{"id":266564,"date":"2024-10-30T08:36:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-30T13:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=266564"},"modified":"2024-10-30T08:36:08","modified_gmt":"2024-10-30T13:36:08","slug":"they-said-she-died-in-a-fire-as-a-baby-but-she-was-kidnapped","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2024\/10\/30\/they-said-she-died-in-a-fire-as-a-baby-but-she-was-kidnapped\/","title":{"rendered":"They said she died in a fire as a baby but she was kidnapped"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From The Guardian<\/a>: “When Delimar Vera was six years old, the woman she thought was her mother \u2013 Carolyn Correa \u2013 turned to her and said, \u201cThere\u2019s a bad lady who wants to take you away from us, but you\u2019re not going to let her, right?\u201d Vera promised she wasn\u2019t going anywhere; she\u2019d tell the \u201cbad lady\u201d to get off her. \u201cI was a sassy kid,\u201d she says now, 20 years on. Remembering that strange exchange still gives Vera chills. It was Correa herself that had taken Vera away, kidnapping her as a newborn, crossing over from Philadelphia to New Jersey, changing Delimar\u2019s name to Aaliyah and raising her as her own. Vera, 26, tells me the story of her bizarre and traumatic childhood \u2013 part horror story, part fairytale, and still in many ways a mystery.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These twins created their own secret language<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From the BBC<\/a>: “Twins Matthew and Michael Youlden speak 25 languages each. The 26th is Umeri, which they don’t include in their tally. If you’ve not heard of Umeri, there’s good reason for that. Michael and Matthew are the only two people who speak, read and write it, having created it themselves as children. The brothers insist Umeri isn’t an intentionally secret language. An estimated 30-50% of twins develop a shared language or particular communication pattern that is only comprehensible to them, known as cryptophasia. The term translates directly from Greek as secret speech. Nancy Segal, director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University, believes there are now better and more nuanced words for the phenomenon, and prefers to use “private speech”.<\/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\u00a0see other issues\u00a0and sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

A PhD student found a lost city in the Mexico jungle by accident<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From the BBC<\/a>: “A huge Maya city has been discovered centuries after it disappeared under jungle canopy in Mexico. Archaeologists found pyramids, sports fields, causeways connecting districts and amphitheatres in the southeastern state of Campeche. They uncovered the hidden complex – which they have called Valeriana – using a survey that maps structures buried under vegetation. They believe it is second in density only to Calakmul, thought to be the largest Maya site in ancient Latin America. The team discovered three sites in total, in a survey area the size of Scotland’s capital Edinburgh, \u201cby accident\u201d when one archaeologist browsed data on the internet. It was a Lidar survey, a remote sensing technique which fires thousands of laser pulses from a plane and maps objects below using the time the signal takes to return.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scientists have started to decode bird songs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From The New Yorker<\/a>: “Language is often cited as the quality that distinguishes us as humans. When I asked Robert Berwick, an M.I.T. computational linguist, about birds, he argued that \u201cthey\u2019re not trying to say<\/em> anything in the sense of James Joyce trying to say something.\u201d Still, he and Kleindorfer both pointed out that humans and songbirds share a trait that many animals lack: we are \u201cvocal learners,\u201d meaning that we can learn to make new sounds throughout our lives. \u201cTo me, the most amazing thing is that every generation of vocal learners has its own sound,\u201d Kleindorfer said. \u201cSo, just like our English is different from Shakespeare\u2019s English, the songbirds, too, have very different songs from five hundred years ago. I am sure of it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was held in Kazakhstan after officials denied that New Zealand was a country<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Stuff<\/a>: “A Kiwi tourist who travelled to Kazakhstan claims she was detained at the border by officials who were skeptical that New Zealand was, in fact, a country. Chloe Phillips-Harris, a 28 year old from Kawakawa, was attracted to Kazakhstan’s beautiful, rugged scenery and “good people”. But her adventure almost turned into a misadventure when she was told by immigration officials she’d need to supply an Australian passport upon arriving at the immigration booth. “They thought New Zealand was a state of Australia and that I needed an Australian passport.” Further complicating matters, the room she was interrogated in had a large map of the world tacked on the wall – but the map didn’t include New Zealand.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He watches his daughter walk for the first time using a machine he created<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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A father's joy his daughter feels the sensation of walking for the first time, in a machine he built

pic.twitter.com\/5r9OGBP9v6<\/a><\/p>— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) October 28, 2024<\/a><\/blockquote>