{"id":259041,"date":"2024-02-02T09:37:13","date_gmt":"2024-02-02T14:37:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=259041"},"modified":"2024-02-02T09:37:13","modified_gmt":"2024-02-02T14:37:13","slug":"a-paralyzed-man-made-it-up-el-capitan-using-only-his-arms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2024\/02\/02\/a-paralyzed-man-made-it-up-el-capitan-using-only-his-arms\/","title":{"rendered":"A paralyzed man made it up El Capitan using only his arms"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From Jack Dolan at the LA Times<\/a>: “Dangling from a thin rope thousands of feet above Yosemite Valley last October, Zuko Carrasco could feel his arms tremble. A paraplegic who had lost the use of his legs eight years earlier in a bizarre accident \u2014 a trust fall gone awry \u2014 he had spent a week ascending El Capitan, the world\u2019s most famous big wall rock climb, one tiny pull-up at a time. A \u201cgood pull\u201d moved him up about 4 inches. He would need to perform something like 9,000 of them to reach the summit. Along the way, he suffered dehydration, searing blisters and, at times, soul-crushing doubt. He shivered in the early morning and baked in the midday sun. That was the worst because the injury that paralyzed him from the waist down also prevented him from sweating properly, adding heatstroke to the long list of mortal dangers he had to contend with.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unravelling the mystery behind a tiny village at the center of a giant crater on Madagascar<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Vox, via Kottke<\/a>: “Right in the center of the island nation of Madagascar there\u2019s a strange, almost perfectly circular geological structure. It covers a bigger area than the city of Paris \u2014 and at first glance, it looks completely empty. But right in the center of that structure, there\u2019s a single, isolated village: a few dozen houses, some fields of crops, and dirt roads stretching out in every direction. When we first saw this village on Google Earth, its extreme remoteness fascinated us. Was the village full of people? How did they wind up there? And what did life look like in such a strange geography? To find out, we teamed up with a local team in Madagascar and fell down a rabbit hole of geology and mapping along the way. It\u2019s a story of how continental shifts and volcanic geology came together to form a place for a group of people to call home.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: 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<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

One of the most famous Victorian dishes, Brown Windsor Soup, is a hilarious lie<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Diana Hubbell for Atlas Obscura<\/a>: “Brown Windsor soup was the butt of many a joke. Sludgy, stodgy, and devoid of discernable texture or flavor, it was a recurring comic stand-in for everything dreadful about British cookery. Cookbooks including The Daily Mail Modern British Cookbook<\/em> typically describe the \u201cthick meat soup\u201d as a popular dish in Victorian times, with some recipe authors going so far as to call it \u201cQueen Victoria\u2019s favorite.\u201d The dish is so synonymous with traditional Victorian-era gastronomy that recipes for it appear in The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook <\/em>and The Unofficial Downton Abbey Cookbook<\/em>. There\u2019s just one problem: Queen Victoria never heard of brown Windsor soup, because historians say no such thing existed in the nineteenth century.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Editor’s note<\/strong><\/em>: If you like this newsletter, please share it with someone else. And if you <\/em>really <\/strong><\/em>like it, perhaps you could subscribe, or contribute something via <\/em>my Patreon<\/em><\/a>. Thanks for being a reader!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those beautiful sand beaches in Hawaii are mostly made of fish poop<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Joe Roman for Nautilus<\/a>: “If you\u2019re reading this on a tropical beach, consider yourself lucky. Plunge your hand into the rough beach sand, with its colors of oatmeal, cream, sandstone, and slate, that brought you there. You really can see the biosphere in a grain of sand\u2014from the flying fish to the frigate bird, the coconut palm to the elkhorn coral and the parrotfish\u2014on an island beach. Most people don\u2019t realize that when they stretch out by the sea in Hawaii, they\u2019re lying on a bed of animal waste. Biogenic sand, as it\u2019s known, can pass through the gut of a parrotfish or come from ground-up animals\u2014sponge spicules and barnacle fragments\u2014and coralline algae. A single green humphead parrotfish, native to the Indian and Pacific Oceans and measuring more than four feet long, can poop almost 10,000 pounds of sand annually.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

America lost most of its horses in 1872 because of a strange virus<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Matthew Wills for JSTOR Daily<\/a>: “In late 1872, North America west of the Mississippi unexpectedly lost its horsepower. Literally: the horses who hauled streetcars, fire engines, and all the local freight sickened with influenza. It was the age of steam, yes, but railroads and ships all depended on goods and passengers getting to and from them by horse-power\u2014over what we would now call the \u201clast mile\u201d of delivery. As a result of this horse flu, cities slowed to a crawl. A human-powered crawl. To give a sense of the scale of horse-dependence: in New York City, with a human population closing in on a million in 1870, had as many as 14,000 horses employed by the stage and streetcar companies. Oxen were experimented with, but they were incapable of working city streets. More typically, people ended up pulling streetcars, stages, drays, fire engines, and carts.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Romanian villagers got upset at police for investigating a vampire slaying<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Matthew Schofield for McClatchy<\/a>: “Before Toma Petre’s relatives pulled his body from the grave, ripped out his heart, burned it to ashes, mixed it with water and drank it, he hadn’t been in the news much.That’s often the way here with vampires. Quiet lives, active deaths.Villagers here aren’t up in arms about the undead \u2014 they’re pretty common \u2014 but they are outraged that the police are involved in a simple vampire slaying. After all, vampire slaying is an accepted, though hidden, bit of national heritage, even if does happen to be illegal.”What did we do?” pleaded Flora Marinescu, Petre’s sister and the wife of the man accused of re-killing him. “If they’re right, he was already dead. If we’re right, we killed a vampire and saved three lives. … Is that so wrong?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What it’s like to stand inside a thousand-year-old tree<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Inside a thousand-year-old treepic.twitter.com\/aiAC8PID6Y<\/a><\/p>— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) February 1, 2024<\/a><\/blockquote>