{"id":259855,"date":"2025-07-03T05:40:01","date_gmt":"2025-07-03T09:40:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingramblog.wordpress.com\/2025\/07\/03\/independence-day-should-be-on-july-2nd-or-august-2nd\/"},"modified":"2025-07-03T05:40:01","modified_gmt":"2025-07-03T09:40:01","slug":"independence-day-should-be-on-july-2nd-or-august-2nd-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2025\/07\/03\/independence-day-should-be-on-july-2nd-or-august-2nd-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Independence Day should be on July 2nd or August 2nd"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From Now I Know<\/a>: “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 \u2013 Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman \u2013 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 \u2013 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 \u2013 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scientists are using the bodies of dead spiders as miniature claw machines<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Scientific American<\/a>: “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\u2014dead wolf spiders that can be used as machines to pick up and put down objects. In a paper published in Advanced Science<\/em>, researchers have dubbed the use of biotic materials as robotic components \u201cnecrobotics.\u201d They say this area of research could be used to create biodegradable grippers for very small objects. \u201cWe understand that many people are put off by the sight of a spider, but from an engineering point of view, the spider\u2019s mechanism of movement is very interesting,\u201d 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.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

He runs a Florida restaurant and is the best Pac-Man player in the history of the game<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Oxford American<\/a>: “Billy Mitchell, the most knowledgeable and masterful Pac-Man player ever to drop a quarter in a machine, is a hard man to find. When I asked one of his best friends, Walter Day, the best way to get in touch with him, Day told me, \u201cFirst I spend an hour praying to God, then I visit a psychic, then I place a classified ad, then I hire a plane to carry a banner that says CALL ME BILLY! and make it fly all over South Florida. Because he might be anywhere.\u201d After some seventy phone calls, I manage to arrange a meeting with Mitchell at Ricky\u2019s, the restaurant in Hollywood, Florida, that he took over from his father in the mid-1980s. Mitchell is probably the greatest arcade-video-game player of all time. In 1999, he executed the first-ever perfect game on Pac-Man. The feat requires navigating 256 boards, or levels, and eating every single possible pellet, fruit, and ghost, for the highest score of 3,333,360.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either <\/em>through my Patreon<\/em><\/a> or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called <\/em>The Torment Nexus<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Public contests advanced the science of canning and also navigation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From MIT Press<\/a>: “Cancer remains an unsolved problem, and thousands of scientists worldwide are working diligently to make progress in its treatment. What sequence of actions will lead to a better way to block that channel? How can that cell type be detected in early stages? How can that tumor be targeted without harming healthy cells nearby? What treatment will work to eradicate the tumor without making it resistant to the treatment? Scientists, like game players, must thread an incredibly narrow path through action space. There is a long history of games and competitions for public good. Modern canning and jarring techniques originated in part from a reward offered during the French Revolutionary Wars to anyone who could devise a cheap way of preserving food. In 1714, British Parliament passed \u201cAn Act for providing a Public Reward for such Person or Persons as shall discover the Longitude at Sea,\u201d establishing prizes with payouts tied to improvements in accuracy. The rewards were paid out for over 100 years, and the results had a lasting impact on timekeeping.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ancient Greek guide to how to succeed at philosophical dinner parties<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Atlas Obscura<\/a>: “Imagine that you have just been invited to a dinner party in third-century Rome. This is going to be a very fancy kind of affair. It\u2019s going to be some high-profile guests, and you want to make sure that you\u2019re going to make a good impression. Luckily, you own a copy of a work of literature called the Deipnosophistae<\/em>, which in Greek can be translated as \u201cthe philosophers at dinner\u201d or \u201cthe wise people at dinner.\u201d The framing device is that it\u2019s a bunch of people talking at a dinner party. So it\u2019s kind of structured that as the courses of the dinner are coming out, they see a dish and it inspires them to talk about that ingredient. And they\u2019re telling stories and they\u2019re quoting a lot from other authors. It also contains the oldest recorded known recipe in Greek. During this time, the Greek cities in what is now Sicily were known for kind of fancy haute cuisine. And so the recipe that we have in Deipnosophistae<\/em> is for a grilled fish. It\u2019s called ribbon fish, and it\u2019s topped with grated cheese and olive oil.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A group of Amish men carry a building down a road for over a mile<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Acknowledgements<\/strong><\/em>: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as <\/em>The Morning News<\/em><\/a> from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s <\/em>Curious About Everything<\/em><\/a>, Dan Lewis’s <\/em>Now I Know<\/em><\/a>, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s <\/em>The Browser<\/em><\/a>, Clive Thompson’s <\/em>Linkfest<\/em><\/a>, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s <\/em>Why Is This Interesting<\/em><\/a>, Maria Popova’s <\/em>The Marginalian<\/em><\/a>, Sheehan Quirke AKA <\/em>The Cultural Tutor<\/em><\/a>, the <\/em>Smithsonian<\/em><\/a> magazine, and <\/em>JSTOR Daily<\/em><\/a>. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2013 Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Independence Day should be on July 2nd or August 2nd”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-259855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newsletters"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259855\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}