The heat wave that got the US to legalize wearing shorts

Before the summer of 1936, people were used to dressing in a lot of layers. And while the materials in summer were lighter, they were still hot. That arrangement was tolerated most summers. Temperatures would climb, and everyone would grimace and bear it, sweating underneath coats and petticoats, vests and corsets, hats and gloves. But the summer of 1936 was too much. It was a summer when people perished because of their choice of clothing. In Yonkers, on June 21, two reporters from the New York Daily News — hoping to test the city's anti-shorts law — were arrested for wearing shorts.

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First he erased his own identity and then he walked into the sea

On June 12, 2009, a man checked into a hotel in Sligo, Ireland under the name Peter Bergmann and a nonexistent Austrian address. He paid cash every night. Over the next three days, cameras around town filmed him leaving the hotel with a purple plastic bag of belongings and coming back without it, using the blind spots between cameras to dispose of whatever was inside. He bought eight 82-cent stamps and airmail stickers at the post office, and asked a taxi driver where to find a quiet beach for swimming. On June 15, he checked out, ate a toasted ham and cheese sandwich at the bus station while reading scraps of paper from his pocket, tore them up, dropped them in a bin, and took the 2:20 bus to Rosses Point.

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If you’re looking for mathewingram.com I have some bad news

It's likely that not many people care about this, but I am writing this on my WordPress.com blog — which I normally use as a backup to my blog at mathewingram.com/work — because the machine hosting that blog (and my photo server and my Plex instance and a bunch of other things) got hacked by ransomware a few days ago. I am currently in the process of either trying to restore it or wiping it and starting again, and at this point I have to say that the latter seems more likely.

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Marmot researchers set up an OnlyFans to get funding

Funding for scientific research in the United States is at a record low after the Trump administration canceled billions of dollars in research grants last year, derailing work focused on diversity, climate change, and other hot-button topics. For Daniel Blumstein, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, those changes reflect a wider priority shift that has caused support for his work to slowly dwindle. For years, Blumstein has overseen one of the longest-running studies of free-living mammals in the world, focused on yellow-bellied marmots in central Colorado.

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Should we be worried about the Hugging Face hack?

OpenAI admitted that two of its leading-edge models escaped onto the internet and hacked into another AI company. Is this just a testing error or should we be worried about the dangers of rogue AIs?

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Should we be worried about the Hugging Face hack?

OpenAI admitted that two of its leading-edge models escaped onto the internet and hacked into another AI company. Is this just a testing error or should we be worried about the dangers of rogue AIs?

mathewingramblog.wordpress.com

He impaled himself on a pole and then hiked down a mountain

David Cifaldi and two of his friends had been hiking for about seven hours up Montana’s tallest mountain on July 20 when he slipped on a rock and fell. He saw one of his trekking poles on the ground, but the second one was nowhere to be found.Then he rolled over. Something wasn’t right. Mr. Cifaldi, 32, had impaled himself on the pole. He immediately went into nurse mode: Mr. Cifaldi is a wound nurse at St. Vincent Regional Hospital in Billings, Mont.The pole was jutting at an angle into his left lateral muscle, below his armpit, and out through his back.

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Con artist Fat Leonard fleeced the Navy, now wants a pardon

Wearing an extra-large tan prison uniform, the man who seduced legions of U.S. Navy officers with prostitutes and bribes shuffled into a visiting room at a remote federal penitentiary on the Pacific coast. He squeezed his hulking frame into a tiny plastic chair. In an exclusive interview, Leonard Glenn Francis — the con man better known as Fat Leonard — revealed for the first time how he bamboozled U.S.

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A paranoid techie, a homemade bunker and a shocking death

It was late afternoon on September 10, 2017, and Bruce Leshan was at home repairing a crack in his car’s windshield in Bethesda when he heard a scream. “Get out!” the voice cried. Leshan looked up and noticed smoke coming from the house up the hill. As he rounded the corner, racing up Danbury Road, the home came into view: a modest white Cape Cod, its eaves exhaling brown volcanic plumes.

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Mom (or dad) keeping watch

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Australian duo sailed a raft with an outhouse to Kangaroo Island

An old school toilet is not a typical mode of transport on which to hit the high seas but that did not deter friends Alex Craig and Paul Graham from giving it a go. The duo crossed the stretch of ocean between Cape Jervis and Kangaroo Island on a homemade barge complete with an outhouse and a barbecue. The apparent brazen act of Aussie larrikinism was actually a solution to a problem.

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It’s the end of reading as we know it! It’s the new Dark Ages!

If you read The Atlantic, or you follow a lot of writers on Substack — or virtually any other writing-focused website or form of social media — you will already know what this post is about: The Atlantic published a piece recently entitled The End of Reading, the subtitle of which stated that "the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history." The piece begins with a lyrical description of the famous Library of Alexandria, which King Ptolemy the First intended to be the repository of all human knowledge at the time.

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Harvard astrophysicist believes we’ve been visited by aliens

Harvard scientist Avi Loeb has been doing interviews all week because of his take on 3I/ATLAS, an interstellar object that has captured public fascination. The astronomy community generally agrees it’s a comet — potentially the oldest one ever seen. But Loeb has repeatedly pointed to what he contends are unexplained anomalies. Over the past eight years, has gained worldwide notoriety for advancing provocative notions, propelling him ever deeper into the pop-culture zeitgeist.

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It’s the end of reading as we know it! It’s the new Dark Ages!

If you read The Atlantic, or you follow a lot of writers on Substack — or virtually any other writing-focused website or form of social media — you will already know what this post is about: The Atlantic published a piece recently entitled The End of Reading, the subtitle of which stated that "the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history." The piece begins with a lyrical description of the famous Library of Alexandria, which King Ptolemy the First intended to be the repository of all human knowledge at the time.

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They thought she was a vampire so they dug up her casket

A few miles from where I live is a small graveyard with one tombstone more decorated than the rest. Offerings of trinkets and candles tell a story about a woman mourned by people who never knew her. No story from the life of this young woman, who died of tuberculosis at the age of nineteen, indicated that she would lead a notorious afterlife.

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He lost his arms at two but grew up to run a 1,300-acre farm

A devastating farm accident when he was just two and a half years old became the beginning of an extraordinary journey of resilience, determination and self-belief. After losing both his arms in a grain auger accident on his family's Ohio farm in 1972, Detwiler refused to let his disability define him. He taught himself to perform everyday tasks using only his feet, eventually managing a 1,300-acre corn and soybean farm.

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Who buried $10M in gold coins found by a California couple?

The dream of discovering buried treasure came true for a California couple who found a real pot of gold while walking their dog. The largest such hoard ever found in the U.S. is comprised of 1,411 gold coins, minted between 1847 and 1894, worth an estimated $10 million in today's market.The coins are now known as the Saddle Ridge Hoard, after a feature on the couple's property.

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How a suburban mom wound up working for a Mexican cartel

As Chelsie Marie Anderson rode through the desert, leaning her head against the bus window, she kept thinking, This is how I’m going to die. Anderson stuck out among the other passengers: an American woman with bleached-blonde tips, huge brown eyes, and olive skin on a bus in rural Mexico. The next day, she arrived at a gated community in a small city, sore and exhausted.

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Kids need to explore the world and that includes social media

A prominent psychologist argues that children should be free to explore the world they are going to have to live in, and that includes the internet and social media, which means no age-gating laws

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He’s been pulled over hundreds of times in his banana car

A Montana police officer spotted the giant banana rolling through Billings and did what countless law enforcement officers have done before him: He pulled it over. For Steve Braithwaite, owner, builder and full-time driver of the 23-foot-long Big Banana Car, the stop was less of a surprise than a tradition. After 15 years, he has learned that driving a giant banana attracts attention.

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Kids need to explore the world and that includes social media

A prominent psychologist argues that children should be free to explore the world they are going to have to live in, and that includes the internet and social media, which means no age-gating laws

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The hottest sport around is something called Banana Ball

If you like baseball and use social media, you’ve likely already encountered the Savannah Bananas. The team is something of a social-media darling, especially on TikTok – the Bananas’ more than 6m million followers on the app significantly outnumber those of every franchise in Major League Baseball (as well as every team in the NFL, NBA and NHL). The factors driving the Bananas’ online success are obvious.

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A Chinese businessman survived six days in open water

Qin Jianping had only intended to stop off in Haikou, capital of China’s Hainan province, for a few days. He drove to a seaside plaza to take an evening stroll along a seawall. He remembers slipping in the darkness, losing his balance, and suddenly falling over the edge into the sea. After plunging into the deep, dark, icy water, Qin quickly fought his way to the surface.

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Inside the secret plan to move the famous Bayeux tapestry

A convoy of police cars, lights flashing, tail the large yellow truck up to the back gates of London’s British Museum. It’s just before 3 a.m. on July 10, a date that has been kept under wraps for months. After the truck pulls into the museum’s loading bay, four men open its back doors to reveal a cage-like rectangular crate. Inside it is another crate, inside that crate is a metal shell, and inside that shell, folded back and forth on itself 28 times, is a precious and fragile artifact, nearly a thousand years old.The journey this truck has made over the previous 10 hours, by road and rail from northern France, was undertaken in great secrecy, due to the importance and value of the cargo within (reported to be insured for over a billion dollars).

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AI 2040: Plan A

A detailed forecast and recommendation for how the US, China and the rest of the world should navigate superintelligence.

ai-2040.com

Anthropic discovers that Claude has a secret spot for thinking

As longtime Torment Nexus readers probably know, I have a minor obsession with the topic of artificial intelligence engines and consciousness — in part because such discussions inevitably reveal how l...

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This famous romance writer was also an aviation pioneer

We now think of Dame Barbara Cartland in her hot-pink guise as a romantic novelist, but in the early 1930s she was a sparkier sort of woman. Her early novels and plays raised eyebrows due to their racy nature and she wrote some rather naughty gossip columns. She was also interested in technology. In the summer of 1931, she was involved in a series of experimental glider flights.

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Golden hour

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