A painting worth $30 million was almost thrown in the trash
From Wikipedia: "The Mocking of Christ is a small 13th-century panel painting by the Italian artist Cimabue. It depicts the mocking of Jesus and is one of three panels known from Cimabue's Diptych of Devotion. The painting was discovered hanging above the hotplate in the kitchen of an elderly woman living in Compiègne, northern France. The woman was in her nineties and was selling the house, which had been built in the 1960s, and moving from the area. Ahead of the move in June 2019 the owner called in a local auctioneer to determine if any of her possessions were worth selling; the remainder were to be thrown away. The work was put up for auction in 2019 and reached a hammer price of 19.5 million Euros, which reached 24 million Euros once selling fees were included. The winning bid was placed on behalf of two anonymous collectors, and set a new world record for a pre-1500 artwork sold at auction."
A shipwreck eluded searchers for 139 years but citizen scientists found it in two hours
From the Smithsonian: "On September 15, 1886, the F.J. King was transporting a load of iron ore across Lake Michigan when the ship encountered a storm and started leaking. The crew tried to pump out the water, but the three-masted schooner eventually became so flooded that Captain William Griffin ordered everyone to abandon ship. They clambered onto the ship’s yawl boat and headed for shore, where they were later picked up by a nearby schooner, La Petite. In the early morning hours, they watched the F.J. King sink bow-first beneath the waves. For decades, shipwreck hunters searched for the vessel without success. The F.J. King proved so elusive she even earned a reputation as a “ghost ship." Brendon Baillod, president of the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association, led the efforts to find the F.J. King along with his research partner Bob Jaeck. They decided to invite 20 citizen scientists and historians along for the search, to share in the excitement of looking for a missing wreck."
A dog named Robot dug a hole and discovered a cave full of 17,000-year-old paintings
From The Collector: "As World War II raged through Europe, Marcel Ravidat took his dog for a stroll along the river near his home in the countryside town of Montignac, France. Everything seemed normal until Marcel realized that Robot had fallen down a hole. He shouted for his four-legged friend and eventually heard a muffled reply from deep down inside the ground. It was then, when Marcel went down to find Robot, that he also found something that would prove to be one of the most significant finds in the history of art. The pair had quite literally stumbled across the one of the earliest known examples of man-made art – the Lascaux cave paintings. Thanks to the dim light from a small oil lamp, Marcel was able to make out a number of animal figures dotted around the ceiling of the cave. He didn’t know it at the time, but these paintings were over 17,000 years old and he was most likely the first person to have laid eyes on them."
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 through my Patreon 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 The Torment Nexus.
A company is building a plane as long as a football field to carry wind turbine blades
From Spectrum: "he world’s largest airplane, when it’s built, will stretch more than a football field from tip to tail. Sixty percent longer than the biggest existing aircraft, with 12 times as much cargo space as a 747, the behemoth will look like an oil tanker that’s sprouted wings—aeronautical engineering at a preposterous scale. Called WindRunner, and expected by 2030, it’ll haul just one thing: massive wind-turbine blades. In most parts of the world, onshore wind-turbine blades can be built to a length of 70 meters, max. This size constraint comes not from the limits of blade engineering or physics; it’s transportation. Any larger and the blades couldn’t be moved over land, since they wouldn’t fit through tunnels or overpasses, or be able to accommodate the sharper curves of roads."
He took 16 years to type every number from one to a million using a single finger
From the BBC: "A man who took 16 years to type a million words with one finger won a place in the Guinness World Records book. Les Stewart of Queensland, Australia began typing the numbers from one to a million - in words - in 1982. He finished 16 years and seven months later, having got through seven manual typewriters, 1000 ink ribbons and 19,990 sheets of paper making it the world's longest typewriting marathon. Mr Stewart embarked on his Herculean task after injuries sustained in a house fire left him unable to work. His condition also meant he could only type with one finger. It took him two hours to complete each page and he averaged three pages a day. perhaps more bizarre than his world record achievement, is the fact that Les threw out all but two of the 19,890 pages he typed over those fifteen years. "I just put them in the recycling bin, we’ve got too many things in the house,” he said. “But I kept the first and the last page.”
Hyperlinks are blue because blue is Mosaic developer Marc Andreessen's favourite colour
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
