{"id":262273,"date":"2024-07-03T14:35:34","date_gmt":"2024-07-03T19:35:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=262273"},"modified":"2024-07-03T14:35:42","modified_gmt":"2024-07-03T19:35:42","slug":"the-1910-monorail-that-used-gyroscopes-to-stay-upright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2024\/07\/03\/the-1910-monorail-that-used-gyroscopes-to-stay-upright\/","title":{"rendered":"The 1910 monorail that used gyroscopes to stay upright"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From Hackaday<\/a>: “The Brennan Monorail was a train from the early 1900\u2019s that seemed to defy the laws of physics. Not only did it keep itself perfectly balanced on a single rail, but it mysteriously leaned into corners without any driver input. This was a real invention \u2013 and it was unveiled to the public in 1910 by its inventor Louis Brennan. The idea was that using a single rail instead of two would make trains faster and railways cheaper to build. His train could take corners at greater speeds without being thrown off the tracks and railways would only need half the material. Unlike the monorails we\u2019re familiar with today, which wrap themselves around tracks built high in the air, Brennan\u2019s<\/em> monorail could run on existing tracks. Although it looked a bit sketchy, it was very stable. At the heart of the train was a gyroscope that would correct the train\u2019s tilt before the passengers noticed. This was a mind-blowing piece of engineering, especially for 1910.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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From Paul Kedrosky<\/a>: “Something strange has happened to the word “delve” in the last two years. Its usage has exploded in everything from Amazon reviews, to undergraduate essays, to academic papers. There were, for example, more papers with the word \u201cdelve\u201d in them in 2022 and 2023 together than in the prior 500 years combined. Everyone is on the delve train. It all has to do with a weird quirk of large language models (LLMs), understanding which requires a trip back through the Lord of the Rings, early American settlements, a 17th-century pastor, and Milton. Delving into something is a grandiloquent clich\u00e9 and a quest for implied certainty. But it is also a cultural signifier, one with a thousand years of history at the intersection of religion, politics, science, risk, and literature, and one that is now being reflected back to us. Models are channeling all that history, in which is embedded our uneasy relationship with technology.”<\/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\u00a0see other issues\u00a0and sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

One of the most popular jazz recordings of all time was performed on a broken piano<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Why Is This Interesting<\/a>: “One night in January 1975, the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett showed up late for a sold-out solo show at the K\u00f6ln Opera House in West Germany, only to discover that the stagehands had delivered him a busted piano. It was a B\u00f6sendorfer whose tones could not be played in the upper and lower octaves, and in the middle, the black keys clamped, the pedals did not work, and the strings were torn. Jarrett was a 29-year-old pro who made the last-minute decision to play this damaged instrument for 1,400 audience members, improvising an hour of the loveliest music I\u2019ve ever heard. As he plays, Jarrett hums, wails, and stomps along with the notes. The visionary producer Manfred Eicher recorded the performance, and soon released it as the two-record K\u00f6ln Concert set. The great music critic Ted Gioia said it eventually sold more than 3 million copies, and for a time ranked as the top-selling solo piano album in history.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Editor’s note<\/strong>: If you like this newsletter, please share it with someone else. And if you\u00a0<\/em>really\u00a0<\/strong>like it, perhaps you could subscribe, or contribute something via\u00a0<\/em><\/em>my Patreon<\/em><\/a>. Thanks for being a reader!)<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lager is the world’s most popular form of beer, but no one knows where it came from<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Good Beer Hunting<\/a>: “Go almost anywhere in the world and ask someone to explain beer, and they\u2019ll likely describe a pale lager\u2014bright, bubbly, and refreshing. Arguably the greatest success of lager is that it became so knowable, and so trusted. Pretty much wherever you go, you can order a lager and know what you\u2019re going to get, and how it will feel to drink it. And yet, for all of its familiarity, there is an enigma at the core of lager\u2019s long story, one that has fascinated and frustrated me for years: We don\u2019t know where lager yeast came from, or how it developed. No matter how much scientists and historians have searched\u2014and they\u2019ve literally hunted in forests, cellars, and old brewery buildings, and have run all the DNA testing that\u2019s available to them\u2014a void has existed at the heart of what is the world\u2019s most popular and most consumed beer.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zora Neale Hurston was a folklorist of the old South who gained fame only after she died<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Will Dowd<\/a>: “According to Maryland law, “all colored youths between six and twenty years of age” were provided free admission to public schools. So Hurston simply decided she had been born in 1901 rather than 1891, a lie she maintained so diligently and for so long that even her headstone shaves away her first decade of life. By transforming herself into a secretly 26-year-old high school student, Hurston began her journey to becoming the first Black student to attend Barnard College. At Barnard, she studied anthropology, making trips to her native South to collect folktales, which the storytellers colloquially refered to as \u201clies.\u201d During her expeditions, the pistol-carrying Hurston often slept in her car when she couldn\u2019t find a hotel that accepted Black patrons. \u201cSometimes, I feel discriminated against,\u201d she wrote, \u201cbut it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oldest deep-sea shipwreck ever found is a time capsule from the Bronze Age<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Scientific American<\/a>: “Golden sunlight fell on the two amphorae, still caked in brown ooze, as they breached the Mediterranean\u2019s waves. Their ascent from the seafloor, more than a mile down and 60 miles from land, had taken three hours. It was the first daylight they had seen in at least 3,200 years, and they came from the only Bronze Age shipwreck discovered in deep waters. Archaeologists retrieved these Canaanite storage jars, just two from a cargo of dozens located far off northern Israel\u2019s coast in May. \u201cIt\u2019s the only ship from this period that was found in the deep sea,\u201d one of the final frontiers of archaeology, says Jacob Sharvit, director of marine archaeology at the Israel Antiquities Authority. Only a handful of other Late Bronze Age ships have been discovered\u2014all of them in shallow coastal waters of the Mediterranean Sea, including in the Aegean Sea.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He used his own money to open up a mobile shower for the homeless<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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There are angels who walk among us.

Nicky Crawford is one of them.

He\u2019s retired. From Atlanta. And he just opened a mobile laundry bus for unhoused people.

\u00a0\u201cGod has blessed me so much, I knew this is what I was supposed to be doing.\u201d pic.twitter.com\/3s1RqQJwQ6<\/a><\/p>— Leah Goodridge (@leahfrombklyn) July 2, 2024<\/a><\/blockquote>