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It’s 1902, in what was known as the “Paris of the Caribbean,” Saint-Pierre, Martinique. And on May 7th, Ludger Sylbaris gets arrested. He works by the docks and he’s a guy that likes to enjoy a drink or two. We don’t know what it is that he did wrong on that day. But we know Ludger was up to something. And the authorities decided to put him in this cell for the night. It’s a solitary cell in the side of a hill. Half of it is underground. There’s no windows. And really the only opening is this slit under the door. When the volcano explodes, black clouds cover the sky for 50 miles, and it starts spewing a deadly combination of superheated gas, ash, and rock that races at 400 miles an hour from the volcano. Everyone dies – 30,000 people. Except for Ludger. But he’s trapped in a stone cell underground and everyone else is dead. (via Atlas Obscura)

Scientists believe the Easter Island statues may have walked to their final destinations

Easter Island is famous for its giant monumental statues, called moai, built some 800 years ago and typically mounted on platforms called ahu. Scholars have puzzled over the moai on Easter Island for decades, pondering their cultural significance, as well as how a Stone Age culture managed to carve and transport statues weighing as much as 92 tons. One hypothesis is that the statues were transported in a vertical position, with workers using ropes to essentially “walk” the moai onto their platforms. The oral traditions of the people of Rapa Nui certainly include references to the moai “walking” from the quarry to their platforms. A new paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science offers fresh experimental evidence of “walking” moai, based on 3D modeling of the physics and new field tests. (via Ars Technica)

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Continue reading “He only survived a volcano eruption because he was in jail”

In January of 2016, Avner Harari strolled out of a Tel Aviv prison for the umpteenth time and announced he was finally going straight. The convicted assassin had spent 40 of his 61 years behind bars and had cultivated a reputation as the Israeli mafia’s “Terminator”. Now, Harari hoped that people might forget the six mobsters that police allege he whacked, as he unveiled an unlikely career change. Harari had spent his most recent prison term crooning songs in the Mizrahi style, a Middle-Eastern music. His lilting voice was so angelic that inmates nicknamed him the Nightingale. Free from his cage after serving 37 months for firing an anti-tank missile at a rival crime boss and six years for conspiring to shoot another with a silencer, he released two tender ballads. But Harari’s record bombed. And 17 days after his release, a series of terrible explosions rocked Tel Aviv. (via the FT)

No one knows where the founder of the Nation of Islam was from or how he died

Wallace Fard Muhammad appeared in Detroit in 1930, where he founded a new religious movement that came to be called the Nation of Islam. Both his origin and fate are uncertain. Nation of Islam tradition holds that Fard was born in Mecca, while scholars have considered a wide variety of possible origins and backgrounds. In the 1960s, the FBI identified Fard as “Wallie Dodd Ford”, a Los Angeles restaurateur who had spent three years in prison in California for the sale of a narcotic; The Nation of Islam disputes the identification, while most scholars accept it. Fard disappeared in 1934. Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad maintained that Fard had been deported, while others speculated that Fard may have died by foul play or due to complications from his diabetes. (via Wikipedia)

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Continue reading “He was a mafia assassin but what he really wanted was to be a pop star”

Does it feel like you are living in a bubble? According to a lot of experts, you are — a bubble created by hysteria related to a little thing known as artificial intelligence, which you may have heard of. Even Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI — and therefore the man who many people feel has inflated this bubble more or less singlehandedly — has admitted that we are in a bit of a bubble right now. And when the bubble inflaters admit we are in a bubble, you know it’s real, right? But then, smart financial and tech analysts have been warning about bubble-like (bubblicious?) conditions for some time now. In July, the chief economist at Apollo Global Management, a massive hedge fund, warned that the top 10 AI-related stocks were completely detached from reality, and that the bubble around AI was worse than the investment hype around internet stocks in the late 1990s, just before the dot-com stock-market crash. An estimated five trillion dollars in theoretical market value was vaporized almost overnight between 2000 and 2002.

It may feel sometimes as though AI products and companies and stocks have been around for a long time, but ChatGPT was launched less than three years ago. At first, it seemed like a harmless toy, and the company that created it, OpenAI, was also seen as mostly harmless — a nonprofit, research-oriented outfit. That impression changed quickly, however, as OpenAI started to do large funding deals with Microsoft and others, and then there was the whole boardroom “let’s get rid of Sam Altman” drama in 2023, which ended with a bunch of people leaving and Altman retaining control (I wrote about it here if you’re interested in more background). That was in part about whether AI research was proceeding too quickly and whether AI would ultimately achieve human-like intelligence — known in the biz as AGI — and then turn evil and destroy humanity (I wrote about this as well for Torment Nexus). Suffice it to say that no one really cares about any of that any more, everyone is racing towards AGI as quickly as possible so they can cash in.

From an investment point of view, after crypto currency failed to ignite a big enough pile of money for tech investors, a lot of that greedy money poured into AI investments, and found its way to several of the big names, including Nvidia, the chip-maker whose graphics processing units (GPUs) were once used primarily for playing video games, but now are acquired by the truckload in order to power giant AI server farms that have to boil the ocean in order to produce AI “slop” (as the kids like to call it) like videos of Karl Marx breakdancing or Albert Einstein talking about the new iPhone or painter Bob Ross standing in his studio playing Call of Duty, or SpongeBob SquarePants flying an airplane into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. Nvidia’s market value is close to $5 trillion, or about the same as all the vaporized market value in the entire dot-com bubble. OpenAI, which has done some new rounds of funding, is worth about $500 billion, the most valuable private company in the world, and possibly in history.

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Continue reading “Sometimes bubbles can be good”

Why do astronauts leave things behind on the Moon? There are many reasons. Often, it is to make room for Moon rocks to be taken back to Earth. As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin began their return journey to Earth, they disposed of anything they didn’t need. This included the tube that the US flag had been rolled up in, the TV camera they’d used to send footage back to Earth, and the tools they’d used to gather moon rock and dust. In doing this, they created a ‘toss zone’, which lies to the west of the Apollo 11 landing site. In the Apollo missions that followed, many things were left on the Moon, adding up to an estimated 400,000 pounds of stuff. There are a total of 96 bags of human waste on the Moon. Scientists are keen to one day bring this back to Earth, to study how its time on the Moon has affected it, but for now it sits in bags. (via RMG)

Scientists were baffled because she only had half a brain but had perfect vision

Scientists discovered how a 10-year-old girl born with half a brain is able to see normally through one eye. The youngster, from Germany, has both fields of vision in one eye and is the only known case of its kind in the world. Researchers used an MRI to reveal how the girl’s brain had rewired itself in order to process information from the right and left visual fields in spite of her not having a whole brain. The right hemisphere in the girl’s brain failed to develop in the womb. Normally, the left and right fields of vision are processed and mapped by opposite sides of the brain, but scans showed that retinal nerve fibres that should go to the right hemisphere of the brain diverted to the left. Further, the researchers found that within the visual cortex of the left hemisphere, which creates an internal map of the right field of vision, ‘islands’ had been formed within it to specifically deal with, and map out, the left visual field. (via U of Glasgow)

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Continue reading “There are 96 bags of human waste sitting on the Moon”

In 1934, Leon Dionne called a local newspaper in Ontario, Canada and asked how much it would cost to print a birth announcement for his brother’s five daughters, all born to the same mother in one delivery earlier that day. At the time, the world had rarely witnessed the medical marvel of quintuplets. The identical sisters became a media sensation. The Ontario government took legal guardianship of the quints and housing them in a nursery called Quintland, which quickly became a roadside attraction that drew nearly three million spectators. By 1938, the quints were bringing in as much as 25 million Canadian dollars in tourism revenue annually, but for the quintuplets, it came at a cost. They spent half of their childhood in a so-called “baby zoo.” A trust fund they were promised was mismanaged, with just a fraction remaining by the time they entered adulthood and their personal lives were mired in tragedy. (via The Smithsonian)

At 15 years old he hacked NASA’s network and stole its space-station software

In 2000, a 16-year-old from Miami pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in a detention facility. The juvenile, whose was known on the Internet as “c0mrade,” admitted in U.S. District Court in Miami that he was responsible for computer intrusions from August 23, 1999, to October 27, 1999, into a military computer network used by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, an agency of the Department of Defense charged with reducing the threat to the U.S. and its allies from nuclear, biological, chemical, conventional and special weapons. In addition to the computer intrusions at DOD, on June 29 and 30, 1999, “c0mrade” illegally accessed a total of 13 NASA computers located at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., using two different ISPs to originate the attacks. As part of his unauthorized access, he obtained and downloaded proprietary software from NASA valued at approximately $1.7 million. (via Justice.gov)

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Continue reading “The Dionne Quintuplets were famous but it ruined their lives”

A Polish adventure skier has made history by becoming the first person to climb up and ski down Mount Everest without the use of additional oxygen. The ascent was Andrzej Bargiel’s third attempt at climbing Everest – the tallest mountain on earth at 29,032ft high – after dangerous conditions forced the 37-year-old to abandon earlier attempts in 2019 and 2022. More than 6,000 people have climbed the mountain, but only about 200 have done it without additional bottled oxygen. A few people have skied back down, but never a continuous downhill without supplementary oxygen. It took nearly 16 hours on Monday for Bargiel to climb through the “death zone”, which is above 8,000 meters where oxygen levels are dangerously low. At the top of the mountain the air is so thin that climbers only get about a third of the oxygen available at sea level. This can cause brain damage, fluid in the lungs, and even death. (via The Guardian)

The oldest and one of the weirdest musical instruments ever invented

Stalactites hang tight to the ceiling, and stalagmites push up with might from the floor: this is a mnemonic device you may once have learned. It would surely be called to mind by a visit to Luray Caverns in the American state of Virginia, home of the Great Stalacpipe Organ. Not long after the discovery of Luray Caverns itself in 1878, its stalactites were found to resonate through the underground space in an almost musical fashion when struck — a property Leland W. Sprinkle took to its logical conclusion in the mid-nineteen fifties. Conception was one thing, but execution quite another: it took him three years to locate just the right stalactites, shave them down to ring out at just the right frequency, and rig them up with electronically activated, keyboard-controlled mallets. This was not hard for the technically minded Sprinkle, who worked at the Pentagon as a mathematician and electronics scientist. (via Open Culture)

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Continue reading “He just climbed and then skied down Everest without oxygen”

“I first heard of Hit Man in May 1999, when I was a young journalist in Philadelphia. Paladin Press’s insurance company had just settled with the victims’ families for undisclosed millions, a decision that made international headlines. The case was unprecedented; never before had a publisher been accused of “aiding and abetting” murder through the publication of a book. Major media organizations that had rallied to Paladin’s defense — including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Society of Professional Journalists — now pondered the ramifications for free speech. Lost in most of the discussion was Hit Man’s mysterious author. Only one detail about her life had come to light so far: She was a divorced mother of two living in a trailer park in Florida. I grew obsessed with her. How did this woman come to write a murder manual? What had happened in her life to bring her to that point?” Vanity Fair

She claimed to be a German princess and her trial for bigamy started a publishing boom

“In early June of 1663, Mary Carleton was tried for bigamy in London’s Old Bailey. A figure of considerable public fascination, Mary had been “viewed” by an estimated five hundred visitors while in prison awaiting trial.¹ Officially, she stood accused of having wed John Carleton in London while already married to John Steadman, a shoemaker, in Canterbury. (Over the course of the trial, the possible existence of a third husband, a Dover surgeon named Day, emerged.) Unofficially, she stood accused in the court of public opinion of a far more interesting cheat: impersonating a fabulously wealthy foreigner in order to lure the hapless Carleton — a lawyer’s clerk, eighteen years old — into marriage. Though Mary herself modestly claimed noble rather than royal birth, she became widely known as the German Princess. Mary Carleton’s exploits produced a publishing boom: 1663 alone witnessed the printing of more than a dozen pamphlets about the case, a pair of autobiographical self-defenses by Mary herself, two rebuttals by John, and printed reports of the trial.” Public Domain Review

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Continue reading “Her manual for hitmen became a major First Amendment case”