Behind the fancy cars and private jets was a huge fraud

From Toronto Life: "Elaine Hoffman, a 71-year-old grandmother, sat in her suburban Indiana home and turned on her computer. A banner ad caught her attention: its claim seemed unbelievable — that she could make money with the click of a mouse. Hoffman knew her way around investments. She had a math degree and had worked as a financial planner before a liver transplant forced her to retire early. By keeping abreast of the markets and investing in stocks and bonds, she’d built enough of a nest egg to ensure that she and her husband would be comfortable for the rest of their lives. Still, she was curious about the ad. When the video ended, a phone number appeared on her screen. Hoffman dialled it and was soon speaking to a man who worked for an operation called Glenridge Capital. He explained tha Glenridge was an investment service that offered clients a way into the lucrative world of binary options trading."

Mark Twain's books may have been comedies but his life was a tragedy

From The Atlantic: "Ron Chernow’s new book Mark Twain forces us to a conclusion about its subject: he was clearly an idiot, and a born sucker. This conclusion will shock anyone who knows Twain only through his writing, in which the author is wise and witty and, above all, devastating in his portrayal of frauds, cretins, and sententious bores. In life, Twain was quite different. He was gullible, emotionally immature, and prone to shoveling money into obvious scams. He was also struck by a series of family tragedies that would have been unbearable even for a much less self-destructive man. The Twain of the printed page is irreverent and quotable, but the private Twain is petulant, self-pitying, narcissistic, and afflicted with tragedy and misery of his own making and of God’s. Mark Twain is funny. Mark Twain is funny the way the Book of Job is funny."

Scientists discover that orange cats are that colour because of a rare genetic mutation

From Scientific American: "Studying the colors of cat fur has informed various aspects of modern genetics. But one hue has stumped scientists for decades: orange. In house cats, orangeness appears to be sex-linked; it almost always occurs in males because of a mutation on the sex-determining X chromosome. Scientists have long been unable to pinpoint any specific gene responsible for pumpkin-colored cats, however.Now two papers reveal a remarkably unique genetic pathway that has never been seen in other felines—or any other mammals. With their colleagues, two separate groups at Stanford University and Kyushu University in Japan independently arrived at the same conclusion: a tiny deletion in a cat’s X chromosome increased the activity of a gene called Arhgap36, which scientists had never previously associated with pigmentation. In this case, it appeared to be coaxing the cat’s melanin-producing cells to shift orange."

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.

In New Zealand you can't name your baby King

From CNN: "It seems some parents in New Zealand just can’t get the message. Once again, King has topped the list of baby names rejected by the country’s Registrar General. The royal title led the list of banned baby names for 14 years in a row until 2023 when it was replaced by Prince, which ranks second in the latest iteration. Other regal references including Duke, Majesty and Emperor are also a no-go in the country, which polices birth names under its strict registration law. New Zealand registered 60,000 births last year and rejected 38 proposed names. Under the law, baby names must not be offensive, unreasonably long, or include numbers and symbols. They must also refrain from resembling official titles and ranks without adequate justification, according to the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act 2021."

The lampposts in New York's Central Park can help you pinpoint your location

From Now I Know: "Each lamppost in Central Park has a number printed on it. The first two digits [or three, if you go north of 99th Street] indicate the closest cross street, and the last two numbers indicate which side of the park the lamp is closer to: even numbers, in this case, mean the east side, and odd numbers mean west. The last two digits also indicate location, with the numbers increasing as you move closer to the center of the park. There are roughly 1,600 such lamp posts throughout the park, so no matter where you are, you’re only a few feet away from knowing your location (unless you go into the part of the park known as the Ramble, between 73rd and 79th Streets; there are no lamp posts in the 36 acres of woodlands and trails in that area). The numerical system was originally designed to assist park employees in locating a lamp that was in need of servicing. If someone came across a lamp that wasn’t lit, all they needed to do was tell the park administrators the four- or five-digit code."

What happens when you eat around seagulls

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