere else in space before—a fully functional 4G cellular network. Using point-to-point radio in space wasn’t much of an issue in the past because there never have been that many points to connect. Usually, it was just a single spacecraft, a lander, or a rover talking to Earth. And they didn’t need to send much data either. But it could soon get way more crowded up there: NASA’s Artemis program calls for bringing the astronauts back to the moon as early as 2028.”

A ceremonial gavel used by Canada’s Black Watch Regiment is from the 1814 White House

From Dokumen: “On 13 September 1958, the 3rd Battalion Black Watch returned to Philadelphia. The battalion flew and were met at the airport by a guard of honour from the 111th. The September visit marked the second time in 195 years that “The Black Watch Chair” would be occupied. The formal banquet included a double-tiered head table, and was held at Philadelphia’s exclusive Union League. The guest speaker was the adjutant general of the Pennsylvania National Guard, AJ Drexel Biddle, Jr. He was followed by the assistant to the Canadian military attaché to Washington, Colonel John B Allan, who presented a fine Highland claymore from the Queen Mother on behalf of the Imperial Black Watch to George H Roderick, the assistant secretary of the United States Army. On Sunday, an exhibition game of CFL Football was played between the Ottawa Rough Riders and the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. At halftime, the 111th and Black Watch paraded and exchanged mementoes. The 111th colonel presented a wooden gavel, carved from a window of the original White House, burned by a British fleet in 1814.”

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Continue reading “Nokia is setting up the first 4G cellular network on the moon”

From The Guardian: “A humpback whale briefly scooped a kayaker into its mouth off the Chilean Patagonia before quickly releasing him unharmed in an incident caught on camera. Adrián Simancas was kayaking with his father, Dell, in Bahía El Águila near the San Isidro lighthouse in the Strait of Magellan when a humpback whale surfaced, engulfing Adrián and his yellow kayak for a few seconds before letting him go. Dell, just metres away, captured the moment on video. “Stay calm, stay calm,” he can be heard saying after his son was released from the whale’s mouth. Experts say it’s just not possible for a humpback whale to swallow something as large as a person, since they normally consume tiny fish known as krill. While their mouths are massive — as wide as 10 feet — their throats are much smaller, roughly the size of a human fist.”

Scientist solves the mystery of the Summerville Ghost that has haunted a town since the 1950s

From The Daily Mail: “Since the 1950s, people in Summerville, South Carolina have told stories of a ghost haunting abandoned railroad tracks. Legend has it that a man working or traveling on the railroad was hit by a train and killed, and after her death, his wife began haunting the area – walking with a lantern. People have claimed to see an eerie glow hovering over the tracks and strange lights seemingly floating in the air that sometimes rush towards them or grow in size. Locals also claim to have seen shaking cars, slamming doors and whispered voices being heard without a source near houses and buildings running along the rail line. Dr Susan Hough, a geophysicist at the Earthquake Hazards Program, believes a natural explanation may be the reason for the paranormal activity. She believes the hauntings are actually after-effects of minor earthquakes.”

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Continue reading “A kayaker was briefly swallowed by a humpback whale”

From National Geographic: “Officials in the Brdy region of the Czech Republic were at an impasse.Despite securing more than one million dollars’ worth of funding for a new dam to address water issues, the project had stalled after seven years of planning because the necessary building permits for such a structure couldn’t be acquired. But then, everyone woke up one morning in January to find that the job had been completed—by eight beavers. For free. Beaver dams can be massive structures. The largest beaver dam on record is in Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada, stretching the length of seven football fields. The dam is so big, it can be seen from space. “At this point, nothing that beavers do surprises me,” says Ben Goldfarb, a science journalist and author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter.”

The founder of New Yorker magazine almost lost it during a late-night poker game

From The Conversation: “Inside that first edition, a reader would find a buffet of jokes and short poems. There was a profile, reviews of plays and books, lots of gossip, and a few ads. It was not terribly impressive, feeling quite patched together, and at first the magazine struggled. When The New Yorker was just a few months old, Ross almost even lost it entirely one night in a drunken poker game at the home of Pulitzer Prize winner and Round Table regular Herbert Bayard Swope. Ross didn’t make it home until noon the next day, and when he woke, his wife found IOUs in his pockets amounting to nearly $30,000. Fleischmann, who had been at the card game but left at a decent hour, was furious. Somehow, Ross persuaded Fleischmann to pay off some of his debt and let Ross work off the rest. Just in time, The New Yorker began gaining readers.”

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Continue reading “Some eager beavers saved the Czech government $1.2 million”

From Defector: “If neighbors peeking behind curtains at the idling 18-wheeler thought to call in a complaint, the husband and wife receiving the delivery didn’t notice. They were too busy unloading boxes—more than 800 of them. That problem cost $43,000, a sum that represented the entire life savings of Mr. Fox and his wife, who at that point had been surviving on public-school salaries. Friends and family never really said it out loud, but they were certainly thinking it: This was insane. What about the three kids and that mortgage? Tucked inside those boxes were 120,000 plastic cups. They were turned upside down, each with a hole drilled through the middle of the base. The couple’s future hinged on convincing thousands of kids that stacking these plastic cups in pre-determined patterns was … fun. And to convince the parents of those kids to actually buy these cups, despite not even being able to drink from them.”

There are more ways to arrange a deck of cards than there are atoms on Earth

From McGill: “Think of your last card game – euchre, poker, Go Fish, whatever it was. Would you believe every time you gave the whole deck a proper shuffle, you were holding a sequence of cards which had never before existed in all of history? Consider how many card games must have taken place across the world since the beginning of humankind. No one has or likely ever will hold the exact same arrangement of 52 cards as you did during that game. It seems unbelievable, but there are somewhere in the range of 8×10⁶⁷ ways to sort a deck of cards. That’s an 8 followed by 67 zeros. To put that in perspective, even if someone could rearrange a deck of cards every second of the universe’s total existence, the universe would end before they would get even one billionth of the way to finding a repeat. This is the nature of probabilities with such great numbers.”

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Continue reading “Stacking cups as a game was invented by this guy’s dad”

If you’ve been reading the news at all, you probably know that Elon Musk — and/or a group of twentysomething programmer/hackers with nicknames like “Big Balls” (no, I am not making this up) — have taken control of significant parts of the functional machinery of the US government, including the Departments of Energy, Education, Housing and Urban Development, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They are installing external servers and shutting down billions of dollars worth of payments, as well as firing tens of thousands of federal employees. Do they have the authority to do this? Donald Trump has issued an executive order saying that they do. The courts disagree, but it remains to be seen whether Trump will obey the courts or simply ignore them. Can he do that? Perhaps. Is there any way for the state or Congress to stop him? Not really. Is this the beginning of a constitutional crisis? Probably.

This isn’t a political newsletter, so all of that is outside my purview at the moment, although I have to say it is troubling in the extreme. From a technological point of view, however, what is interesting to me is that even with all of that going on — running and/or dismantling the entire federal government — Elon Musk still managed to find the time to put together a $97-billion hostile takeover offer for OpenAI. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal describes it:

A consortium of investors led by Elon Musk is offering $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, upping the stakes in his battle with Sam Altman over the company behind ChatGPT. Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, said he submitted a bid for all the nonprofit’s assets to OpenAI’s board of directors Monday. The unsolicited offer adds a major complication to Altman’s carefully laid plans for OpenAI’s future, including converting it to a for-profit company and spending up to $500 billion on AI infrastructure through a joint venture called Stargate. He and Musk are already fighting in court over the direction of OpenAI. “It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement. “We will make sure that happens.”

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Continue reading “Does Elon Musk want to buy OpenAI? Yes and no”

From Discover Music: “No matter how memorable Bobby Fuller’s signature hit was – and his version of “I Fought The Law” is inarguably a classic rock’n’roll record of any era – it always risks being upstaged by the macabre and never-explained circumstances of his death. Born on October 22, 1942 in Baytown, Texas, Fuller became a noted performer in the El Paso, Texas area to which he and his family relocated. Fuller was just 23 when his song hit the charts, but within a few weeks, he met an unseemly and mysterious end. Eight days after the group’s last gig in July 1966, he received an unexplained late night phone call that prompted him to leave in the family Oldsmobile. Later that day, he was found dead by his mother Loraine outside his Hollywood apartment. The car was full of gasoline; accounts have subsequently varied as to whether he had sustained bruises or cuts. His body had been there for some time.”

Her discovery wasn’t alien life but science has never been the same since

From the NYT: “With TV cameras pointed at her, Felisa Wolfe-Simon began speaking at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 2, 2010. She was at that time a visiting researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey, speaking to a sizable audience of journalists and bloggers, two of them wearing tinfoil hats, and hordes of streamers online. Days before, NASA had teased “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” Dr. Wolfe-Simon had not found aliens, but she had found a terrestrial organism that was behaving unlike any life form known on Earth. The creature came from Mono Lake, a body of water near Yosemite National Park that is nearly three times as salty as the Pacific Ocean and is full of toxic arsenic. Dr. Wolfe-Simon’s team said they had isolated an organism that could survive on arsenic.”

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Continue reading “The short life and strange death of rock ‘n’ roller Bobby Fuller”

From The Oxford Clarion: “The Eagle & Child is Oxford’s most storied inn. It was here that the Inklings met every Tuesday lunchtime – a writing group including J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Hugo Dyson, who infamously dismissed a plot twist in the Lord of the Rings with “Not another —ing elf!”. Larry Ellison is the billionaire behind US database giant Oracle. He owns the sixth largest island in Hawaii, hired Steve Jobs as his wedding photographer, and was compared to a lawnmower by a disgruntled engineer. He also doesn’t drink. All this makes him an unusual candidate for an Oxford pub landlord. But then the new Eagle & Child is going to be an unusual pub: it is to be the in-house bar for Ellison’s new Oxford outpost, the Ellison Institute of Technology.”

Letters hidden in my family’s attic reveal a 1910s bank con in Key West

From Atlas Obscura: “My mother doesn’t remember much about when she found the letters. The year was 1975, she was 10, and her father had just purchased a dilapidated two-story house on the island of Key West. She remembers finding a box containing 20 or so handwritten letters that were dated between 1913 and 1915. The collection of letters chronicles the correspondence between two bank colleagues: James L. Johnson, a cashier who lived at 616 Caroline Street, and E. M. Martin, the bank’s vice president and a shadowy figure whose life was riddled with many peculiar twists and turns. Both men worked at the Island City National Bank, a small bank open for only 10 years. The bank has long been an enigma. Its bizarre story stretches over a decade between various cities, countries, and continents. And these hidden letters turned out to be a missing piece of the puzzle, a winding tale of fraud, manhunts, and amnesia.”

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Continue reading “The world’s third richest man bought Tolkien’s local pub”

From the NYT: “In the 1850s, Eunice Foote, an amateur scientist, made a remarkable discovery about greenhouse gases that could have helped form the foundation of modern climate science. But the scientific paper she published that might have added her name to the pantheon of early climate scientists was quickly forgotten, and she faded into obscurity. There isn’t even a photograph of her today. Foote’s ingenious and elegant experiment involved two glass cylinders filled with various substances, including moist air and carbon dioxide. She placed a thermometer in each container, then left them in sunlight. In her 1856 paper about the experiment, “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays,” she wrote that a cylinder with moist air became warmer than one with dry air, and a cylinder filled with carbon dioxide warmed even more. “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature,” she wrote.

The last two Jewish men in Afghanistan disguised their synagogue as a kebab stand

From Wikipedia: “The country’s last rabbi fled in 1988, and the last formal prayer services were held at the synagogue in 1990. In the mid-1990s, Zablon Simintov moved into the synagogue, by then Kabul’s only functioning synagogue. The Taliban had come to power in 1996, and the synagogue had been deserted and left in disrepair. The Taliban considered the synagogue un-Islamic and as such, ransacked it and frequently arrested Simintov and fellow resident Yitzhak Levin. Simintov and Levin argued frequently about who was the rightful owner of the synagogue, and they lived in different wings. Each would complain to the Taliban about the other, to the point that the Taliban imprisoned both men. To disguise the synagogue from the outside, Simintov operated a kebab restaurant from the building called Balkh Bastan beginning in 2009.”

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Continue reading “She discovered the greenhouse effect 150 years ago”

From The Smithsonian: “On the flat top of a steep hill in a distant corner of northern Japan lies the tomb of an itinerant shepherd who, two millennia ago, settled down there to grow garlic. He fell in love with a farmer’s daughter named Miyuko, fathered three kids and died at the ripe old age of 106. In the mountain hamlet of Shingo, he’s remembered by the name Daitenku Taro Jurai. The rest of the world knows him as Jesus Christ. It turns out that Jesus of Nazareth did not die on the cross at Calvary, as widely reported. According to local folklore, that was his kid brother, Isukiri. A bucolic backwater with only one Christian resident and no church within 30 miles, Shingo nevertheless bills itself as Kirisuto no Sato or Christ’s Hometown. Every year 20,000 or so pilgrims and pagans visit the site, which is maintained by a nearby yogurt factory.”

Scientists may have solved the infamous ‘move a couch around a corner’ problem

From Scientific American: “For those who have wrestled a bulky couch around a tight corner and lamented, “Will this even fit?” mathematicians have heard your pleas. Geometry’s “moving sofa problem” asks for the largest shape that can turn a right angle in a narrow corridor without getting stuck. The problem sat unsolved for nearly 60 years until Jineon Baek, a postdoc at Yonsei University in Seoul, posted a paper online claiming to resolve it. Baek’s proof has yet to undergo thorough peer review, but initial passes from mathematicians who know Baek and the moving sofa problem seem optimistic. The rules of the problem, which Canadian mathematician Leo Moser first formally posed in 1966, involve a rigid shape turning a right angle in a hallway. Both the shape and the hallway are two-dimensional. Imagine the sofa weighs too much to lift.”

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Continue reading “This village claims Jesus moved to Japan and became a farmer”

From USC: Oneida. For most Americans, the name conjures up fine silverware. Few are aware that behind this secular symbol of middle-class respectability lies the story of a 19th-century religious community predicated on radical notions of equality, sex and religion. The community’s founder, John Humphrey Noyes, was the scion of a prominent Vermont family and a graduate of Yale Theological Seminary. He founded his own offshoot of Protestantism called Perfectionism. Noyes believed in the second coming and he also believed he was God’s prophet on Earth. Amid the fervor of religious revival, he attracted a group of devoted followers seeking an alternative to Puritanism. In 1848, he established a revolutionary community in rural New York that aimed to achieve a sin-free life through God’s grace, while espousing equality of the sexes and encouraging sex with multiple partners via “complex marriage.”

She was the first woman to fly rescue missions in a combat zone then became a brain surgeon

From the New York Times: “Valérie André was 10 years old in 1932 when, armed with a congratulatory bouquet, she greeted the hero aviator Maryse Hilsz at the Strasbourg airfield in France. She was already committed to becoming a doctor, an ambitious career goal for a young lady at the time. But she was so warmly received when she presented the flowers to Ms. Hilsz, who had just completed a record-breaking round-trip flight between Paris and Saigon, that she committed herself to another formidable objective: She decided to become an airplane pilot. Valérie André not only pursued both professions; she thrived in them. She became a brain surgeon, a parachutist and a helicopter pilot who was said to be the first woman to fly rescue missions in combat zones for any military force. She was also the first Frenchwoman to be named a general and was a five-time winner of the Croix de Guerre, for bravery in Indochina and Algeria.”

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Continue reading “Oneida silverware started out as a sex and eugenics commune”