mathewingram.com/work – Page 2 – Links that interest me and maybe you

September 22, 2026

He hiked the entire 2,193-mile Appalachian Trail at 91

More than 14 million older adults fall every year in the U.S., perhaps none so often as 91-year-old Dale Sanders. By his count, Sanders fell 71 times while reclaiming his record as the oldest hiker to complete the Appalachian Trail. Six were what he calls hard falls, including one that led to a brief hospitalization and another just 200 yards from the finish. But none were enough to permanently divert him from the 2,193-mile (3,530-kilometer) trail that runs between Springer Mountain in Georgia and Mount Katahdin in Maine. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy defines a thru-hike as completing all of the trail’s sections in any order within a year, allowing for pauses. Sanders started Sept. 6 in West Virginia, hopscotched around with some brief breaks and finished Monday atop Maine’s highest peak, where he paused to pray at the sign marking the summit. Sanders, whose trail name is Grey Beard, first set the Appalachian Trail record in 2017 at age 82. Four years later, his 83-year-old friend M.J. Eberhart, aka Nimblewill Nomad, took the title. But within months, Sanders announced his comeback plan. (via PBS)

Moby Dick wasn’t exciting enough so Hollywood invented an evil half-brother for Captain Ahab

The Sea Beast, the first film adaptation of Moby-Dick, begins with a leather-bound edition of the novel opening to page one, but the phrase “Call me Ishmael” is nowhere to be found. That’s because there’s no Ishmael in this movie at all. Instead, theatergoers a hundred years ago were introduced to a new character: Captain Ahab’s evil younger brother, Derek. Yes, Derek. This silent film, released in 1926, offers the story of a dreamy and handsome young harpooner named Ahab Ceeley, cut down in his prime by both fraternal and cetaceous violence. The Hollywood leading man John Barrymore plays Ahab as a valiant lover, wooing the beautiful Esther with his nautical prowess and igniting the envy of his jealous half brother, who hopes to steal Esther’s heart. The dastardly Derek stealthily shoves his sibling into the jaws of a vicious sperm whale, then convinces the now-disabled Ahab that his sweetheart could never accept him in his disfigured condition. Plunged into a steely despair, the captain focuses his hate on the legendary Moby Dick—at least until he discovers the truth. “Your worst enemy ain’t Moby Dick,” a sailor eventually informs him, “it’s your half brother, Derek.” (via The Paris Review)

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September 21, 2026

Why did this trainer at a riding academy shoot a student?

Until 2019, when he attempted to kill one of his students, Michael Barisone was a leading rider and trainer in the horse-handling sport of dressage. Today, he still owns a dressage farm in Loxahatchee, Florida, twenty miles inland from Palm Beach. On five acres, he has a stucco house that’s connected to a barn; white-fenced paddocks shaded by palms; and an outdoor riding ring. Along one end of the ring is a common neighborhood fixture: an eighty-foot-long mirror. Barisone, who’s in his early sixties, with a Will Ferrell chin and a muscular build, can hold a conversation about his own good judgment, and the iniquity of his enemies, while riding a horse and monitoring his own reflection. In Barisone’s Loxahatchee kitchen there is a dark-green safe the size of a vending machine. It used to stand in his office on the New Jersey farm. He has never seriously contested the idea that, on August 7, 2019, he took a handgun from the safe and drove a few hundred yards, to a house on his property where Lauren Kanarek, a thirty-eight-year-old student of his, was boarding with her boyfriend. He shot her twice. (via The New Yorker)

He was cleaning out his garage and found a box marked SECRET in a hidden crawlspace

Jason Hurdle was clearing space in his garage for his Halloween decorations when he pulled back an unassuming sheet of plywood from the wall, revealing a crawl space he’d never seen before. Inside was a dusty cardboard box full of weathered files that looked like trash. But as he carried the box out to the flatbed of his truck and reached for a garbage bin, a breeze lifted one of the covers, and a word in red block letters stopped him: “SECRET.” A mechanic for his local school district near Waterloo, New York, Hurdle doesn’t encounter government documents with classified markings. Initially, he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. But as he read the pages, he started to get an idea.The 80-year-old, onionskin pages were mostly handwritten, first-person accounts by American prisoners of war, or POWs, describing their experiences in German captivity during World War II. In July, the National Archives announced the documents had been safely recovered by its Archival Recovery Program. (via the Washington Post)

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September 11, 2026

This forgotten pioneer was the Jackie Robinson of golf

How good a golfer was Ted Rhodes? At the 1948 US Open, he finished the first round just three shots behind the leader – and eventual winner – Ben Hogan. But there’s more to the story: Rhodes was the first Black competitor in the tournament in its modern era, during a time of widespread segregation in American sport. In addition to reintegrating the US Open, Rhodes was part of a 1948 lawsuit against the PGA, which had restricted membership to white people. The PGA responded with a settlement and a promise to change, but according to the book, instead it shifted the status of tournaments from open to invitational, allowing the organization to tacitly continue segregation. Before the PGA reversed its stance, some courses welcomed Black players for PGA events, including Phoenix Country Club for the 1952 Phoenix Open, where the Black entrants included Rhodes and a crucial figure in his life: boxing great Joe Louis. It was golf that connected them – when not in the ring, the heavyweight champ liked to go out on the links, with Rhodes as his teacher. During and after his playing career, Rhodes helped spread interest in golf among Black people through his instruction. (via The Guardian)

Some scientists believe we would be better off burying plastic garbage instead of recycling it

Every child is taught that landfill is the worst place our trash can end up. It is the sad consequence of a failure to recycle: a mountain of waste leaking chemicals and smells, blighting the land forever. What if that picture is wrong? What if landfill, properly done, is actually one of the cleanest, cheapest, and most environmentally sensible things we can do with our waste? It turns out that for much of what we throw away, the humble landfill beats the recycling bin. The case against landfill has two parts. The first part is that there are efficient, cheap, or environmentally friendly ways to practically reuse or recycle materials, rather than landfilling, meaning that there is a reasonable alternative. The second is that landfill itself is unsustainable, or environmentally unfriendly, meaning that we need an alternative. Both are false. It’s natural to assume that reusable always means better. But this intuition treats different materials as interchangeable and ignores the cost of making them in the first place. Once we account for energy, labor, and other inputs, reuse pays off only in selective cases. (via Works In Progress)

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September 10, 2026

I don’t like it but the Trump DoJ is right on AI and fair use

I’ve written about this topic a number of times before, but in this case I’m tempted to re-use the popular meme “When the worst person in the world makes a good point,” as I did awhile back when I wrote about Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI for (among other things) not actually being open. In this case, the worst person is the Trump government – or, to be more specific, the Department of Justice. Obviously not everyone in the DoJ is tainted by the association with Trump, and many of them may be hard working and smart lawyers who would like nothing better than to be associated with a different administration, and I choose to believe that those are the ones who wrote the brief that the Trump government recently filed in the copyright case between the New York Times and OpenAI. In a nutshell, the brief argues that scanning news stories and other content owned by the New York Times for the purposes of training an AI model should be covered by the fair use exemption in U.S. copyright law – and, of course, implies that all content owned by corporations or other rightsholders is theoretically covered by the same exclusion. As some of you may know by now, this is a conclusion that I agree with.

To recap for those of you who aren’t familiar with the case, the New York Times sued OpenAI in December of 2023, claiming that its ChatGPT model was trained on NYT content, and that the newspaper publisher should be entitled to billions of dollars in compensation as a result. The newspaper’s complaint, filed in Manhattan federal court, accused OpenAI (and its then-partner Microsoft) of trying to “free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism” by using it as a way to give information to users. The lawsuit added that “there is nothing ‘transformative’ about using The Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it.” This latter statement is a crucial element in the newspaper company’s argument, since one of the four factors that the courts take into account when considering a fair-use case (and the one that courts often deem to be the most important factor) is whether the infringing use could be seen as “transformative.”

It’s worth noting that the point about OpenAI free-riding on the Times in order to create an alternative way of giving users the same information was buttressed in the lawsuit by an exhibit the Times said showed that ChatGPT gave users the entire text of NYT articles for free when asked to do so. However, OpenAI responded that this was not the way the AI model was supposed to be used, and that the Times only managed to generate the entire text of an article by repeatedly prompting the AI with long sections of the article, and even then it took many tries before it succeeded. “Even when using such prompts, our models don’t typically behave the way The New York Times insinuates, which suggests they either instructed the model to regurgitate or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts,” OpenAI said at the time. In any case, OpenAI said that it had changed the way ChatGPT worked so that this was no longer possible. The whole point of the model, the company said, was not to reproduce the entire text of existing articles but merely to use those articles as raw material to train ChatGPT to understand text.

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September 9, 2026

She’s 17 years old and her brain won’t let her forget anything

Known as the human calendar to her friends but nicknamed AJ in later research reports, the woman was looking for help. “I want to know why I remember everything,” she said. AJ told the scientists that she couldn’t turn her memory off, even when she was engaged in other activities that demanded her attention, like talking to a friend. The scientists reported on AJ’s condition, and coined the term “hyperthymesia” to describe it. Almost uniformly, those who have the condition find the memories—which tend to be carefully indexed by date—intrusive, uncontrollable, and distressing. Which is why the recently published case study of a 17-year-old girl dubbed TL is commanding attention. Like others with hyperthymesia, TL has an exceptionally intense and vivid memory for the events that have occurred over her short life. She can provide an especially rich amount of perceptual, spatial, and temporal information, and even recall events from multiple points of view. But unlike the others, she is able to organize these memories into a kind of “memory palace,” and can access them whenever she likes. (via Nautilus)

They rented jet-skis for an hour and wound up fighting for their lives in the open ocean

They had become, in an instant, two indiscernible specks stranded in a dark and boundless sea. The jet skis that had carried them past the breakwater had been swept away. The shore of Long Beach, Calif. — where their evening jaunt had begun — was no longer in sight. Now the longtime friends clung to life jackets while choking on fierce waves, their bodies dangling in the Pacific Ocean. It was Aug. 16, and the last rays of sun had faded. It was not clear if help was on the way. Mr. Carbullido was dazed. He had been thrown from his jet ski and landed on his back, the wind knocked out of him. He appeared unable to comprehend the urgency of the situation. At 47, Ms. Dubray was a strong swimmer; it was not unusual for her to go into the ocean every day of the week, even to take her kayak out at night. But as she left Mr. Carbullido and set off for the glimmer in the distance, the water churned with an unfamiliar terror. Every few strokes, she shouted her friend’s name so he could hear her voice. She heard no response. (via the NYT)

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September 8, 2026

An ex-cop said he stole millions so he could give it to the poor

It was the largest armed robbery in Austrian history. The heist had been near perfectly executed — perfect, that is, except for one small oversight. The thieves didn’t realize that the ATM had a security camera that automatically took photos of the street. The images were blurry, but they revealed that the perpetrator who climbed into the van was short enough to stand upright without hitting their head. Detectives decided that it was almost certainly a woman. They soon homed in on a former Loomis employee who, when she worked for the company, had scheduled the routes and was only five feet three inches tall. Investigators were stunned when she named her accomplice: Gabriel E., a former officer in the city’s WEGA unit, the Viennese equivalent of SWAT. When detectives asked why he had committed such an audacious crime, he replied that he hadn’t stolen the money for himself. He’d done it for the children of Africa; he planned to build an orphanage there. It sounded absurd—the kind of desperate lie a thief might invent to deflect blame or ameliorate punishment—but it was very much the truth. (via The Atavist)

He survived for five nights in the mountains by eating wildflowers and hiding in a cave

A man who survived a grueling five nights in British Columbia’s Coast Mountains is sharing more about his experience. Stanislav Volo became the subject of a massive search after he failed to return from a hike on Sunday after riding up the Sea-to-Sky Gondola, just south of Squamish. Search and rescue crews found him Friday evening on the Indian Arm Forest Service Road after he’d descended the mountain injured, but under his own power. In an interview with CBC News on Saturday after being discharged from the hospital, the 43-year-old father of two was in good spirits, despite bruises and a black eye. Volo had intended to hike the Mount Habrich Loop. He said his phone died when he got to the top of the mountain, and he was unable to find his way down. Volo said he spent several nights sheltering in a small cave near a waterfall, where he focused on recovering, trying to stay warm. He said he rationed a few packages of gummy bears before he discovered a sweet-tasting wildflower to eat. (via the CBC)

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September 4, 2026September 3, 2026

Crows make human friends but also hold grudges for years

Many people who receive attention from crows feel that the birds have more complex motives. “It seemed like they would just come by to hang out,” my sister tells me — like, well, friends. What is a friend, anyway? For a scholarly perspective, I spoke to Thom van Dooren, a field philosopher at the University of Sydney. He believes crows relate to people in ways that meet several conditions for friendship. Criterion one: You must know a friend from a stranger. “In order to strike up a friendship, you have to be the kinds of organisms who can firstly recognize one another as individuals,” he says. Here, the avians have an advantage. While people struggle to tell crows apart, crows are startlingly good at identifying us. In experiments, urban crows held long grudges against people who mistreated them, cawing harshly and forming mobs upon seeing the face of their persecutor—even years later. My sister’s crow companions knew her when she had a different haircut or wore a hat or sunglasses. (via Audobon)

A food scientist says he would love to taste the rotting fish sauce from an abandoned factory

Take capelin, a small silvery fish in the smelt family. Now add salt. Then throw those two ingredients in 110 vats, each of them about 10 feet tall, and let them sit in a defunct factory for over two decades. The resulting stench might haunt an entire community, as it has the people of St. Mary’s, a coastal town of about 300 people in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. In 2019, one resident described the ritual of abandoning her home every summer, boarding up the windows and doors so the smell doesn’t permeate her belongings. The people of St. Mary’s have long fought for the fish sludge to be cleaned up; after an aborted attempt in 2016, that work finally began in earnest this week. There are 900,000 liters of fish sauce to remove — some of it just liquid, some of it with fish solids. I spoke with food scientist Bryan Quoc Le earlier this week. Given his background in chemistry and Vietnamese cuisine, he was the ideal expert to unpack this horrifying and possibly delicious situation. (via Defector)

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September 3, 2026

The co-pilot who bombed Hiroshima never got over it

Ask most people who flew the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb and you’ll get one name: Paul Tibbets. He’s the one who named the Enola Gay after his mother, the one who spent decades insisting he never lost a night’s sleep over Hiroshima, the one whose life has been written up in a bestselling autobiography and a dozen documentaries. Sitting next to him that morning was a co-pilot named Robert Lewis, a man who was actually supposed to be flying that plane as its commander, and whose reaction to what he’d just witnessed is one of the most quoted lines to come out of the entire mission. Almost nobody knows the rest of his story. Lewis wasn’t originally supposed to be the co-pilot of anything. He was the regular aircraft commander of the Superfortress 44-86292, the B-29 that would become the Enola Gay, and had flown it on its first six missions with his own hand-picked crew. (via Utterly Interesting)

Proof that Australian convict pirates hijacked a ship and sailed to Japan in 1830

An amateur historian has unearthed compelling evidence that the first Australian maritime foray into Japanese waters was by convict pirates on an audacious escape from Tasmania almost two centuries ago. Fresh translations of samurai accounts of a “barbarian” ship in 1830 give startling corroboration to a story modern scholars had long dismissed as convict fantasy: that a ragtag crew of criminals encountered a forbidden Japan at the height of its feudal isolation. The brig Cyprus was hijacked by convicts bound from Hobart to Macquarie Harbour in 1829, in a mutiny that took them all the way to China. Its maverick skipper was William Swallow, a onetime British cargo ship apprentice in the Napoleonic wars, who in a piracy trial in London the following year told of a samurai cannonball in Japan knocking a telescope from his hand. (via The Guardian)

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September 3, 2026

Yes, we should be very worried about the Hugging Face hack

About a month ago, I (and many others) wrote about an incident in which two AI models from OpenAI — one that has been released publicly, called Sol, and one that was still in testing mode with no assigned name — were asked to find the answers to a series of tests as part of something called the ExploitGym, which is a system that tests an AI model’s ability to find back doors, hacks and other “exploits” or software vulnerabilities. Instead of trying to figure out the answers on their own, however, the two AI engines conspired to find their way onto the internet (which they were not supposed to do) and then hacked into Hugging Face, an open-source database of AI-related info, where they got what they were looking for. In the piece I wrote after the incident was first reported, I asked whether we should be worried about the hack, and while I didn’t come up with a yes or no, there were definitely things that seemed worrisome. But now we have the benefit of two detailed reports on what really happened, and the correct answer seems to be unequivocally yes, we should be very worried!

One of the reports in question comes from METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research), a non-profit that monitors and evaluates the safety of AI models. A team of researchers spent a week onsite at OpenAI analyzing the Hugging Face hack — which was only possible with the help of other AI agents, because of the scale of what happened. A simple graphic at the beginning, illustrating a timeline of the events, looks cartoonish, and would be easy to dismiss were it not for the actual text on the items in that timeline. In a nutshell, it was not just a couple of models that decided to pursue the HuggingFace hack — it was what can only be described as a “swarm” of up to several thousand semi-independent agents, which were spawned in order to come up with ways of solving the ExploitGym problem. This swarm created and used an unauthorized and secret message board to coordinate the attack, with some agents given subsets of the main problem (i.e., how to get out on the internet and find a solution).

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September 2, 2026

He escaped from a memory unit by listening to the keypad tones

At the Elmcroft of Lebanon, Tennessee, the staff of the memory-care unit knew the code to the keypad that controlled the exit door. Residents weren’t supposed to be able to leave unattended. That’s how the system worked: the keypad stood between those in the facility’s care and the risks outside of it. But on March 2, 2020, the system broke down—because one resident realized the keypad was giving the code away. That afternoon, a husband and wife living in the memory-care unit left the facility. While the man and woman were gone about 30 minutes before a stranger picked them up two blocks away and returned them to the facility, uninjured, the real question came afterward: how did they manage to get through the locked exit in the first place? Local reporters say the man told staff that he had previously worked with Morse code in the military and learned the door’s numeric exit code by listening as staff punched it on the keypad. From those sounds, he figured out the code well enough to use it himself. (via Popular Mechanics)

How orchids helped inspire the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin

In Darwin’s woods I was moved that I was feeling pleasure from something he initiated but never got to see. And in his woods are some plants he would be fascinated by. Here and there in the deep shade under the beeches is a species of orchid called violet helleborine. The orchids time their flowering for when fruits have fallen to the ground and wasps are patrolling for food. Bees avoid the gloom of the understory, but wasps don’t mind it, and are attracted to the helleborines by the promise of an intoxicating nectar (itself made by a symbiosis with fungi). When they drink it, becoming dusted with pollen as they do so, the wasps seem to get drunk. They give up on personal hygiene; they let themselves go. This means they don’t groom themselves with anything like the care they normally would, and pollen remains stuck to them. They stagger to the next flower, like a pub crawl with bonus pollination events. If you examine the orchid flowers, you’ll find a sort of shield stopping the pollen falling from the male parts of the flower onto the female parts, preventing self-pollination. (via LitHub)

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September 1, 2026

They fell in love but had to check they weren’t brother and sister

For years, Arthur Kermalvezen, the child of a sperm donor, saw possible fathers everywhere he went. “I imagined it might be my teacher, the people I saw on the bus… and I was very angry because it’s impossible to live like this.” When, as an adult, he fell in love with Audrey, another sperm donor baby from Paris, the question became even more pressing. Audrey describes the moment they met at a gathering for donor conceived activists in 2010 as “love at first sight” – but was this connection a romantic or genetic attraction? When they were born, there were only two sperm banks in Paris and many men had made multiple donations – so there was a real possibility they could be half-siblings. Before building a life together, Arthur and Audrey needed to know whether they were related. But in France, laws governing genetic testing and donor anonymity made finding the answer extremely difficult. In France, only a research scientist, doctor or judge can order and supervise a genetic test, and people can be fined more than €3,500 ($4,288; £3,191) for possessing a home testing kit. (via the BBC)

He was America’s greatest industrial designer but hardly anyone knows his name

Outside of the field of product and transportation design, too few people know who Raymond Loewy was. The best-known industrial designer, founder of the industrial design profession, and member of the pantheon of our greatest designers, it is time for wider recognition of this amazing man. Coming to the United States from France in 1919 at the age of 25 with $40 in his pocket, Loewy brought with him a love of trains, cars, and good design, but he soon also developed a love of America. Called “the frog” and “a refrigerator designer” by leaders of the auto industry, he created some of the most visionary automobiles in American history. He trained and developed dozens of other top designers. Today we see his work every time we see Air Force One, the Shell Oil or Exxon logos, or the Greyhound dog on a bus. Over his 60-year career, he reshaped the world as we know it. (via Profectus)

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August 31, 2026August 31, 2026

The plot to topple the US government after World War I

In July 1933, former Marine General Smedley Butler was visited by a pair of gentlemen who had come to urge him to run for the office of National Commander of the American Legion, an influential organization of veterans. Though Butler declined the invitation, one of the men⁠— Gerald MacGuire⁠— made several subsequent visits during which he disclosed additional details. He claimed to represent The Committee for a Sound Dollar, whose primary purpose was to pressure the president to reinstate the gold standard. He implied that his organization had the support of several political leaders, and the financial backing of some of the country’s most affluent individuals and successful corporations. The credibility of MacGuire’s claims was reinforced when he produced evidence of considerable cash resources and made some eerily accurate predictions regarding personnel changes in the White House. He also described the still-secret American Liberty League, a high-profile group whose principal players were wealthy Americans, including the leaders of DuPont, JP Morgan, US Steel, General Motors, Standard Oil, Colgate, Heinz Foods and Chase National Bank. (via Damn Interesting)

The Mayo Clinic apologizes because its founder dug up the corpse of an indigenous man

For 156 years, the Santee Dakota people have waited for what happened in a casino conference room in Santee, Neb., a few weeks ago. The Mayo Clinic apologized for the desecration of Marpiya Okinajin, known as “Cut Nose,” who was hanged in 1862 in Mankato, Minn., one of 38 Native Americans executed under orders from President Abraham Lincoln in the largest mass execution in U.S. history. The Santee tribe was forced from Minnesota. Cut Nose was buried in a shallow grave. But a doctor dug up the body, “carted the corpse to his office, dissected it, melted off the flesh and made a skeleton he studied and allowed his children to play with,” columnist Matthew Hansen writes at the Omaha World Herald. The doctor was William Mayo, founder of the Mayo Clinic, where Cut Nose’s skull remained on display until it was returned in 1998. Mayo had a practice in Le Sueur, Minn. Earlier this year, officials of the Mayo Clinic contacted a descendant who is also a Mayo employee, and asked if it would be OK to establish a scholarship that would allow one Native American student a year to go to medical school free. (via NewsCut)

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August 28, 2026

You may be a risk-taker because of this parasite that lives in cats

The organism in question is a protozoan, meaning a single-celled animal, and it’s called Toxoplasma gondii. It’s one of the most successful parasites on the planet. Depending on which country’s serology data you look at, somewhere between eleven per cent of Americans, thirty per cent of the world’s population, and above eighty per cent of the historic French are estimated to be carrying it right now. Most of them have no idea. Most of them never will. In immunocompetent adults, latent Toxoplasma infection produces no measurable symptoms for the rest of the person’s life. But it does something almost nobody knows about, which is that it settles into the brain and stays there, forming small cysts of dormant parasite cells inside the neurons and glia of its human hosts, and quietly doing whatever it’s doing to the tissue around them. What that is, in rodents, has been extensively documented. What it might be, in humans, is one of the more interesting open questions in modern neurobiology. (via Space Daily)

“Mad honey” made in Nepal will stop your heart if you eat too much of it

A few months ago, a friend of mine told me that his father-in-law had been rushed to the hospital after eating some wild honey brought back from the hills of Nepal. Within about 30 minutes, his heart rate had dropped dangerously low and his blood pressure had collapsed. He recovered, but the episode was terrifying for the whole family. As a chemical ecologist from Nepal, I knew immediately what had happened. My friend’s father-in-law had eaten wild honey, known locally as “bhir mauri ko maha,” from the Himalayan cliff bee. These bees forage on rhododendron flowers that carry a natural toxin called grayanotoxin. As bees collect the nectar, the toxin ends up concentrated in the honey. This is what’s now popularized worldwide as “mad honey.” Eat a teaspoonful and you might feel pleasantly warm and slightly light-headed. Eat more than a few tablespoons and your heart rate can drop to life-threatening levels. The Gurung people of Nepal have built up knowledge of safe doses over generations. (via The Conversation)

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August 27, 2026August 27, 2026

The bizarre bomb plot that blew up a Lake Tahoe casino

“I don’t think it belongs here.” Such was the assessment of Bob Vinson, the graveyard shift supervisor at Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. The “here” Vinson referred to was a nook just outside the telephone equipment room in the employees-only portion of the second floor of the hotel. The “it” was a curious piece of equipment of unknown origin loitering conspicuously in the cramped side room. It was a metallic gray box about the size of a desk, with a smaller box attached on top near the rear right corner. The front face of the smaller box was an incomprehensible control panel occupied by 28 metal toggle switches in five neat rows, each labeled with a numbered sticker. All of these switches were situated in the down position except for #23, which was toggled up⁠⁠—an oddly ominous asymmetry. Whoever had left the machine had taken the time to place each corner on blocks of wood, and these blocks pressed deep dimples into the red-orange carpet, suggesting that the equipment had significant mass. In spite of its resemblance to some kind of manufactured electromechanical office machine, it had no power cord, and no obvious power switch, just the 28 enigmatic toggles. (via Damn Interesting)

An Icelandic TV station aired an episode of the Teletubbies but with audio from The Sopranos

In 2012, Icelandic television viewers were in for a major surprise when a showing of Teletubbies featured an NSFW subtitle-dubbing from HBO’s The Sopranos. Eh-Oh! The shows couldn’t be more opposite. For one, Teletubbies is geared towards children; therefore, Laa-Laa, Po, Dipsy, and Tinky-Winky speak in a language only toddlers could understand. The Sopranos, on the other hand, is a crime drama following members of the mob in New Jersey, often featuring language of a different sort. While it was definitely a major error on the station’s part, funnily enough, the stark contrast really works? The dubbing over the Teletubbies episode was from Season 4, Episode 10 of The Sopranos, “The Strong Silent Type”. Unlike the Teletubbies fighting over the last slice of Tubby Toast, the family is holding an intervention for Christopher. They’ve become increasingly fed up with his drug use. Adriana brings up the fact that he recently killed their dog, Cosette, by sitting on it while he was high. (via Vice)

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August 27, 2026

That $18-billion Facebook case is based mostly on vibes

I was already working on a piece for this week about the multiple state and federal lawsuits claiming that Facebook and Instagram harm teens, cause addiction and depression etc. when I saw the headlines saying Meta had agreed to settle many of these claims (most of the state ones anyway) by paying up to $18 billion in fines, with a majority of that coming in the form of annual payments that are to be used for online safety programs for children. According to reports, 30 percent of the total amount will only be paid if TikTok and YouTube also implement controls such as strict age limits, daily usage limits, etc. which Meta has agreed to. Meta is also going to turn off default features such as auto-video plays and “like” counts (but apparently these could be turned on again by users without too much trouble). A block on night-time use by teens, which will extend from midnight to 6 am, however, can’t be disabled except by a parent. There will be an option for users to have a non-algorithmic feed, and Meta has agreed to a number of other terms, including the use of an independent auditor, and a prohibition from making “further false, misleading, or deceptive statements around its safety features.”

So that’s it then, right? Why I am I even writing about this after Meta has agreed to all that? Clearly, the company is basically admitting that it did all the things the lawsuits claim that it did – that it deliberately made its products as addictive as possible, even when it knew that this would cause harm; that it targeted children specifically, and ignored its own internal research showing that Instagram in particular causes emotional harm, depression, etc.; and that it hid or lied about that research, and deliberately made its products worse even when it knew about the harms they might cause. And this isn’t the first settlement Meta has agreed to in similar cases: earlier in August, it agreed to pay a total of almost $1 billion in a case in New Mexico, after a judge said the social media giant is a “public nuisance” akin to air pollution – the first successful state prosecution of Meta based on child safety. In March, meanwhile, a jury in California awarded a woman $6 million because she said she was addicted to Instagram since she was a child and that it caused her mental distress, including the development of a body dysmorphic disorder.

If you follow these kinds of cases, it probably won’t surprise you that Meta didn’t admit to anything in any of these settlements. It simply agreed to drop the cases in return for making payments – payments that, according to my calculations, amount to about 0.005 percent of Meta’s revenue. Even the latest $18 billion mega-settlement works out to less than one-tenth of one percent of the company’s revenue. In other words, Meta paid because it was worth it to get the cases out of the public eye, not because it actually believes any of the allegations against it are true – and because its lawyers argued there was a non-zero chance of the result being even more expensive, as much as $200 billion according to some estimates (the stock rose after the settlement news). As for the changes it has agreed to make to the ways that its apps work, they are in many cases reversible – which means they are likely to be about as effective as Australia’s social-media ban for teens has been (which is to say not at all) – and I would argue are cosmetic at best.

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