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Independence Day should be on July 2nd or August 2nd

From Now I Know: “Some believe that July 4, 1776, is not truly America’s independence day. That honor should fall to either July 2, 1776, or August 2, 1776. On June 11, 1776, the Continental Congress created a sub-committee of five delegates – Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman – empowered to write a first draft of a declaration of independence. Jefferson took the lead and the quintet delivered their draft on June 28th. After a few days of debates and revisions, the Congress voted to declare independence – on July 2nd, not July 4th. nstead, we Americans celebrate independence on the 4th, the day the Continental Congress ratified the text of the document. Ratified – but not signed. According to National Geographic, many of those who signed the famous piece of parchment were not present on the 4th of July and the document wasn’t signed until August 2nd.”

Scientists are using the bodies of dead spiders as miniature claw machines

From Scientific American: “Spider corpses turned into robots sounds like the far-fetched plotline of a B horror movie. But researchers from Rice University have created just that—dead wolf spiders that can be used as machines to pick up and put down objects. In a paper published in Advanced Science, researchers have dubbed the use of biotic materials as robotic components “necrobotics.” They say this area of research could be used to create biodegradable grippers for very small objects. “We understand that many people are put off by the sight of a spider, but from an engineering point of view, the spider’s mechanism of movement is very interesting,” said Faye Yap, a mechanical engineer at Rice. The research began in 2019, when the scientists noticed a dead spider curled up in their lab. Yap and her colleagues did a quick search and discovered that spiders have a hydraulic pressure system that controls their limbs.” 

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.

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Why Substack shouldn’t be the future of online publishing

I’d like to apologize in advance for the topic of this week’s newsletter, which I fear may not interest all (or perhaps even most) of you. It would be nice to think that lots of people care about the nuances of how news and information gets published, and the challenges that the modern web and social media and tech monopolies (among other things) pose to our information ecosystem, but a long career as a journalist writing about tech — including publishing technology like Substack — has convinced me that this is very much not the case! So if you are one of those people for whom this topic induces snoring, please feel free to ignore this week’s newsletter and then come back later 😄

If you are reading this newsletter via Substack, the headline might seem a little confusing. Don’t I use Substack to publish The Torment Nexus? I sure do, because I want to reach potential readers in as many ways as possible, and lots of people use Substack. However, I also publish this newsletter using Ghost — an open-source platform — and I simultaneously post all of the newsletters to my personal website, which runs on WordPress (a platform that I confess also has some problematic aspects). Unlike many of the people who publish on Substack, I don’t have a paywall that kicks in at a certain point, or hides posts or premium options behind a subscription. I rely on donations through both Substack and Ghost to support my newsletters (including my daily newsletter When The Going Gets Weird), and I also have a Patreon portal where you can send money if you want to support my work with a specific amount of your choosing.

As you can probably gather from the above description, I am not backing one specific horse in the web publishing race. If you want to read my writing via Substack that’s great, and if you want to read it via Ghost that’s also great, but if you’d rather use the old-fashioned open web that’s fine too. This makes monetization somewhat more difficult, since people can easily get my newsletter without paying and therefore there isn’t a compelling reason for subscribing or donating (apart from just the fact that you like me or my writing). But I am willing to live with that because I think the free and open exchange of information is a crucial aspect of the web — although it is becoming less and less common all the time. And that’s part of why I don’t think that Substack is the real future of web publishing, or at least shouldn’t be the future.

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.

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Eminem was once a world-class Donkey Kong player

From Vice: “Back in 2010, in social media’s Wild West years, Eminem shared a photo on Twitter of a Donkey Kong machine, boasting a high score of 465,800, which, per DonkeyKongBlog, would have put him very near the top 30 scores in the world at the time. The high score at the time of Em’s post was just over 1,000,000 points, which is a pretty far shot from his total, but it’s still impressive. A 2014 YouTube playthrough of the game that lands at a similar score takes just over an hour to complete, meaning that for his high score alone, Eminem was sweating and twitching over an arcade cabinet for at least an hour straight. For what it’s worth, The Verge reported in 2014 that top tier players sink thousands of hours of practice into their record-breaking runs, so it’s likely that Em had to put some serious time in to hit that mark. Of course, given that he only posted a still and not a stream or a video clip, Eminem’s run at Kong is unverifiable, so he doesn’t land on any of the official leaderboards.”

Scientists are using modified E. coli bacteria to turn plastic into a common painkiller

From Nature: “A common bacterium can be adapted to convert plastic waste into paracetamol, a study published this week in Nature Chemistry reports. Paracetamol, also known as acetaminophen, is widely used to treat pain and fever. It is produced from molecules derived from fossil fuels, but researchers are working to develop processes that use more sustainable source molecules, such as plastic waste. Central to the project’s success was the discovery by Wallace and his team that a synthetic chemical reaction that typically requires conditions that are toxic to cells can occur in their presence. The reaction, called the Lossen rearrangement, has been known for more than a century, but had previously been observed only in a test tube or a flask. The researchers used conventional chemical methods to degrade and modify polyethylene terephthalate, then added this molecule into a culture of E. coli, where the Lossen rearrangement transformed it into a more biologically relevant molecule.”

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.

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Eminem was once a world-class Donkey Kong player

From Vice: “Back in 2010, in social media’s Wild West years, Eminem shared a photo on Twitter of a Donkey Kong machine, boasting a high score of 465,800, which, per DonkeyKongBlog, would have put him very near the top 30 scores in the world at the time. The high score at the time of Em’s post was just over 1,000,000 points, which is a pretty far shot from his total, but it’s still impressive. A 2014 YouTube playthrough of the game that lands at a similar score takes just over an hour to complete, meaning that for his high score alone, Eminem was sweating and twitching over an arcade cabinet for at least an hour straight. For what it’s worth, The Verge reported in 2014 that top tier players sink thousands of hours of practice into their record-breaking runs, so it’s likely that Em had to put some serious time in to hit that mark. Of course, given that he only posted a still and not a stream or a video clip, Eminem’s run at Kong is unverifiable, so he doesn’t land on any of the official leaderboards.”

Scientists are using modified E. coli bacteria to turn plastic into a common painkiller

From Nature: “A common bacterium can be adapted to convert plastic waste into paracetamol, a study published this week in Nature Chemistry reports. Paracetamol, also known as acetaminophen, is widely used to treat pain and fever. It is produced from molecules derived from fossil fuels, but researchers are working to develop processes that use more sustainable source molecules, such as plastic waste. Central to the project’s success was the discovery by Wallace and his team that a synthetic chemical reaction that typically requires conditions that are toxic to cells can occur in their presence. The reaction, called the Lossen rearrangement, has been known for more than a century, but had previously been observed only in a test tube or a flask. The researchers used conventional chemical methods to degrade and modify polyethylene terephthalate, then added this molecule into a culture of E. coli, where the Lossen rearrangement transformed it into a more biologically relevant molecule.”

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.

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Most of what we know about a famous brain injury case is wrong

From Aeon: “In September of 1848, Phineas Gage was using an iron ‘tamping rod’ to pack an explosive charge into a hole. The charge exploded prematurely, firing the iron straight through his head. Miraculously, Gage survived, but his doctor noted a marked change in Gage’s personality: he had become ‘fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity’ and ‘a child in his intellectual capacity.’ The doctor concluded that this decline was a consequence of the damage done by the tamping iron to the frontal lobes of Gage’s brain. More than a century later, Gage’s transformation would still be referenced as the quintessential case study. ‘He took to gambling and sleeping with prostitutes,’ neuroscientist David Eagleman said in a talk at the Royal Society for the Arts in 2010. ‘He could not be trusted to honour his commitments,’ wrote neuroscientist Hanna Damasio and colleagues in 1994. The sensational impact of this version of Gage’s story would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that it’s largely fictional.”

He bought a house and then found a massive model train setup underneath the floor

From SBS News: “After Daniel Xu and his wife finalised the purchase of their house in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, he found what can only be described as a train enthusiast’s dream beneath their feet. Underneath his new home, Xu discovered a model train setup, designed around an extensive network of train lines and miniature landscapes. With plans for renovations, Xu needed to get beneath his house, much of which is raised, sitting above a carport. Entering the undercroft of his new home via a small door, Xu was shocked to find the area, which is just tall enough to stand in, entirely taken up by the elaborate setup. He said nothing had been mentioned about model trains during the open home inspections. Coincidentally, Xu is a train enthusiast. He works as a rolling stock engineer for a company that manufactures new trains.”

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.

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Most of what we know about a famous brain injury case is wrong

From Aeon: “In September of 1848, Phineas Gage was using an iron ‘tamping rod’ to pack an explosive charge into a hole. The charge exploded prematurely, firing the iron straight through his head. Miraculously, Gage survived, but his doctor noted a marked change in Gage’s personality: he had become ‘fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity’ and ‘a child in his intellectual capacity.’ The doctor concluded that this decline was a consequence of the damage done by the tamping iron to the frontal lobes of Gage’s brain. More than a century later, Gage’s transformation would still be referenced as the quintessential case study. ‘He took to gambling and sleeping with prostitutes,’ neuroscientist David Eagleman said in a talk at the Royal Society for the Arts in 2010. ‘He could not be trusted to honour his commitments,’ wrote neuroscientist Hanna Damasio and colleagues in 1994. The sensational impact of this version of Gage’s story would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that it’s largely fictional.”

He bought a house and then found a massive model train setup underneath the floor

From SBS News: “After Daniel Xu and his wife finalised the purchase of their house in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, he found what can only be described as a train enthusiast’s dream beneath their feet. Underneath his new home, Xu discovered a model train setup, designed around an extensive network of train lines and miniature landscapes. With plans for renovations, Xu needed to get beneath his house, much of which is raised, sitting above a carport. Entering the undercroft of his new home via a small door, Xu was shocked to find the area, which is just tall enough to stand in, entirely taken up by the elaborate setup. He said nothing had been mentioned about model trains during the open home inspections. Coincidentally, Xu is a train enthusiast. He works as a rolling stock engineer for a company that manufactures new trains.”

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.

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He was a spy and a scam artist who also invented the bar chart

From Engora: “A spy, a scoundrel, and a scholar — William Playfair was all three. He led an extraordinary life at the heart of many of the great events of the 18th and 19th centuries, mostly in morally dubious roles. Among all the intrigue, scandal, and indebtedness, he found time to invent the bar and pie charts, and make pioneering use of line charts. Playfair had always been a good writer and good at explaining data. He’d produced several books and pamphlets, and by the mid-1790s, he was trying to earn a living at it. But things didn’t go too well, and he ended up imprisoned for debt in the notorious Fleet Prison (released in 1802). There were no official government spying agencies at the time, but the British government quite happily paid for freelancers to do it. He discovered the secrets of the breakthrough French semaphore system while living in Frankfurt and handed them over to the British government in the mid-1790s.”

The 400-year old mystery of Roanoke may have finally been solved

From Fox Digital: “A team of researchers believes they may have cracked one of America’s most enduring legends: Where did the settlers of the Roanoke Colony go? Known as the Lost Colony, it was the first English settlement attempt in the United States. A group of over 100 colonists settled on North Carolina’s Roanoke Island in 1587, led by Sir Walter Raleigh. John White, the governor of the colony, returned to England for supplies in 1587. When he came back to Roanoke Island in August 1590, he found the settlement mysteriously abandoned – and all the colonists, including his daughter Eleanor Dare and his granddaughter Virginia Dare, gone. One of the only clues remaining at the site was the word “CROATOAN” carved into a palisade, which might referred to Croatoan Island, which is now called Hatteras Island, or the Croatoan Indians. The mystery has haunted Americans and Brits for the past four centuries.”

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.

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Judge says AI engines can index books but can’t pirate them

Ever since ChatGPT first emerged on the scene in 2022, there has been a vociferous debate about whether the indexing (or “scraping”) of public content that AI companies do when they are training a large-language model should be considered an infringement of the copyright held by publishers and/or the authors of those books, or whether it should be covered by the “fair use” exemption in US copyright law. As some of you may know, I have consistently been on the latter side of the debate — in a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review and then an edition of The Torment Nexus, I argued that the scraping or indexing of public content by LLMs should be legally no different than the indexing of books that Google did in the early 2000s as part of its Google Books project. After a court case that lasted for a number of years, judge Denny Chin ruled in 2013 that Google’s indexing of content was covered by the fair-use exemption because he believed it to be a “transformative” use, which is one of the four factors that judges have to take into account when they are making a decision. As I wrote last year:

Judges have to balance the competing elements of the “four factor” test, namely: 1) What is the purpose of the use? In other words, is it intended as parody or satire, is it for scholarly research or journalism, etc. 2) What is the nature of the original work? Is it artistic in nature? Is it fiction or nonfiction? 3) How much of the original does the infringing use involve — is it an excerpt or the entire work? and 4) What impact does the infringing use have on the market for the original? In the Google Books case, the scanning of millions of books was not done for research or journalism, in many cases the books in question were creative works of fiction, the entire book was copied, and the Authors Guild argued that it would have a negative impact on the market. One element in Google’s favour, however, was that while its indexing process made copies of the whole book, its search engine never showed users the entire thing.”

As you can see from the four factors, a fair-use decision is effectively a balancing act between different and competing interests: the interests of the author and/or publisher, in protecting and making money from their works, and the interest of the public in having “transformative” uses of art available to them. This kind of balancing is necessary because copyright itself was designed as a balancing act, between the commercial interests of creators and the public benefit of freely available artistic work — to “promote the progress of science and useful arts,” as the US Constitution describes it. Some authors and publishers (but not all) believe that copyright’s sole purpose is to enrich creators, but that’s not accurate; revenue for creators is important, but so is society’s interest in having publicly available and usable art. Judge Chin decided that the scanning of books in order to make them searchable and provide excerpts was transformative enough that it outweighed the infringement of copyright and potential market impact.

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.

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When one of the coldest cases in Texas got even weirder

From Texas Monthly: “The day before he would take off his clothes and vanish into the rural countryside on a frigid night — defying logic, devastating those who loved him, and baffling some of the best criminal investigators in Texas — Jason Landry was thinking about socks. Not just any socks, but a colorful pair that featured an image of a monkey in a suit and tie holding a briefcase in one hand and a banana in the other, with the words “monkey business” stitched across each ankle. Socks were the highlight of an extensive, bullet-pointed Christmas list that Jason texted to his mother, Lisa, on Saturday, December 12, 2020. Jason, a lovable 21-year-old goofball who always seemed to be smiling, was normally the opposite of a list maker. Unlike his older siblings, both of whom were regimented and rule oriented, Jason eschewed rules and hated planning. In the days before he disappeared, Jason appears to have done lots of self-medicating. In Instagram messages that were later released by law enforcement, Jason told a close friend that with the help of drugs, he’d found God and seen him for the “first time ever.”

A brain implant allowed a man with ALS to speak and even sing musical notes in his real voice

From Scientific American: “A man with a severe speech disability is able to speak expressively and sing using a brain implant that translates his neural activity into words almost instantly. The device conveys changes of tone when he asks questions, emphasizes the words of his choice and allows him to hum a string of notes in three pitches.The system — known as a brain–computer interface (BCI) — used artificial intelligence (AI) to decode the participant’s electrical brain activity as he attempted to speak. The device is the first to reproduce not only a person’s intended words but also features of natural speech such as tone, pitch and emphasis, which help to express meaning and emotion.In a study, a synthetic voice that mimicked the participant’s own spoke his words within 10 milliseconds of the neural activity that signalled his intention to speak. The system, described today in Nature, marks a significant improvement over earlier BCI models, which streamed speech within three seconds.”

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.

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The poisoning of a Chinese student is still a mystery

From the China Project: “It’s perhaps the most infamous case in the annals of modern Chinese crime. The tale begins in March 1995, as a nervous Zhu walked on stage to begin a Chinese zither recital. Her performance was flawless, if a touch rote. No one in the room, least of all Zhu, had any idea of the reason: that there was a rare poison working through her system, a toxic heavy metal called thallium (ta) that would soon render the young scholar incapable of again recognizing a zither melody again, let alone play one. The first strange signs had begun in November the previous year: Zhu’s palms would tingle and grow numb, symptoms quickly followed by agonizing pains, nausea, and diarrhea. At the time, the student had dismissed them as a winter flu or some form of food poisoning. When the conditions returned only hours after her final recital in March, however, they proved far more extreme and varied: Acute stomach ache, drastic hair loss, leg pains, loss of muscular eye control, partial facial paralysis. Today, Zhu Ling lives, but has the mental age of a six-year-0ld.”

The shark from the movie Jaws is in the public domain and always has been

From Ironic Sans: “Due to a fluke of publishing and copyright law, the Jaws shark is public domain. It’s not the character of the shark that’s public domain – or someone would surely be making a low-budget horror prequel about how he became the Amity Island Killer. But I’m talking about the famous shark painting from the movie poster. When the book first came out, it didn’t have this cover art. An old New York Times article about the book’s origin explains that the author, Peter Benchley, actually had his own idea for the cover. He thought it should show “a peaceful unsuspecting town through the bleached jaws of a shark.” The publisher didn’t like it. They hired artist Roger Kastel to make an updated version of the cover, and he went to the Museum of Natural History to study sharks, and he had a model pose across a couple of stools for reference of what someone looks like swimming. But it was never copyrighted.”

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.

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A gay paraplegic had a key role in the early days of Marvel

From Flaming Hydra: “The best-kept secret in the history of Marvel Comics was in high dudgeon by the time he sat down at his typewriter. It was a July afternoon in 1971, and Ron Whyte, a playwright and activist, was about to hammer out an ill-advised letter. Truth be told, there may have been some pills involved: he had just finished the 15-minute ordeal of strapping on the prosthetics that he had used to walk since the age of 20, when the doctors had amputated what remained of his legs, and he’d long since relied on a variety of drugs for help with the pain he experienced as a gay, poor, legally blind, paraplegic double amputee. What we know is that Ron Whyte was at Marvel Comics in 1966, where he worked with Stan Lee and Roy Thomas. And curiously,  in the large collection of Ron Whyte’s papers at Yale University there are scripts for some of the most storied and beloved comics — comics eventually published in Stan Lee’s name.”

Two hundred thousand eggs disappeared and then came the ransom note

From the Washington Post: “The hens were unaware of the heist. Before the product of their labor was an item on a police report, it was a shipment headed from Maryland to Florida: 280,000 brown eggs. They belonged to Cal-Maine Foods, which boasts being number one in the pecking order of egg supply. About 1 of every 5 eggs sold in America are laid by a Cal-Maine hen. They line the refrigerated shelves of Walmarts, Costcos and other supermarkets, labeled Eggland’s Best, Land O’Lakes and other brands. By gobbling up its competitors, Cal-Maine built an egg empire without most egg eaters knowing the company’s name. But by the April afternoon when the 280,000 eggs left the farm, that was beginning to change. A winter spike in bird flu was widely seen as the cause of empty shelves and eggs doubling or tripling in price.”

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.

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Twenty-five years ago today the Globe leaped into the future

I remember it like it was yesterday, even though it was a quarter of a century ago: The day the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto flipped the switch (or switches) and a live news website suddenly appeared at globeandmail.com. Imagine — actual news being posted on the internet directly from computers! It was a spectacular thing at the time, real groundbreaking stuff — although as I am writing about it I feel the same way I do when I tell my children that we used to have a dial phone and a party line (ask your grandparents about that last one). The launch was five years after a colleague and I mocked up a website using borrowed HTML and showed it to some of the senior editors at the paper, as an illustration of what we might be able to do if we got on the old information superhighway. The New York Times was getting online, I said, as well as smaller entrepreneurial papers like the News and Observer. There was little to no interest. After all, the internet was a plaything for nerds, not a place where real people did real things!

Not surprisingly, I like to describe this story in a way that makes me seem like a visionary and the Globe like a stodgy stick-in-the-mud (which it was, of course). But in addition to uncertainty about the whole internet thing — and a marked preference for proprietary solutions like Pointcast — there were other business considerations in play as well, as my former boss Ed Greenspon hints at in his LinkedIn post recalling the launch (which was apparently codenamed Rowboat, something I didn’t know until today). At the time, the Globe had a very lucrative deal selling something called InfoGlobe — an old-fashioned text database of news stories — to corporate customers and libraries for huge sums of money, and no one wanted to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs by messing around with some nerdy vision of access for everyone via the Interweb. Also, the Globe was in the midst of a bitter newspaper war with Conrad Black’s National Post, and all the publisher cared about was getting more people reading the paper version.

Somehow, despite all these obstacles, and thanks to the efforts of Ed and Neil Campbell and a host of others, the site went live on this day in 2000. It looks comical now, the height of late 1990s web design (below is a somewhat blurry printout of what it looked like on launch day, courtesy of Kenny Yum), but it was a magical thing. I wrote a launch column in which I said the internet was the best thing to happen to journalism since the typewriter. I believed it at the time, and in some ways I still believe it — even though I have seen in the years since that launch all the myriad ways in which both journalists and non-journalists can foul that nest. But at the time, we knew nothing about Gamergate, or 4chan, or Russia’s Internet Research Agency, or the fact that in the future, people would use the internet primarily to start fights with people from other backgrounds, and to push conspiracy theories about September 11 and the moon landing and how online retailers are shipping children around in furniture as part of a sex trafficking ring run by Hillary Clinton.

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He started walking around the world 27 years ago

From the BBC: “A man hoping to become the first person to complete an unbroken round-the-world walk is preparing for the last leg of his journey. Karl Bushby set off from Chile in 1998. Since then he has walked across American and Asian continents, swam 186 miles across the Caspian Sea and fought off ice lumps and polar bears through the Bering Strait, all without using any form of transport. The former paratrooper has less than 2,000 miles left to walk before he arrives at his home city of Hull. Mr Bushby, who is currently in Mexico waiting for a visa to complete his challenge, has said returning home will be a very strange place to be after being away for some 27 years. Following his 31-day swim across the Caspian Sea last year, Mr Bushby said he continued his journey to Azerbaijan and then through to Turkey. The traveller said he had to step aside from his mission, named the Goliath Expedition, while he waited for a visa.”

This former New York fashion photographer abandoned the city for life off the grid

From the New York Times: “Early in 2007, John Wells, a former fashion and catalog photographer, sold the farmhouse he’d renovated in Columbia County, N.Y., paid off his debts, canceled his credit cards and headed to the West Texas desert. There, he settled on a 40-acre plot near a ghost town called Terlingua, 30 miles from the Mexican border — a raw and rocky terrain of mesquite and desert juniper known locally as the Moonscape.There were no paved roads, no electricity and no water. Mr. Wells, who was then 48, chose the property because he could see no other dwellings.He was there to hash out life on his own terms, off the grid, to tame the rough environment to suit his own minimal needs, like a modern-day Thoreau.He called his new home the Southwest Texas Alternative Energy and Sustainable Living Field Laboratory, or the Field Lab for short, and began to chronicle his adventures on a blog.”

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.

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Reports of Bluesky’s death have been greatly exaggerated

A little over six months ago, I (and pretty much everyone else with a pulse) was writing about Bluesky’s meteoric growth, which seemed to be driven in equal parts by frustration with Elon Musk’s MAGAfication of Twitter/X and the search for somewhere to talk about Donald Trump and the ongoing dumpster fire that is his presidency. My headline at the time was “Is Bluesky the new Twitter, and if so is that a good thing?” — very similar to one that I wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review six months before that, when I was still the chief digital writer and Bluesky was also growing quickly, even though it was in invitation-only beta. A number of celebrity Twitter users like billionaire Mark Cuban, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ron Wyden had joined, and plenty would follow. By last November, the network had close to 15 million users, having added more than a million since the election. Now it has about 36 million, or more than twice what it had when I first wrote about it, and it is adding a new user every second.

This is a picture of runaway success, no? A brand new social network born from virtually nothing, built on an open-source, decentralized protocol (I wrote more about that here), with customizable algorithms and other features, and it got 15 million users to sign up in six months, and more than 35 million in a year? Everyone looking for a Twitter replacement must be cheering, right? Wrong. While Bluesky has plenty of fans (and I am one of them) it also has what appears to be a growing number of prominent critics, who raise a number of points: 1) Bluesky is no longer growing quickly, and in fact is shrinking and/or dying; 2) Bluesky has become a noisy and expletive-filled place for those who want to talk dispassionately about a range of subjects, and is also a place that can’t take a joke; and 3) Bluesky has siphoned off progressive discussion and created a kind of echo chamber for the left, which blunts its effectiveness.

To take those in reverse order, Megan McArdle of the Washington Post argued that Bluesky isn’t doing progressive thought or action any favours, in a piece on June 8th titled “The Bluesky bubble hurts liberals and their causes.” The social network, she wrote, was “doomed to fail as users tried to re-create Twitter.” McArdle’s piece cited a Pew Research Center analysis that found many news influencers had set up accounts on Bluesky but about two thirds of them only posted to the network sporadically, while more than 80 percent of them still posted to X regularly. Engagement on Bluesky peaked in mid-November, she wrote, and is now down about 50 percent, and “the decline shows no sign of leveling out.” McArdle’s larger point was that exporting progressives from X onto Bluesky’s “beautiful blue bubble” wasn’t a good thing for the movement. This effort “isn’t just a doomed attempt to re-create the old Twitter,” she said, but is “likely to sap progressive influence and make the movement less effective.” She added:

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.

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He changed brain science while working as a janitor

From Nautilus: “The 60-year-old man lying on the street, as far as anyone knew, was just a janitor hit by a drunk driver. There was no mention of it on the local news, no obituary in the morning paper. His name might have been Anonymous. But it wasn’t. His name was Peter Putnam. He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr, and two blocks from the crash, in his run-down apartment, where his partner, Claude, was startled by a screech, were thousands of typed pages containing a groundbreaking new theory of the mind. “Only two or three times in my life have I met thinkers with insights so far reaching, a breadth of vision so great, and a mind so keen as Putnam’s,” Wheeler said in 1991. And Wheeler, who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” had worked alongside some of the greatest minds in science. Robert Works Fuller, a physicist, told me in 2012, “Putnam really should be regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century.”

The word bear was coined because people were afraid to call them by their real name

From Now I Know: “The word bear is derived from the Proto-Germanic term ‘beron,’ meaning ‘the brown one.’ It’s not all that uncommon for words to be derived from descriptive terms; the initial names of things have to come from somewhere, after all. But bear is somewhat special because, apparently, ‘beron’ wasn’t the animal’s first name. Rather, according to linguistic experts, the term ‘beron’ is a euphemism for the animal’s original name. Our ancestors were so worried about bears, they didn’t even want to name them because they feared the bears might overhear and come after them. So they came up with this word bruin, meaning “the brown one” as a euphemism, and then bruin segued into bear. We know the euphemism, but we don’t know what word it replaced, so bear is the oldest-known euphemism. Some linguists believe the original term was a variation on the word ‘htrkos,’ a reference to the Arctic.”

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