The Russian bot army that conquered online poker

Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. As many of you probably know, I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your Ghost 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. And I appreciate it, believe me! If you like this newsletter, please share it with someone else, and thanks for being a reader.

From Bloomberg: "Advanced poker software is now widely available for a few hundred dollars. Forums are full of accusations about everyone from anonymous, low-stakes fish to sponsored professionals. All the big platforms promote a zero-tolerance policy, but no one seems to know how many bots are out there or where they come from. “It’s a scourge,” one gambling executive told me. When I started investigating poker bots, I came across an obscure chatroom thread posted by a whistleblower describing an operation so large it resembled an international corporation. It had a board of directors, training programs and an HR department—everything, it seemed, but a water cooler. Allegedly based in Siberia, the group was said to have absorbed all potential rivals in the region, becoming known as Bot Farm Corporation, or BF Corp. I decided to find out the truth about BF Corp., by following a trail of leaked internal emails, and by conducting interviews with players, gambling executives, security consultants and botmakers. When I finally tracked down BF’s Siberian creators, they agreed to an interview."

Her children were sick and no one knew why. Was it forever chemicals on the farm?

From the New York Times: "Allison Jumper’s family was a picture of healthy living. Active kids. Wholesome meals. A freezer stocked with organic beef from her in-laws’ farm in Maine. Then in late 2020, she got a devastating call from her brother-in-law. High levels of harmful “forever chemicals” had been detected on their farm and in their cows’ milk, and they were getting shut down. At first, Mrs. Jumper worried only about her in-laws’ livelihoods. But soon, her mind went somewhere else: to her own children’s mysterious health issues, including startlingly high cholesterol levels. Unknown to them, her family’s beloved organic farm had been fertilized decades earlier with sewage sludge tainted by a dangerous class of chemicals linked to certain cancers, liver disease and a host of other health problems. Their cattle had grazed on contaminated pastures, making the beef and milk too dangerous to eat. Yet her family had been eating it for several years."

The term scientist was first used in the 1800s to describe Mary Somerville

From The Marginalian: "Victorian polymath Mary Somerville tutored pioneering computer programmer Ada Lovelace and later introduced her to Charles Babbage, thus sparking their legendary collaboration on the world’s first computer. Somerville’s 1834 treatise On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences so impressed her peers, readers, and reviewers that “man of science” — the term used to refer to a person who had advanced the progress of knowledge — seemed suddenly inappropriate and obsolete. In 1834, the Cambridge don William Whewell wrote a complimentary article about Somerville, whose erudite books brought together previously disparate fields of mathematics, astronomy, geology, chemistry, and physics. He called her a scientist, in part because her work was interdisciplinary. She was no mere astronomer, physicist, or chemist, but a thinker who articulated the connections among the various branches of inquiry."

He was a renowned Harvard psychiatrist but then he said he believed in alien abductions

From the LARB: "John Mack had been serving as the head of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School since 1977. A remarkable polymath with a long and distinguished career, Mack won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1977 for his brilliant A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence. Yet by 2004, Mack’s reputation among his colleagues at Harvard, and in the wider psychoanalytic community of the United States, had suffered significant damage. Over the previous several years, Mack had dedicated much effort to investigating an idiosyncratic and seemingly unserious scholarly pursuit: the reality of alien abduction. Mack’s studies of UFOs and encounters with extraterrestrial life, and his public statements, popular books, TV appearances, and conference speeches, had incited scandal—and even scorn—among his learned colleagues."

The quaint bearskin caps worn by the Kings' Guard cost $2,500 each

From the BBC: "The bearskin caps worn by soldiers outside Buckingham Palace now cost more than £2,000 each, figures from the Ministry of Defence show. The cost of the ceremonial caps, made from the fur of black bears, soared by 30% in a year, according to figures revealed in response to a Freedom of Information request from animal welfare campaigners. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals group are against using real fur in principle, but they say it is also now a financial as well as an ethical issue, with £1m spent on fur caps in recent years. A ministry spokesman said a fake fur version would have to satisfy "safety and durability considerations" and that "no alternative has met all those criteria". The increase in price is the result of a change in the "contractual arrangements" for the caps, which are made from the fur of bears killed in Canada."

Eighteen-year-old guitar phenomenon Grace Bowers plays Telluride

Acknowledgements: 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 The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis's Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's The Browser, Clive Thompson's Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy's Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova's The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com