{"id":286371,"date":"2026-07-08T08:56:29","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T13:56:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=286371"},"modified":"2026-07-08T08:56:35","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T13:56:35","slug":"did-a-climber-leave-his-girlfriend-to-die-on-the-mountain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2026\/07\/08\/did-a-climber-leave-his-girlfriend-to-die-on-the-mountain\/","title":{"rendered":"Did a climber leave his girlfriend to die on the mountain?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The judge, Norbert Hofer, was a specialist. At the Innsbruck Regional Court, in western Austria, he oversaw a jurisdiction designated for mountain, avalanche, climbing, cable-car, and ski accidents. Cases handled by this department rarely draw much public attention, but the trial of Thomas Plamberger, in February, was different. He was charged with homicide by gross negligence in the death of his girlfriend, Kerstin Gurtner, during an attempt to climb Grossglockner, Austria\u2019s tallest mountain. Hofer was an alpinist himself and a mountain-rescue volunteer. He led groups of young people on summer hikes. The case against Plamberger was nearly unprecedented. Hundreds of unfortunates \u2014 hikers, climbers, skiers, snowboarders \u2014 die in the Austrian Alps each year, but these fatalities rarely result in criminal charges. Gurtner, thirty-three, had frozen to death a few dozen yards from the Grossglockner summit after Plamberger, then thirty-six, parted ways with her at around 2 a.m.<\/em> on a winter night. (via the New Yorker<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Italy they store their cheese in a bank vault because people keep stealing it<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Northern Italy. In the dead of night, a group of thieves creeps toward a locked vault. Were they looking for jewels or priceless artwork? Gold bullion? No \u2014 Parmesan. And they almost managed it. Around 400 wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano were loaded onto their getaway vehicle before police apprehended the thieves. Credito Emiliano SpA is a local bank in the Emilia-Romagna region, the only place where Parmigiano Reggiano can be produced. Local Parmesan-makers, who have been subjected to multiple organized large-scale thefts over the years, have turned to the bank to store and protect their cheese. Such is the cheese\u2019s worth that the bank also permits the wheels of cheese to be used by producers as collateral against loans. The cheese is in a purpose-built, climate-controlled storage facility that can hold 300,000 wheels (which are worth $950\u2013$1,900 each) known as the \u201cFort Knox of cheese.\u201d (via Longreads<\/a>)<\/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

How Amsterdam invented the fire department<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the seventeenth century, Amsterdam was likely the wealthiest city in the world. Global trade and local industry financed its artistic masterpieces and furnished the abundant foods and household goods that Dutch painters immortalized in still lifes and domestic scenes. But material abundance and industrial activities also heightened an ancient danger: they added fuel to urban fires. Yet Amsterdam avoided the disastrous equivalent of London\u2019s Great Fire of 1666. In the last three decades of the century, in fact, the toll from fires dropped dramatically. In the 1660s, the city purchased dozens of large water-pumping engines from an inventor in Nuremberg. Dragged to the scene by a horse, each engine had a cistern whose water was manually pumped into a metal pipe capped by a nozzle. By 1670, about 60 of these engines were distributed around the city. Amsterdam\u2019s fire-fighting system was the largest and best-equipped in Europe. Neither Paris nor London had anything similar. (via Works In Progress<\/a>)<\/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

This $20-million New York penthouse has a giant metal slide between floors<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Sky House at 150 Nassau Street is the brainchild of architect David Hotson and interior designer Ghislaine Vi\u00f1as and has been named twice by Interior Design Magazine as the best of the best \u2013 in 2015, as best of the decade, and in 2025 as best of the last twenty years. The planning and construction took over 5 years. Spanning the top four floors of the American Tract Society building \u2013 including the full, two-story arcade \u2013 Sky House sprawls across its 6,500 square feet.
The slide is a two-part spiral made of German stainless steel. It launches from the top floor \u2013 the acute apex of the building \u2013 and plunges through to the next floor. The second section releases into the foyer, a grand, open space, where immense arched windows provide 270-degree views, including both rivers and skyline landmarks. The volume of space allows for a functional rock wall and a rope swing to grace the middle of the room. (via Zillow Gone Wild<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the 19th century people’s teeth would sometimes literally explode<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the 19th Century, a Pennsylvania dentist called WH Atkinson came across a condition that sounds like the stuff of nightmares. Writing in The Dental Cosmos, the first major journal for American dentists, Atkinson documented an outbreak of exploding teeth. The first, the Reverend DA from Springfield, went through this unpleasant ordeal in 1817: “The right superior canine or first bicuspid commenced aching, increasing in intensity to such a degree as to set him wild. During his agonies he ran about here and there, in the vain endeavor to obtain some respite.<\/em>” Finally, at 9:00 the next morning, “all at once a sharp crack, like a pistol shot, bursting his tooth to fragments, gave him instant relief.” <\/em>Some scientists believe the answer may lie in the chemicals used to make early fillings. Before the advent of mercury amalgam in the 1830s a wide variety of metals were used to fill dental cavities, including lead, tin, silver and various alloys. These could lead to a build-up of hydrogen within a tooth. (via the BBC<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This man shows how to use a flag properly at a World Cup game<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Acknowledgements<\/strong><\/em>: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places 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> and <\/em>Why Is This Interesting<\/em><\/a> by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy<\/em>. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com<\/em><\/p>\n

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

The judge, Norbert Hofer, was a specialist. At the Innsbruck Regional Court, in western Austria, he oversaw a jurisdiction designated for mountain, avalanche, climbing, cable-car, and ski accidents. Cases handled by this department rarely draw much public attention, but the trial of Thomas Plamberger, in February, was different. He was charged with homicide by gross … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Did a climber leave his girlfriend to die on the mountain?”<\/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":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"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-286371","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\/286371","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=286371"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":286373,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286371\/revisions\/286373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}