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From The Guardian: “When I first discovered chess, after watching the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer on HBO, I was a nine-year-old kid living in a tiny village in the mountains of Arizona. Searching for Bobby Fischer was to me what Star Wars was for kids a few years older. I was dirt poor. Tonto Village, where my sister, my brother and I lived, had nothing but dirt roads, and we’d run around barefoot most of the time. We’d disappear in the forest for hours, playing cops and robbers, building magnificent forts, making our own worlds. For most children, the challenge of living in such a small, remote place would be loneliness, only having a handful of others like yourself to play with. But that was never the case in Tonto Village. On any given summer day, there were probably around 100 of us, all under the age of 12, running around shirtless and barefoot in the dusty streets and hills and streams and forests, because we were all being raised in the Church of Immortal Consciousness – a cult.”

Two families came up with a dangerous plan to escape from East Germany in the 1970s

From Damn Interesting: “As night fell over the East German town of Pössneck on the evening of 14 September 1979, most of the town’s citizens were busy getting ready for bed. But not Günter Wetzel. The mason was in his attic, hunched over an old motor-driven sewing machine, desperately working to complete his secret project. Wetzel and his friend H. Peter Strelzyk and their families had been working on their plan for more than a year and a half, and by now the authorities were looking for them. Earlier in the day, a strong wind had arisen from the north. These were exactly the conditions that the two families had been waiting for. Around 10:00pm, Wetzel put the finishing touches on the massive patchwork project, then rounded up Strelzyk and prepared to leave. Two hours later the families were en route to a predetermined clearing on a hill. The other components of their project⁠⁠—a steel platform, a homemade gas burner, and a powerful fan⁠⁠—were already packed and ready to go. It was time.”

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Continue reading “He was a chess prodigy but he was trapped in a religious cult”

If you’ve been following the online discourse at all (and I would encourage you not to do too much of that, especially now) you may have seen a number of journalists and other commentators arguing that the blame for a big part of the unrest that we are seeing in the United States should be laid at the feet of social media (if social media had feet). Tools like X and Instagram and TikTok and Bluesky, or so the theory goes, serve only to inflame political divisions and empower the loudest and stupidest opinions out there. When combined with the bots — some of which appear to be driven by foreign agents who want to sow discord wherever possible — and the algorithms that seek engagement above all else, the whole system becomes a chaos engine, critics say. As some loyal readers of The Torment Nexus may know, I don’t really buy this argument, at least not entirely, and I went into some of the reasons why in a recent piece. But does social media help to enflame some of the political divisions and hatreds that already exist? No question.

Given all of this debate, I was fascinated to watch what happened recently in Nepal. You can read a lot more about the background to the events there at the usual news sites, including the New York Times and CNN, but the short version is that a popular uprising appears to have been ignited in part by the government’s decision in early September to ban more than 25 social-media platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, both of which are very popular with Nepalese citizens, especially younger people. The nominal reason for the ban was that the social platforms had failed to meet a requirement to register with the government — something that a number of other countries including Turkey and Brazil have also implemented in the past. Nepal’s government justified the rule and the subsequent ban in the same way that these other countries did: by arguing that the social-media platforms are filled with fake news and hate speech.

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Continue reading “On Nepal’s Discord election and social-media driven uprisings”

From Engelsberg Ideas: “The first winter was the bloodiest. Some estimates suggest that Rosa Zemlyachka’s crew shot as many as 96,000 people in the space of four months (a tenth of the total population). Though Bela Kun’s attempt at revolution in Hungary had collapsed, he remained true to Lenin’s cause; in Soviet Sevastopol, he was credited with shooting 8,000 people in one week. Gender, it seems, was no bar to common sadism, but Rosalia was housewife enough to be concerned about the wanton use of bullets. Her solution disgusted even some Bolsheviks. Instead of shooting unarmed Whites, she tied them up on makeshift barges (or even just a few thin planks) and drowned them wholesale in the Black Sea. Lenin was delighted – hence her coveted Order of the Red Banner – and her return to civilian life was smoothed by national acclaim.”

Denzel Washington paid for Chadwick Boseman to attend theater school at Oxford

From Entertainment.ie: “Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman revealed in an interview in Rolling Stone magazine that Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington paid for a then unknown Boseman to study at the University of Oxford. It came about when Boseman was in college and Phylicia Rashad, star of The Cosby Show, was his mentor. The actor applied to a summer program to study theatre at Oxford and while he was accepted, he couldn’t afford to go so Rashad called upon some friends in the entertainment business to help out. Boseman later realised that Washington was the one who financed his trip, although he kept it secret because he wanted to talk to Denzel about it first. He got the opportunity at the New York premiere of Black Panther and Denzel’s reaction was priceless, telling Boseman, “Oh so that’s why I’m here, you owe me money!”

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Continue reading “She executed thousands and her nickname was Demon”

From the Las Vegas Review Journal: “Groucho Marx called Alice Cooper ‘Coop,’ the way he used to do with actor Gary Cooper. He and the rock star met while dueting on ‘Lidia the Tattooed Lady’ at a Frank Sinatra birthday party. They became friends while living in Beverly Hills. Groucho had insomnia and would call Coop to hang out. “He had a chair next to his bed with a six pack of Budweiser, and we would sit and watch old movies,” Cooper recalls. “And then pretty soon, after about two movies were over, I’d look over and he’d be in his beret and his cigar and he’d finally go to sleep. I’d put out his cigar, turn out the lights and go home. And the next night, one o’clock in the morning: ‘Hey Coop, can’t sleep, come on over.’” It was Groucho who dubbed Alice’s horror-comedy concerts ‘vaudeville,’ a classification Alice immediately knew was right.”

She became the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by disguising herself as a man

From La Brujula Verde: “During the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, a dozen statues were inaugurated in honor of French women who stood out in different fields. The most well-known are Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Veil, and Christine de Pizan, but there is a lesser-known figure after whom a Maritime Affairs vessel had been named two years earlier, and who was also featured on a postage stamp in the Great Travelers collection. We are talking about Jeanne Baret (or Barret), a young woman from Burgundy who managed to embark on Bougainville’s famous naval expedition disguised as a man and thus became the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. She achieved this by posing as the assistant of Philibert Commerson, the voyage’s naturalist. Barret and Commerson had been a couple for years, but the presence of women aboard ships of the French Royal Navy was strictly forbidden, hence the need for disguise and to pretend they had not known each other before the voyage.”

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Continue reading “If Groucho Marx couldn’t sleep he would ask Alice Cooper over”

From Hacker News: “Nicole Eagan, the CEO of cybersecurity company Darktrace, told attendees at an event in London how cybercriminals hacked an unnamed casino through its Internet-connected thermometer in an aquarium in the lobby of the casino. According to what Eagan claimed, the hackers exploited a vulnerability in the thermostat to get a foothold in the network. Once there, they managed to access the casino’s high-roller database of gamblers and pulled it back across the network, out the thermostat, and up to the cloud. “There’s a lot of internet-of-things devices, everything from thermostats, refrigeration systems, HVAC systems, to people who bring in their Alexa devices into the offices,” Eagan told the attendees at the conference. “There’s just a lot of IoT. It expands the attack surface, and most of this isn’t covered by traditional defenses.”

Octegenarian nuns left their retirement home and moved back into their abandoned convent

From the BBC: “Three Austrian nuns in their 80s have run away from the retirement home where they were placed and gone back to their former convent. Sister Bernadette, 88, Sister Regina, 86, and Sister Rita, 82, are the last three nuns at the Kloster Goldenstein convent in Elsbethen, just outside Salzburg. They regained access with the help of former students and a locksmith. Church authorities are not happy – but the nuns are. The three nuns have spent much of their lives at Schloss Goldenstein, a castle which has been a convent and a private girls’ school since 1877. Sister Bernadette attended the school herself, arriving as a teenager in 1948. Sister Regina arrived at the convent in 1958, and Sister Rita four years later. All three went on to work at the school as teachers for many years. Sister Regina was headmistress. But the numbers of nuns dwindled. In 2022, the building was taken over by the Archdiocese of Salzburg. The community was officially dissolved at the beginning of 2024.”

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Continue reading “A casino got hacked through an internet-connected fish tank”

From The Assembly: “Freddie Wayne Huff walked into the federal courthouse in Greensboro flanked by U.S. marshals. That Huff was once one of the finest drug interdiction officers in the country, responsible for millions of dollars in drug and cash seizures, was not in dispute this afternoon. Everyone — his legal team, the judge, even the prosecutor — commended his 12-year career as a Lexington police officer and later as a state trooper. Yet they were bewildered by his transformation from drug interdiction officer to drug kingpin. Using his knowledge gained from a decade of busting drug runners, Huff exploited law enforcement procedures to save cartels millions of dollars and catapult himself to the top of North Carolina’s drug trade.   For five years, from 2016 until his arrest in 2021, Huff ran a sprawling drug empire, stretching 1,400 miles from the Mexican border to North Carolina and fueled by a network of unlikely accomplices: a former cell tower technician, U.S. Army veterans, a former Marine Corps sergeant.”

Why did a billionaire software developer’s super-yacht suddenly capsize?

From Wired: “In the predawn hours of August 19, 2024, bolts of lightning began to fork through the purple-black clouds above the Mediterranean. From the rail of a 184-foot vessel, a 22-year-old named Matthew Griffiths took out his phone to record a video. The British deckhand was just a week and a half into his first official yacht job, and he wasn’t on just any boat. The yacht, the $40 million Bayesian, was a star of the superyacht world, considered to be a feat of minimal design and precision engineering. Below deck, the yacht’s owner, Michael Lynch, had every reason to be sleeping soundly. Months earlier, Lynch had walked out of a San Francisco federal courthouse a free man, acquitted of all charges in one of the largest fraud cases in Silicon Valley history. Lynch had built his fortune on understanding probability, on turning the unlikely into the possible. He had named his yacht Bayesian in honor of the statistical theorem that made him a billionaire, after the sale of his company Autonomy.”

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Continue reading “He went from drug-busting cop to drug trafficking kingpin”

From Slate: “29-year-old Taylor Stanberry was the grand prize winner at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s 2025 Florida Python Challenge. The 10-day competition is a conservation event held in the Everglades to fight the invasive Burmese python population in South Florida. The pythons are believed to have been initially introduced through the pet trade and are now  threatening the native wildlife. (All captured snakes are killed.) Stanberry caught 60 pythons — three times the number of last year’s winner — and collected $10,000. “Everyone thinks that pythons just throw themselves at me because I post the good moments online,” Stanberry said, “but every night is hit-or-miss. I could go to the same area seven days in a row — one night I might catch nothing, and another night, I could nab 10 pythons in an hour. I just catch them with my bare hands — no equipment or anything.”

This cassette tape made of DNA can store every piece of music that has ever been recorded

From New Scientist: “Retro cassette tapes may be making a comeback, with a DNA twist. While DNA has been used as an information storage medium before, researchers have now combined this with the convenience and look of a 1980s cassette tape, creating what they are calling a DNA cassette.Xingyu Jiang at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Guangdong, China, and his colleagues created the cassette by printing synthetic DNA molecules on to a plastic tape. “We can design its sequence so that the order of the DNA bases (A, T, C, G) represents digital information, just like 0s and 1s in a computer,” he says. This means it can store any type of digital file, whether text, image, audio or video. While a traditional cassette tape could boast around 12 songs on each side, 100 metres of the new DNA cassette tape can hold more than 3 billion pieces of music, at 10 megabytes a song. The total data storage capacity is 36 petabytes of data – equivalent to 36,000 terabyte hard drives.”

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Continue reading “She caught 60 pythons with her bare hands and won $10,000”

From Nautilus: “Five years ago, when neurosurgeon Marcelo Galarza saw images from jazz guitarist Pat Martino’s cerebral MRI, he was astonished. “I couldn’t believe how much of his left temporal lobe had been removed,” he said. Martino had brain surgery in 1980 to remove a tangle of malformed veins and arteries. At the time he was one of the most celebrated guitarists in jazz. Yet few people knew that Martino suffered epileptic seizures, crushing headaches, and depression. Locked in psychiatric wards, he withstood debilitating electroshock therapy. It wasn’t until 2007 that Martino had an MRI and not until recently that neuroscientists published their analyses of the images. Galarza’s astonishment, like that of medical scientists and music fans, arises from the fact that Martino recovered from surgery with a significant portion of his brain and his memory and other skills gone, but his guitar skills intact.”

If you buy shark meat in the US there’s a good chance it comes from an endangered species

From Phys.org: “A new study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has uncovered that shark meat sold in U.S. grocery stores, seafood markets, and online vendors often comes from endangered species and is frequently mislabeled. Researchers purchased and DNA barcoded 29 shark meat products to determine their species identity, finding that 93% of samples were ambiguously labeled and included meat from 11 different shark species. Among the species identified were the great hammerhead and scalloped hammerhead, both listed as Critically Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Despite global declines in shark populations, their meat was being sold to American consumers, sometimes for as little as $2.99 per pound. In their study published in Frontiers in Marine Science, the researchers found that of the 29 products tested, 27 were labeled simply as “shark” or “mako shark.”

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Continue reading “He had part of his brain removed but his musical ability remained”