After their son died they found out he was a legendary gamer

From the Sunday Times: "At 18, he graduates from high school with excellent grades but is unemployable. He moves into an annexe, is looked after by a rotating team of carers and spends much of his time deeply absorbed in World of Warcraft, his right hand resting awkwardly on a custom-built keyboard, his head lolling to one side as he navigates an epic world. Robert and Trude sometimes sit with him while he plays, but after half an hour they find their attention drifting. After he passed away at the age of 20, they started getting emails expressing their sorrow at Mats’ death. The messages continued, a trickle becoming a flood as people conveyed their condolences and wrote paragraph after paragraph about Mats. He had a warm heart, people wrote. He was funny and imaginative, a good listener and generous. You should be proud of him. Robert and Trude eventually discovered that he had an online life they knew nothing about."

Sir Rod Stewart has spent two decades building a massive model train set

From the BBC: "He's one of rock's biggest stars, but Sir Rod Stewart has finally revealed the fruits of his other great passion - model railways. In between making music and playing live, Sir Rod has been working on a massive, intricate model of a US city for the past 23 years. He unveiled it as part of an interview with Railway Modeller magazine. He then phoned in to Jeremy Vine's BBC Radio 2 show to rebuff the host's suggestion he had not built it himself. "I would say 90% of it I built myself," he insisted. "The only thing I wasn't very good at and still am not is the electricals, so I had someone else do that." Sir Rod has released 13 studio albums and been on 19 tours during the time it took to build the city, which is modelled on both New York and Chicago around 1945. "A lot of people laugh at it being a silly hobby, but it's a wonderful hobby," he said.

The UK giving up control of a tiny atoll in the Indian Ocean could change the internet

From Gareth Edwards: "On October 3, the British government announced that it was giving up sovereignty over a small tropical atoll in the Indian Ocean known as the Chagos Islands. The islands would be handed over to the neighboring island country of Mauritius, about 1,100 miles off the southeastern coast of Africa. The story did not make the tech press, but perhaps it should have. The decision to transfer the islands to their new owner will result in the loss of one of the tech and gaming industry’s preferred top-level domains: .io. Since 1968, the UK and U.S have operated a major military base on the Chagos Islands, but the neighboring nation of Mauritius has always disputed British sovereignty over them. In return for a 99-year lease for the military base, the islands will become part of Mauritius. Once this treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist, and therefore so will the .io domain."

Mysterious object discovered speeding over a million miles per hour across our galaxy

From Science Focus: "A mysterious object has been spotted zooming through space at about 1.6 million km/h (1 million miles per hour), so fast that it could exit the Milky Way entirely – and scientists are trying to work out what it is. Currently 400 light years from Earth, the object – known as CWISE J1249 – is very unlikely to be a probe due to its large size. Around 30,000 times more massive than Earth, CWISE J1249 is 8 per cent of the Sun’s mass. This unusual size puts J1249 “somewhere between a star and a planet,” Dr Darren Baskill, astronomy lecturer at the University of Sussex, told Science Focus. “Such rapidly moving stars are unusual. Locally, only one or two stars out of every thousand are moving at such a speed, and a star moving as rapidly as J1249."

She spent 24 hours straight riding on the New York subway

From Cafe Anne: "The last thing I do before heading out on my big adventure is drop my dog to stay overnight with my neighbor Shelly. I tell Shelly my plan: I'm going to spend 24 hours straight in the NYC subway. The rules: I can go wherever I please, chat with whomever looks interesting and pass the time however I like—as long as I don't pass back through the turnstile. Also, I’m only allowed to eat, drink and read what I buy underground. "Any suggestions?" I ask. "One word," says Shelly. "Don't." It's too late. I've wanted to do this for years, lord knows why, and have spent many hours at this point planning and packing for the trip, the way one might prepare for a safari. My tote bag is packed with my toothbrush, notebook, pen and ibuprofen. I've got a list of underground sites recommended by readers, and a directory of subway stations with bathrooms."

What life is like on a ship in the North Sea

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