Does it feel like the Earth is spinning faster? Because it is
From Scientific American: "If you haven’t accomplished as much this summer as you had hoped to, you can blame forces far beyond your control: a few of these dog days, by one measure, are among the shortest you’ve ever lived through. For most of humanity’s history, we have measured time by the sun as it rises and sets — essentially, through Earth’s orientation to the cosmos surrounding us. But compare that technique with modern, superprecise timekeeping, and soon you’ll find that each day varies a bit in length at the scale of thousandths of a second. This summer a few factors are adding up to make a handful of Earth’s spins — those occurring on July 10, July 22 and August 5 — more than a millisecond faster than the average of the past several decades. Physics holds that, as a solid object moving in a vacuum, Earth ought to keep spinning at the same rate unless some outside force intervenes. But Earth isn’t quite a simple solid object."
Who is the real Dice Man? The truth behind a disturbing cult novel
From The Guardian: "Toward the end of the 1960s, Luke Rhinehart worked as a psychoanalyst in New York and was bored stiff. He lived in a pretty apartment with a nice view. He practised yoga, read books on Zen, dreamed vaguely of joining a commune but did not dare. So life plods on, calm and dreary, until one night after a dinner party, when he has had a little too much to drink. Rhinehart sees a dice lying on the carpet, a banal playing dice, and gets the idea of throwing it and acting on its instructions. Sooner or later, he could not avoid writing “murder” on his list of options. When the dice orders him to do it, Rhinehart is forced to draw up a list of six potential victims,, and the dice demands that he kill one of his former patients. All this comes from a book, The Dice Man, published in the US in 1971. It was not clear whether the book was fiction or autobiography, but its author, Luke Rhinehart, had the same name as his hero. The Dice Man became the object of a minor but persistent cult, and each time I met someone who had read it, the same questions came up: Who was Luke Rhinehart?"
How the mystery of Winston Churchill's dead platypus was finally solved
From the BBC: "In 1943, a camouflaged ship set off from Australia to England carrying top secret cargo - a single young platypus. Named after his would-be owner, UK prime minister Winston Churchill, the rare monotreme was an unprecedented gift from a country desperately trying to curry favour as World War Two expanded into the Pacific and arrived on its doorstep. But days out from Winston's arrival, as war raged in the seas around him, the puggle was found dead in the water of his specially made "platypusary". Fearing a potential diplomatic incident, Winston's death – along with his very existence – was swept under the rug. He was preserved, stuffed and quietly shelved inside his name-sake's office, with rumours that he died of Nazi-submarine-induced shell-shock gently whispered into the ether. The mystery of who, or what, really killed him has eluded the world since - until now."
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.
There's a little piece of Delaware hidden inside the state of New Jersey, but why?
From NJ.com: "Forget what you learned in third-grade geography. The maps of New Jersey you’ve been looking at are most likely wrong. There’s a swath of land that spans about two miles tucked away next to Pennsville that belongs to Delaware. In Pennsville, near Fort Mott, a section of land that is mainly marsh area, approximately 1.7 miles in length and 0.6 miles wide is owned by Delaware. The First State also lays claim to another piece of land, this time on Artificial Island, less than two miles away from the near the Salem Nuclear Power Plant. To see why this all started, you have to go all the way back to William Penn and the former king of England, King Charles II. The two men made an agreement to draw a 12-mile circle around New Castle as the border for the Delaware colony. The circle extended beyond the middle of the Delaware River, right up to the low tide line of Jersey's shore. At first, the land was New Jersey, and the water belonged to Delaware. Then, over time, because of land fill and dredging, part of the Killcohook marsh site is now actually located in Delaware.”
The city of Helsinki has gone an entire year without a single traffic fatality
From YLE: "Helsinki has not recorded a single traffic fatality in the past 12 months, city and police officials confirmed this week. The city's most recent fatal accident occurred in early July 2024 on Keinulaudantie in the city's Kontula district. Authorities are calling the situation exceptional. According to Utriainen, more than half of Helsinki's streets now have a speed limit of 30 km/h. Fifty years ago, that proportion featured 50 km/h limits. Earlier this summer, Helsinki decided to lower speed limits near schools to 30 km/h, a measure that is set to take effect as the academic year begins. Street design has also played a key role. Pedestrian and cycling infrastructure has been significantly upgraded in recent years. In addition, cooperation with traffic police has intensified and more traffic cameras and automated enforcement systems have been introduced. The positive trend extends beyond fatalities. In the past year, there were 277 injury-causing traffic accidents in Helsinki — a sharp contrast to the nearly 1,000 injurious accidents recorded annually in the late 1980s."
A 7-year-old Indian girl set a world record by limbo-skating under 20 cars
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
