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It’s the fall of 1864. The war is going very badly for the Confederates. John Wilkes Booth is kind of the Brad Pitt of North America. He was a famous, dashing young actor, a committed supporter of the Southern Confederacy. A man who despised Lincoln. He begins to plot to kidnap Lincoln, in order to bargain Lincoln’s life for the exchange of the tens of thousands of Confederate prisoners who are in prisons all along the Canadian border. So he has this plot and where does he go? He goes to Montreal. He knows this is where some of the leading Confederate agents are. He knows this is where they’re getting their money and their support. He checks in at the St. Lawrence Hall. The owner who admires Booth, makes sure he gets one of the best rooms. Booth settles in. He’s playing cards with some of the leading Confederate agents and spies. (via CBC)

For 25 years this dolphin guided ships through a dangerous channel near New Zealand

Pelorus Jack was a Risso’s dolphin that was famous for meeting and escorting ships through a stretch of water in Cook Strait, New Zealand. The animal was reported over a 24 year period, from 1888 until his disappearance after 1912. Pelorus Jack was usually spotted in Admiralty Bay  near French Pass, a notoriously dangerous channel used by ships travelling between Wellington and Nelson. Pelorus Jack was once shot at from a passing ship, and was later protected by a 1904 New Zealand law. The dolphin guided the ships by swimming alongside a water craft for 20 minutes at a time. If the crew could not see Jack at first, they often waited for him to appear. He was first seen around 1888 when he appeared in front of the schooner Brindle. When the members of the crew saw the dolphin bobbing up and down in front of the ship, they wanted to kill him, but the captain’s wife talked them out of it. (via Wikipedia)

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Continue reading “Lincoln’s assassin planned the shooting while in Montreal”

It started with a suitcase hidden under a bed. It was 2009, and Antony Easton’s father, Peter, had recently died. As Antony started to engage with the messy business of probate, he came across a small brown leather case in his father’s old flat in the Hampshire town of Lymington. Inside were immaculate German bank notes, photo albums, envelopes full of notes recording different chapters of his life – and a birth certificate. Peter Roderick Easton, who had prided himself on his Englishness (and been an Anglican) had, in fact, been born and raised in pre-war Germany as Peter Hans Rudolf Eisner, a member of one of the wealthiest Jewish families in Berlin. The contents of the suitcase shone a light into a past that Antony knew almost nothing about. The revelations would lead him on a decade-long trail, revealing a family devastated by the Holocaust, a vanished fortune worth billions of pounds and a legacy of artwork stolen under Nazi rule. (via the BBC)

He was a championship snooker player but he is mostly remembered for his ability to drink

Bill Werbeniuk was a cult hero in the world of snooker, known for his prodigious consumption of lager. Four times a quarter-finalist in the Embassy world championships at the Crucible in Sheffield, between 1978 and 1983, he achieved a career-high ranking of eighth in 1984-85. At a time when snooker was emerging as a major television attraction, he became one of the game’s best loved characters. Born in Winnipeg, Werbeniuk was the son of a Canadian professional champion and former armed robber, fence and drug dealer. Werbeniuk suffered from hypoglaecaemia, a condition which enabled his body to burn off sugar and alcohol exceptionally quickly. He was thus able to cope with drinking at least six pints of lager before a match, a pint per frame during it, and a few sociable ones afterwards. He drank the Scottish professional Eddie Sinclair under the snooker table by consuming 42 pints. At one stage, the inland revenue allowed his spending on lager as a tax deductible expense. (via The Guardian)

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Continue reading “An old suitcase and a family fortune lost under Nazi rule”

Japanese singer-songwriter Yoko Ono had an obsession with artist Salvador Dalí’s surrealism, and decided she wanted to buy a strand of hair from Dalí’s famous mustache. Ono offered to pay the artist $10,000, which is the equivalent of about five or ten times that in today’s dollars. But while Dalí was happy to take Ono’s money, he wasn’t so keen on sending her anything so intimate. According to reports, he was worried Ono was a witch and thought that she might use it for occult purposes. So instead of sending her a hair, he sent his partner to the garden to find a dry blade of grass, and sent it off in a pretty box. It was exactly the kind of stunt you’d expect from Dalí, who thrived on blurring the line between art, myth, and mischief. What’s more surreal than getting a counterfeit piece of mustache hair from Salvador Dalí? (via Now I Know)

Our brains remember stories differently depending on how they are told

In a new brain scan study, neuroscientists found that telling the same story different ways activates different memory mechanisms in the listener’s brain, shaping how someone remembers what you told them. The results don’t suggest that either form of storytelling—conceptual or perceptual—is necessarily easier to remember than the other; participants in the new study recalled the stories told in these two ways roughly equally. But the findings do show that different storytelling techniques can change how that information is stored and retrieved, perhaps explaining why some people are better at recalling stories with certain types of information compared to others. Memories aren’t stored in one place in the brain. Instead memory traces are distributed throughout the brain’s outer layers. These networks connect to a deep-brain structure called the hippocampus, which helps form and retrieve memories. (via Scientific American)

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Continue reading “Salvador Dali sold a blade of grass to Yoko Ono for $10,000”

The white marble headstone of Spc. 4 Richard Leroy McKinley may look like the other headstones in Section 31 but it marks Arlington National Cemetery’s only radioactive grave and the story of America’s first fatal nuclear accident. In 1961, McKinley was serving as an operator at the U.S. National Reactor Testing Station just outside of Idaho Falls. On January 3, 1961, following a 10-day closure for the holidays and maintenance, operators returned to work at the reactor station. Shortly after 9:00 p.m., a steam explosion erupted in the SL-1 reactor. When responders arrived at the reactor at 10:35 p.m., they found dangerously high levels of radiation and three men — Army Spc. John Arthur Byrnes, Navy Seabee Richard Carlton Legg, and McKinley – lying on the ground. Byrnes and Legg were already dead; McKinley miraculously survived the initial blast but died shortly after being placed in an ambulance. He was 27. (via Arlington Cemetery)

Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky and Freud all lived within a short walk of each other in Vienna

Trotsky and Stalin were just two of a number of men who lived in central Vienna in 1913 and whose lives were destined to mould, indeed to shatter, much of the 20th century. It was a disparate group. The two revolutionaries, Stalin and Trotsky, were on the run. Sigmund Freud was already well established. The psychoanalyst, exalted by followers as the man who opened up the secrets of the mind, lived and practised on the city’s Berggasse. The young Josip Broz, later to find fame as Yugoslavia’s leader Marshal Tito, worked at the Daimler automobile factory in Wiener Neustadt, a town south of Vienna, and sought employment, money and good times. Then there was the 24-year-old from the north-west of Austria whose dreams of studying painting at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts had been twice dashed and who now lodged in a doss-house in Meldermannstrasse near the Danube, one Adolf Hitler. (via the BBC)

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Continue reading “Why one Arlington Cemetery grave has a lead-lined casket”

Albert Clarke was a rascally nine-year-old when he inherited the estate of Margaret Wise Brown, his next-door neighbour, who had no children of her own. Ever since, as “Goodnight Moon” has drifted toward the center of America’s collective consciousness, he has floated on the fringes of society. No steady job. No fixed place of abode. Dozens of arrests. Rarely has his life traced a path through terrain even remotely resembling the world of Brown’s stories. Over the years, that world has yielded to him nearly $5 million. Today, he has $27,000 in cash. “I’m an inept bungler when it comes to business matters,” Clarke says, as ash drops from his cigarette into the folds of his trousers. “If it wasn’t for the fact that Margaret Wise Brown left me an inheritance, who knows? I could’ve been a homeless person. I could’ve been a poor, broken-down homeless person.” Clarke and his children have moved seven times in the past five years, their household a jumble of cardboard boxes and photos taped to the walls. (via Joshua Prager)

(Update: After this newsletter was published, I received an email from Ellen Geiger, the literary agent who represented Margaret Wise Brown, who pointed out that the piece I linked to was written 25 years ago, and that Albert “died a couple of years ago after having done his best and been a loving and supportive father to his children.” Just thought some readers might want to know that)

David Bowie borrowed his name but he is said to be one of the worst singers of all time

Norman Carl Odam known professionally as the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, is an outsider performer who is considered one of the pioneers of the genre that came to be known as psychobilly in the 1960s. As a teenager he combined his interests in outer space and the American west to create the name “Stardust Cowboy”, adding the word legendary because “I am a legend in my own time.” He recorded his signature song “Paralyzed” in 1968. He played dobro and bugle, while T-Bone Burnett played drums. The track features unintelligible snarls, growls, and similar vocalisms, surrounded by frantic strumming on acoustic guitar, Burnett’s equally frantic drumming, and occasional slurred yelps of the song’s title, “Paralyzed!” The words that are uttered change with each performance, and are occasionally intelligible. (via Wikipedia)

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Continue reading “He got $5M from Goodnight Moon’s author and lost it all”

It’s a truism – at least in my experience – that the coverage of new product launches often seems to focus on the minutiae of a product. With Apple’s new phones, for example, it’s about how rounded the corners are or how big the bezel is, how many camera bumps it has, and that sort of thing. In part this is because new products are just that — new — and so many journalists likely haven’t had had time to take whatever it is out for a real spin, and in part it’s because in a mature category like smartphones there’s literally nothing else to talk about. But it’s also because a lot of tech journalists tend to be hard-core geeks, and they (and their gadget-obsessed audience) love to pore over tiny details and go down rabbit holes. True to form, there was a lot of this in the coverage of OpenAI’s new ChatGPT-powered browser Atlas — the UI of the opening screen, the nuances of the layout, how a user accesses the browser’s extensions, and so on. All of this is as it should be, but none of that is what interests me about OpenAI’s browser.

Just to recap, OpenAI launched the browser on Tuesday. Under the hood, the browser is Chromium, the open-source version of Google’s Chrome browser, which the company released for anyone to use in 2008 (interesting fact: Google also developed the “transformer” software that would eventually become the foundation for GPT — generative pre-trained transformer — engines like ChatGPT). Chromium is also the foundation of most other non-Google browsers, including DuckDuckGo, and Microsoft Edge. It’s also worth noting that there are two other Chromium-based browsers that have AI aspects built into them: Perplexity has a browser that it calls Comet, and The Browser Company has one called Dia whose motto is “chat with your tabs.” With no disrespect implied to these other products, I think it’s fair to say that they have had very little pickup in either the broader tech community or the world of “civilians,” as I used to refer to non-tech-obsessed people. Deservedly or not, OpenAI is the Microsoft or Google of the AI market, based not just on media coverage but actual users: ChatGPT has about 700 million, and is according to some estimates is one of the fastest growing apps of all time.

So is Atlas the first AI-powered browser, or the first browser with AI features? No. But it is likely to be the only one with the kind of name recognition that might get civilians to download it and possibly even use it. Of course, any such discussion has to start with the reality that many people aren’t even aware that there are different browsers — they use the one that came with their computer, whether it’s Safari or Edge, and that’s that. Even if they have heard of Chrome, they probably aren’t going to download it, or try to figure out how to import their bookmarks or tabs or whatever. And the vast majority of people will never have heard of Firefox, let alone Arc or any of the other alternative browsers that are out there. They may not even be aware of what the word “browser” refers to. I have a vivid memory of trying to explain to my mother-in-law the difference between the little box that you type a URL into and the little box that you type into when you want to search. So if OpenAI is targeting this broader market, good luck to them.

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Continue reading “OpenAI’s new browser is a small part of a much bigger plan”

Authorities are scrambling to find the gang behind the heist that targeted high-security display cases in the famous French museum. The criminals, who disguised themselves as construction workers on a cherry picker, are still on the run. Authorities fear the one-of-a-kind, and therefore highly recognisable items, will be melted down and destroyed before thieves sell them on. There are fears that those responsible could be a part of the ‘Pink Panthers’ – a gang which previously stole £23,000,000 of diamonds from Graff jewellers in London back in 2003. Many members of the gang are ex-soldiers with extensive backgrounds in paramilitary training. The Panthers have a history of targeting museums as well as jewellers. In 2008, a museum in Switzerland had a Monet, Van Gogh, Cézanne and a Degas stolen, with an estimated worth of £119,162,880.(via MetroUK)

Time moves faster the higher up you go so your head is a little older than your feet

Scientists have long known that time passes faster at higher elevations — a curious aspect of Einstein’s theories of relativity that previously has been measured by comparing clocks on the Earth’s surface and a high-flying rocket. Now, physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have measured this effect at a more down-to-earth scale of 33 centimeters, or about 1 foot, demonstrating, for instance, that you age faster when you stand a couple of steps higher on a staircase. Described in the Sept. 24 issue of Science, the difference is much too small for humans to perceive directly—adding up to approximately 90 billionths of a second over a 79-year lifetime—but may provide practical applications in geophysics and other fields. The NIST researchers also observed another aspect of relativity—that time passes more slowly when you move faster—at speeds comparable to a car travelling about 20 miles per hour, a more comprehensible scale than previous measurements made using jet aircraft. (via NIST)

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Continue reading “Louvre robbers could be the infamous Pink Panther gang”

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is one of the most important spiritual sites for Christians, so it may come as some surprise that the keys to the church are entrusted to the care of two Muslim families. This tradition dates back several centuries and was reportedly instituted by Saladin, the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, who expelled the Christian Crusaders from Jerusalem. According to the historical record, two Muslim families have been entrusted with the care of the church for over 850 years. The keys, which were created on July 15, 1149, were entrusted by the legendary Ayyubid Sultan Saladin to two Muslim families in Jerusalem. On February 10, 1187, Saladin designated the Joudeh Al-Husseini family as the only rightful keeper of the keys and authorized the Nuseibeh family to operate the doors. (via Greek Reporter)

The solution to a famous cryptographic puzzle has been sitting in a library for ten years

For 35 years, the world’s most sophisticated minds have attacked Kryptos, a sculpture at CIA headquarters, with everything in the cryptographic arsenal. Computer scientists deployed algorithms, and obsessives spent decades analyzing letter frequencies, transposition matrices, and polyalphabetic substitutions. They all failed to solve the final 97 characters carved into the sculpture’s copper sheets. Then last month, two journalists cracked it in one evening using a powerful tool in intelligence gathering: asking a librarian for some boxes. When Jarett Kobek, reading the auction announcement for Jim Sanborn’s planned sale of the solution, noticed a throwaway line about “coding charts” in the Smithsonian archives. He asked his friend Richard Byrne to request the boxes. Byrne spent September 2nd photographing papers. Sanborn had accidentally included them when archiving his materials a decade earlier. (via Why Is This Interesting)

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Continue reading “Muslim families hold the keys to Jerusalem’s famous church”

For nearly a quarter-century he railed against slavery in one Quaker meeting after another in and around Philadelphia, confronting slave owners and slave traders. He insisted on the utter depravity and sinfulness of “Man-stealers,” who were, in his view, the literal spawn of Satan. He considered it his Godly duty to expose and drive them out. He became one of the very first to call for the abolition of slavery. He was notable for his physique. Benjamin Lay was a dwarf, or “little person,” standing just over four feet tall. He was called a hunchback because of an extreme curvature of his spine, a medical condition called kyphosis. According to a fellow Quaker, his “head was large in proportion to his body; the features of his face were remarkable, and boldly delineated, and his countenance was grave and benignant.” He called himself “little Benjamin,” but he also likened himself to David who slew Goliath. He did not lack confidence in himself. (via the Smithsonian)

Lost Jack Kerouac story found among assassinated mafia boss’ belongings

A lost story written and signed by legendary San Francisco writer Jack Kerouac has been found among the belongings of an infamous mafia boss who was gunned down in 1985. The two-page story, titled “The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing,” was written shortly before the publication of Kerouac’s 1957 masterpiece “On the Road.” The story details, in Kerouac’s typical ecstatic and spontaneous style, an evening of joy and yearning in Denver with Neal Cassady, LuAnne Henderson and Allen Ginsberg, using their alter egos Dean Moriarty, Marylou and Carlo Marx. The typed story is signed by Kerouac with a green fountain pen, something he was known to do at the time. The story’s existence was unknown to the public until recently, as it spent many years among the belongings of the former head of the Gambino New York crime family Paul Castellano. (via SF Gate)

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Continue reading “This Quaker dwarf made the end of slavery his life’s work”

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a piece for The Torment Nexus about the threat of AI, and more specifically what some call “artificial general intelligence” or AGI, which is a shorthand term for something that approaches human-like intelligence. As I tried to point out in that piece, even the recognized experts in AI — including the forefathers of modern artificial intelligence like Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun (who now works at Meta), and Yoshua Bengio — can’t seem to agree on whether AI actually poses an imminent danger to society or to mankind in general. Hinton, for example, who co-developed the technology behind neural networks, famously quit working on AI at Google because he said he wanted to be free to talk about his concerns around artificial general intelligence. He has said that he came to believe AI models such as ChatGPT were developing human-like intelligence faster than he expected. “It’s as if aliens have landed and people haven’t realized because they speak very good English,” he told MIT.

LeCun, however, told the Wall Street Journal that warnings about the technology’s potential for existential peril are “complete B.S.” LeCun, who won the Turing Award — one of the top prizes in computer science — in 2019, says he thinks that today’s AI models are barely even as smart as an animal, let alone a human being, and the risk that they will soon become all-powerful supercomputers is negligible at best. LeCun says that before we get too worried about the risks of superintelligence, “we need to have a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat,” as he put it. There are now large camps of “AI doomers” who believe that Hinton is right and that dangerous AGI is around the corner, and then there are those who believe we should press ahead anyway, and that supersmart AI will solve all of humanity’s problems and usher us into a utopia, a group who are often called “effective accelerators,” usually shortened to “e/acc.”

In addition to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, one of the leading AI engines is Claude, which comes from a company called Anthropic, whose co-founders are former OpenAI staffers including siblings Dario Amodei — the CEO — and Daniela Amodei. The company’s head of policy, Jack Clark (formerly head of policy at OpenAI) recently published a post on Substack titled “Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear,” based on a speech he made at a recent conference about AI called The Curve. Although he didn’t come to any firm conclusions about the imminent danger (or lack of it) posed by existing AI engines, Clark did argue that there is some reason for concern, in part because we simply don’t understand how AI engines do what they do. And that includes scientists who helped develop the large-language model behind most of the leading AI engines. It’s one thing to be convinced that we understand the danger of a technology when we know how it works on a fundamental level, but it’s another to make that assumption when we don’t really understand how it works. Here’s Clark:

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Continue reading “Should we be afraid of AI? Maybe a little”