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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.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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”

When AI engines or LLMs (large-language models) such as ChatGPT started to become popular, one of the main concerns some people had was the widespread crawling and indexing of content that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic engaged in while training these models, and that this is a form of theft. As some readers are probably aware, I’ve written about this before for previous editions of The Torment Nexus, and I’ve argued that instead of theft or copyright infringement, this kind of indexing should be considered a fair use under US copyright law, just as Google’s scanning of millions of physical books was, because of the transformative nature of that use (one of the four factors that judges have to consider in order to make a fair-use ruling). There have been a couple of court decisions that suggest this might become legal precedent — with certain restrictions — but the Supreme Court has yet to weigh in on the question.

In addition to the numerous copyright-infringement lawsuits that have been launched by authors, publishers, and newspaper owners like the New York Times (which tried to negotiate a payment-for-indexing deal with OpenAI but failed to reach an agreement on price), there have been a number of attempts to foil the scraping and indexing bots that AI companies use to hoover up content. Some are of the “spanner in the spokes” variety, like the Iocaine Project, named after the tasteless poison in the movie The Princess Bride (Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line!). It is an open-source program that allows website owners to trap AI bots and scrapers in a kind of garbage-infested dead-end, where they are forced to go around and around indexing nonsense in a maze with no exit. Other attempts to foil the bots are a little more sophisticated, and Cloudflare has come up with several. But is the solution worse than the problem?

In case you’re not familiar with Cloudflare, it is what’s known as a CDN or content-delivery network, essentially a giant middleman that stands between your blog or website (or the sites and services of hundreds of thousands of corporations, governments and other entities) and the festering swamp of hackers and ne’er-do-wells that is the open internet. If you use Cloudflare, your site will load a lot faster — because the company caches it and then serves it from its own superfast network of servers — and is also protected from hacking attempts and DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks, and a host of other nasty behavior. In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that use Cloudflare for my website, but just for DNS hosting and rerouting, so that when you type in mathewingram dot com you get taken to the right website.

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Does Cloudflare want to protect the web or control it?”