I’ve seen the Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis a number of times before — once a long time ago in northern Saskwatchewan, and not long after that on a drive through northern Ontario, and then a couple of times during the intervening forty years or so, but not more than half a dozen. They have always been amazing to watch, but I can safely say that I have never seen a display like we saw at our cottage in the Ottawa Valley just before Thanksgiving. We were told by friends that the ** index — a measure of sunspot electrical activity, which is what creates the Aurora Borealis — was high, so we went out to the local cemetery to try to get a good look at the northern sky, and we were gobsmacked.
From Amusing Planet: “Joseph Pujol was born in Marseille, on the Cote d’Azur in 1857. The son of a stonemason and sculptor, Pujol discovered his unique talent when he was only ten years old. Pujol soon found that by adjusting the force with which he expelled this air, he could create musical notes of varying pitch and timbre. It was while serving in the army that Joseph Pujol was given the name “Le Pétomane”, which roughly translates as the “fart maniac”. In 1890, he took his act to Paris and persuaded Charles Zidler, founder of the newly opened Moulin Rouge, to let him perform. Pujol’s act was an immediate sensation, and for the next three years, he played to packed houses at the iconic cabaret, delighting audiences that ranged from royalty to the bourgeoisie. According to one fellow performer, Pujol was the highest-paid artist at the Moulin Rouge.”
Sixteenth-century Venice conducted its affairs in code, which was regulated by the state
From JSTOR Daily: “The secret in secretary is hidden in plain sight. In late Middle English, a secretary was literally one who kept secrets. In sixteenth-century Venice, there were professional cifrista, cipher secretaries, that is, cryptographers, writing secrets in code to secure communications from prying eyes. The Venetian city-state, which then dominated the politics and commerce of Northern Italy, the Adriatic, and the eastern Mediterranean, actively conducted its affairs in code. Cryptology was so important and widespread in Venice’s Stato de Màr (State of the Sea) it became professionalized and state controlled. Cryptology was first an intellectual pursuit that evolved into amateur use by merchants and rulers and then became professionalized in the 1500s.”
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From the Sunday Times: “At 18, he graduates from high school with excellent grades but is unemployable. He moves into an annexe, is looked after by a rotating team of carers and spends much of his time deeply absorbed in World of Warcraft, his right hand resting awkwardly on a custom-built keyboard, his head lolling to one side as he navigates an epic world. Robert and Trude sometimes sit with him while he plays, but after half an hour they find their attention drifting. After he passed away at the age of 20, they started getting emails expressing their sorrow at Mats’ death. The messages continued, a trickle becoming a flood as people conveyed their condolences and wrote paragraph after paragraph about Mats. He had a warm heart, people wrote. He was funny and imaginative, a good listener and generous. You should be proud of him. Robert and Trude eventually discovered that he had an online life they knew nothing about.”
Sir Rod Stewart has spent two decades building a massive model train set
From the BBC: “He’s one of rock’s biggest stars, but Sir Rod Stewart has finally revealed the fruits of his other great passion – model railways. In between making music and playing live, Sir Rod has been working on a massive, intricate model of a US city for the past 23 years. He unveiled it as part of an interview with Railway Modeller magazine. He then phoned in to Jeremy Vine’s BBC Radio 2 show to rebuff the host’s suggestion he had not built it himself. “I would say 90% of it I built myself,” he insisted. “The only thing I wasn’t very good at and still am not is the electricals, so I had someone else do that.” Sir Rod has released 13 studio albums and been on 19 tours during the time it took to build the city, which is modelled on both New York and Chicago around 1945. “A lot of people laugh at it being a silly hobby, but it’s a wonderful hobby,” he said.
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I realize that many people may not know or care who or what Matt Mullenweg and WordPress are, or why some people are upset about them, but after giving it a lot of thought (okay, about 10 minutes of thought) I decided to write about it anyway. I’m writing this newsletter in part for an audience — in other words, you the reader, and others like you — so when I’m deciding what to write about, I do try to take into account what you might be interested in reading about. But I’m also writing this newsletter for myself, and in this case what I care about trumps (sorry) what my readers may or may not be interested in. And I think this is about something important that goes beyond just WordPress.
Update: After publication, Matt sent me a message on Twitter with a link to a Google doc that lists some corrections and clarifications related to some of my comments here. My response is at the end of this post.
I care about Matt Mullenweg and WordPress for a number of reasons, some personal and some professional. On the personal side, I’ve been using WordPress to publish my blog for more than two decades now, and I’ve helped countless others with their WordPress-powered blogs and websites over the years. It has its quirks, but it is a great system. I’ve tried Drupal and Squarespace and literally everything else, and I keep coming back to WordPress. On the non-personal side, the Columbia Journalism Review — where I was the chief digital writer for about seven years, until a month or so ago — runs on WordPress, as do hundreds of thousands if not millions of other websites (WordPress likes to boast that it powers more than 40 percent of the sites on the web.)
Not long after I started using WordPress for my blog, which was in 2004 or so — after experimenting with Typepad and Blogger and other publishing systems — I cofounded a Web 2.0 conference in Toronto called Mesh, and one of the speakers we invited to the very first one was Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, who was then just 21 years old. I have a very clear memory of Matt sitting at a table with my friend Om Malik (whose Gigaom blog network I would later join) and others, while I tried to get a friend to stop using a local company’s terrible blog-publishing software and switch to WordPress.
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From Science.org: “In 2016, when the U.S. Congress unleashed a flood of new funding for Alzheimer’s disease research, the National Institute on Aging (NIA) tapped veteran brain researcher Eliezer Masliah as a key leader for the effort. He took the helm at the agency’s Division of Neuroscience, whose budget—$2.6 billion in the last fiscal year—dwarfs the rest of NIA combined. His roughly 800 research papers, many on how those conditions damage synapses, the junctions between neurons, have made him one of the most cited scientists in his field. However, a Science investigation has now found that scores of his lab studies are riddled with apparently falsified images used to show the presence of proteins and micrographs of brain tissue. Numerous images seem to have been inappropriately reused within and across papers, sometimes published years apart in different journals, describing divergent experimental conditions.”
A Lego fan has made a working version of a Turing machine out of Lego
From The Register: “A working Turing Machine was submitted to Lego Ideas, consisting of approximately 2,900 parts and a bucketload of extreme cleverness. The original machine was devised by mathematician Alan Turing in 1936. Turing’s idea was a hypothetical system that could simulate any computer algorithm. The design consisted of an infinitely long tape with symbols that could be moved left and right, a ‘head’ that could read the symbols and overwrite them with new ones, a finite control that described the machine’s state, and a table to link each combination of state and symbol to an instruction for what to do next. The Lego builder first came across the concept a few years ago and, despite it being an abstract model, decided to attempt making one. In addition to the constraints of making the device, there was also the challenge of fitting into the limits imposed by Lego Ideas. At the time of submission, this was 3,000 parts.”
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From Nautilus: “If we ever contact extraterrestrials, we’ll have to find a way to understand them. Who are they? What are their intentions? What have they discovered that we haven’t? Olaf Witkowski thinks the only way to begin that dialogue is to try and kill them. Clearly, there are going to be major differences between us and them. Biological, technological, and cultural gaps are likely to be as wide as interstellar space itself. “The only way to communicate with a creature that is very different from you, and you can make no assumptions at all about how they encode language or meaning, is just killing them,” Witkowski says. He argues that the only universal basis of communication, the sole feature that all life shares, whatever its form is that life wants to live.”
Experts at the Van Gogh Museum have exposed three early fakes
From The Art Newspaper: “For decades Interior of a Restaurant was regarded as a second version of an authentic painting, Interior of the Grand Bouillon-Restaurant le Chalet, Paris. This was understandable, since Van Gogh would sometimes make another version of a composition. The second version of the restaurant scene, which only surfaced in the 1950s, was recently studied after its owner submitted it for possible authentication. The colours also included Manganese blue, a synthetic pigment only patented in 1935. In the original painting the red flowers can be identified as autumn begonias, which graced restaurant tables in November or early December 1887, when the picture was completed. The artist of the second version interpreted them as yellow sunflowers, which would have been over by the end of September.”
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From the BBC: “The world’s longest treasure hunt appears to have come to an end, after an announcement in France that a buried statuette of a golden owl has finally been unearthed – after 31 years. The message was posted by Michel Becker, who illustrated the original Chouette d’Or (golden owl) book and sculpted the buried statuette in 1993. No further information about the site or the finder was available and Mr Becker was not contactable by telephone. Tens of thousands of people have taken part in the search, which has spawned a huge secondary literature in books and Internet sites. They have all been following 11 complicated puzzles set out in the first book by its creator, Max Valentin. When he died in 2009, Mr Becker took over the operation. A documentary on the treasure hunt said earlier this year that the value of the owl is estimated to be €150,000.”
Einstein invented a refrigerator with no moving parts that ran on butane
From Wikipedia: “From 1926 until 1934 Einstein and Szilárd collaborated on ways to improve home refrigeration technology. The two were motivated by contemporary newspaper reports of a Berlin family who had been killed when a seal in their refrigerator failed and leaked toxic fumes into their home. Einstein and Szilárd proposed that a device without moving parts would eliminate the potential for seal failure, and explored practical applications for different refrigeration cycles. Einstein had worked in the Swiss Patent Office, and used his experience to apply for valid patents for their inventions in several countries. The refrigerator was less efficient than existing appliances, although having no moving parts made it more reliable; the introduction of Freon made it even less attractive commercially and the Great Depression dried up funding.”
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Over the past few years, it ‘s been hard to avoid the conclusion that smartphones, and in particular the use of social media such as Instagram and TikTok, have caused an epidemic of mental health and body image problems among young people, and in particular teenaged girls — problems that in some cases have led to suicide. A recent piece in The New Yorker is just the latest in a long line of such reports: in it, writer Andrew Solomon interviews distraught parents and relatives of a number of young people who have killed themselves, and in every case the culprit seems to be their excessive use of smartphones and specifically their use of social media, which many of those involved seem to believe caused or exacerbated their childrens’ anxiety and depression.
One of the girls who died by suicide spent all her time on Instagram and was convinced she was ugly and no one would ever love her, and it turned out that her feed was full of people talking about eating disorders and suicide. Her mother says that after reading about Frances Haugen, a whistleblower who leaked thousands of internal Facebook documents about the harms of social media, she became convinced that Instagram played a role in her daughter’s death, and decided to sue Meta. The article goes on to talk about rise in the rate of deaths by suicide between age 10 and age 24 in the US since 2007, and the fact that 53 percent of Americans believe that social media is responsible. And it talks about how social media produces a dopamine effect similar to nicotine or cocaine, and explains that this is why some people get addicted to using social media.
Before I go any further, there’s no question that the stories in the New Yorker piece are heart-wrenching. Solomon writes about visiting the childhood bedrooms of boys and girls in their teens or early twenties who struggled with anxiety and depression and in the end chose to kill themselves, and their parents tell him about the guilt they feel over things they could have done. Only a robot would be able to listen to those stories and not feel for those parents and those families, and I am not trying to downplay or minimize that. But after pages and pages of these stories — more than three quarters of the way through the article — comes what I think is an important point, when Solomon writes that “research has failed to demonstrate any definite causal link” between smartphone or social-media use and depression.
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From The Smithsonian: “In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, “Wild Bill” Donovan, the leader of the Office of Strategic Services told his scientists to find a way to outfox the Axis enemies. In response, the scientists produced a number of dirty tricks, including explosive pancake mix, incendiary bombs strapped to live bats, truth drugs for eliciting information from prisoners of war, and a foul-smelling spray that mimicked the repulsive odor of fecal matter. But Operation Fantasia was the most desperate—and peculiar—of them all. Operation Fantasia was the brainchild of OSS psychological warfare strategist Ed Salinger, an eccentric businessman who had run an import/export business in Tokyo before the war. Operation Fantasia, he pitched the organization in 1943, would destroy Japanese morale by exposing soldiers and civilians to a Shinto portent of doom: kitsune, fox-shaped spirits with magical abilities.”
Two ranchers faked drought numbers to claim millions in crop insurance
From The Colorado Sun: “Into the spring of 2017, U.S. weather experts watching southeastern Colorado noticed something they’d never seen before. Storm clouds would gather over the thirsty sagebrush ranges surrounding tiny Colorado and Kansas towns like Springfield and Coolidge. On a normal day, the promising storms produced snow or rain that would fall onto a system of official weather stations at airstrips or town halls, into heated “tipping buckets.” When the teeter-totter buckets filled with a thimbleful of water, the seesaw tilted, dropping one miniature metal bucket downward to close an electrical circuit. One “tick” of the bucket, and a signal went out to National Weather Service sensors around the world that the High Plains had recorded one hundredth of an inch of water. But on many of those days, those buckets were not tipping.”
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