mathewingram.com/work

Yes, it’s your favourite time of the year — the Ingram Christmas Letter is finally here! In what has become a somewhat depressing annual event, I am typing this in mid-December and it’s plus 10 Celsius, not a trace of snow on the ground. The part of me that hates shovelling snow is happy, but the part of me that is concerned about global warming is not happy at all. In any case, on to the letter! I will do my best not to make this all about our 18-month-old granddaughter Quinn, but it is going to be difficult, since I am convinced she is the cutest and smartest child who probably ever existed (it’s possible there were some cuter and smarter children in ancient Greece, but I doubt it). As usual, the photos here are also available as a Google Photos album or at the Ingram Family Photo Archive  — which runs on an old computer in our daughter’s bedroom, so please don’t get mad if it’s down. You can also find a more old-fashioned web version of this letter, complete with old-timey Santa images, at https://mathewingram.com/christmas. However you consume it, it’s the same great Ingram family content that you know and love!

Since most of these letters are written before Christmas, they don’t often include photos *from* Christmas, but I will make an exception in this case because of the aforementioned angel known as Quinnderella, who was a vision in plaid for her first Christmas. She appeared to have a great time, despite not really knowing what was happening, and at one point she appeared to be channeling her Scottish ancestors and telling a tall tale, clad in her tiny sweater and plaid skirt. And someone upstairs must have heard us wish for a white Christmas, because we got a massive dump of snow just a few days before, and Meaghan — who was driving Becky’s mother from Ottawa — had to be rescued from the blizzard by Wade and me. But once everyone was safe, the snow made it very pretty on hikes around the property, making everything look like Narnia.

Scott Alexander, a psychologist who blogs at Astral Codex Ten, writes about a book that dives into the question of whether bees can think or not:

“Lars Chittka, who wrote The Mind of a Bee, got thinking. He and his lab decided to build fake robotic crab spiders, and had them really robotically attack bumble bees when they visited flowers. Not only did the bees have a bad time, their behavioural patterns totally changed. They began to approach the flowers differently. They began inspecting flowers via quick scanning flights before landing on them, and would occasionally reject flowers even if there was no crab spider present. They seemed more nervous. If you want to see if humans are optimistic or pessimistic, you point at a glass of water that is halfway filled and ask them to describe it. Similarly, you can do the glass half-full versus half-empty test on bees, where you give them an ambiguous stimulus – it might be sucrose, which bees love, or it might be quinine, which they hate – and see if they want it. 

If they want it, they’re likely a happy-go-lucky bee with nothing on their mind. If you simulate the bee being attacked by a predator right before this test, they are much less likely to fly to the solution and much more likely to fly into the container labelled ‘Therabee’. Does that mean bees feel emotions? If they feel emotions, would that mean bees have conscious states? Or are these all just instinctive responses? Bees exist in that great hinterland of consciousness – the valley where we throw all manner of creatures and living beings whose experiences we remain fundamentally uncertain about. Some readers will likely enter the book believing that bees do not have conscious experiences, and Lars Chittka does a good job disabusing these people of their certainty in this belief, if not the belief altogether.”

There’s a lot more to it than this small sample, and it’s all fascinating — why bees build hexagonal honeycombs (even in space with zero gravity), why they do the waggle dance to deliver information about the angle of the sun even though it doesn’t improve their ability to gather nectar, and much more.

From Sheehan Quirke, also known as The Cultural Tutor, comes the story of Vitruvius, one of the most important architects in history:

“What makes Vitruvius so important? During his retirement he wrote something called De Architectura, a comprehensive treatise — part history, part guide — on Greek and Roman architecture. This book is the only surviving architectural treatise from the ancient world. That is to say: without this book we would know far less about Classical Architecture, and would have had to reverse engineer our knowledge of the Five Orders and of Proportion by analysing ancient ruins. Vitruvius’ detailed description of human proportions, which he claimed to be the basis of Classical Architecture, inspired one of history’s most famous drawings: Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.”

He wrote: “For the human body is so designed by nature that the face, from the chin to the top of the forehead and the lowest roots of the hair, is a tenth part of the whole height; the open hand from the wrist to the tip of the middle finger is just the same; the head from the chin to the crown is an eighth, and with the neck and shoulder from the top of the breast to the lowest roots of the hair is a sixth; from the middle of the breast to the summit of the crown is a fourth. If we take the height of the face itself, the dis­tance from the bottom of the chin to the under side of the nostrils is one third of it; the nose from the under side of the nostrils to a line between the eyebrows is the same; from there to the lowest roots of the hair is also a third, comprising the forehead. The length of the foot is one sixth of the height of the body; of the forearm, one fourth; and the breadth of the breast is also one fourth.”

From the excellent Why Is This Interesting newsletter comes the story of the Bridgeport Projectile Company, a munitions manufacturer based in Connecticut in 1915 that made artillery shells. With World War I raging in Europe, the company planned to do a brisk business and placed large orders with leading U.S. munitions suppliers. On July 24 of 1915, a German lawyer named Heinrich Albert had his briefcase stolen on the Sixth Avenue El in Manhattan. But this was no ordinary snatch and grab — the thief in this case was a US Secret Service agent named Frank Burke, and the contents of the briefcase, which quickly found their way into the hands of U.S. Treasury Secretary William McAdoo, revealed that Bridgeport Projectile wasn’t a defense contractor at all, but rather a secret plot created by the German government. As a written account describes it:

“The plan for the Bridgeport Projectile Company, conceived by Heinrich Albert and Franz von Papen and approved by the German general staff, called for the sheer waste of tens of millions of dollars. Bridgeport Projectile was in business merely to keep America’s leading munitions producers too busy to fill genuine orders for the weapons the French and British so desperately needed. The false-front company had ordered five million pounds of gunpowder and two million shell cases with the intention of simply storing them.”

The Bridgeport Projectile episode has been cited by U.S. policymakers as a cautionary tale, an early example of how foreign direct investment in the United States—that is, non-U.S. entities or individuals buying or investing in U.S. companies—can harm U.S. national security. It helped lead to the creation of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews the national security implications of certain foreign investment transactions through the an interagency body comprised of nine executive branch departments and offices and backed by the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Came across this fascinating news in Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten newsletter: a company called Lantern Bioworks has developed a genetically-engineered bacteria similar to the one that causes tooth decay, which is known as streptococcus mutans. It converts sugar into lactic acid, which dissolves the enamel coating on your teeth, leading to cavities. The bio-engineered version doesn’t cause decay because it turns sugar into something else (alcohol, as it turns out, although not enough to get drunk on), and it also has a mild antibiotic property, so it eventually kills off all of the other bacteria in your mouth.

One of the interesting aspects of this invention is that the man who came up with it has been working on it since the mid-1980s. In 1985, Professor Jeffrey Hillman of the University of Florida surveyed the microorganisms on his graduate students’ teeth and found that one had an unusual strain of S. mutans that contained the natural antibiotic, and he spent the next few decades refining it and adding the other features. But when he tried to get FDA approval, they made it almost impossible — they wanted him to do a study with 100 subjects, all of whom had to be age 18-30, with removable dentures.

Eventually, the founder of Lantern Bioworks came across it and licensed it from Hillman. To get around the need for a study of teenagers with dentures, Lantern is going to market the engineered bacteria as a “probiotic,” for which the FDA has lower standards than it does for drugs. Technically, any bacterium which you take in order to change your natural microbiome is a probiotic, and there are already a few genetically-modified probiotics out there that have been approved. Some are almost as creative as Lumina: Zbiotics is a genetically-engineered species of Bacillus that sits in your stomach and supposedly prevents the user from getting a hangover by metabolizing alcohol byproducts.

From Mike Baker for the New York Times: “In the minutes before he boarded an Alaska Airlines flight home, Joseph Emerson, a pilot for the airline, texted his wife and said he missed her. The flight was full, and Emerson was off duty, so he settled into the cockpit jump seat. Then he appeared to grow agitated, the other pilots told the authorities, and suddenly reached up and yanked two fire-suppression handles, which are designed to cut the fuel supply and shut down both engines. In his first interview since the incident, Mr. Emerson said he was overcome with a growing conviction that he was only imagining the journey and needed to take drastic action to bring the dream to an end.”

Jay Leno owns a car that will run on almost any fuel, including tequila and perfume

From Lianne Turner for CNN: “Among the cars that Jay Leno has collected is a Chrysler Turbine car, of which only 50 were built in the early 1960s, which could run on any fuel except leaded gasoline. “When they drove it to Mexico it drove on tequila, when they took it out to France they burned Chanel No. 5 – any liquid that you could burn with oxygen you could run this car on,” said Leno. “It is essentially a jet engine. But when this car came out in the early 60s nobody really cared about alternative fuels because fuel cost 26 cents per gallon. It was extremely expensive to produce and it wasn’t really that much faster than a V8 and it would have cost a lot more to produce.”

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