His blood helped save the lives of more than 2 million babies

From the BBC: "One of the world's most prolific blood donors - whose plasma saved the lives of more than two million babies - has died. James Harrison died in his sleep at a nursing home in New South Wales, Australia on 17 February, his family said on Monday. He was 88. Known in Australia as the man with the golden arm, Harrison's blood contained a rare antibody, Anti-D, which is used to make medication given to pregnant mothers whose blood is at risk of attacking their unborn babies. The Australian Red Cross Blood Service paid tribute to Harrison, saying he pledged to become a donor after receiving transfusions while undergoing a major chest surgery when he was 14. He started donating his blood plasma when he was 18 and continued doing so every two weeks until he was 81. In 2005, he had the world record for most blood plasma donated. His daughter and two of his grandchildren are also recipients of anti-D immunisations."

How a walnut tree played a critical role in convicting a man of mass murder

From the Dublin Review of Books: "Thirty-five years have now passed since civil war erupted in the Balkans. In 1990, the Yugoslav federation began to tear itself apart, with insurrections breaking out in most of its six constituent republics. One story from the Yugoslav civil war connects a small valley in rural England with a mass grave in Croatia. At its heart is a dreadful crime – involving murder, betrayal and deceit – and a struggle between those who sought to reveal the truth, and those who wanted to deny and suppress it. That conflict was resolved by a most unlikely witness: a walnut tree. One spring morning in 1998, Paul Tabbush was at work at the Bedgebury Pinetum in Kent – one of the world’s largest collections of tree specimens – when he received an unexpected phone call. Prof Tabbush was head of silviculture and seed research with the British Forestry Commission. To his astonishment, the phone call he received that morning came from an investigator with the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague."

This feminist resistance fighter created the prototype for the modern kitchen

From Atlas Obscura: "Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was imprisoned in 1941 for her work as a courier for the Communist Party of Austria, which led the resistance against the Nazi regime in her home country. While she managed to narrowly avoid a death sentence, Schütte-Lihotzky remained in jail until the end of World War II in 1945. The incarceration would forever split her life in two. On the one side were her beginnings as a precocious and successful architect spurred on by the desire to create a better life for working-class women. On the other, what she would refer to as her “second life,” as an active communist, political activist, and memoirist who was professionally shunned in Austria for her political beliefs and received her much-deserved accolades only in the final decades of her life. Schütte-Lihotzky died a few days short of her 103rd birthday in 2000. But her name remains forever connected to a space she designed when she was only 29 years old: the Frankfurt Kitchen, the prototype of the modern kitchen."

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.

We know that Vesuvius erupted but no one is quite sure of when exactly

From the New York Times: "When Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, fiery avalanches of ash and pumice assaulted Pompeii, displacing some 15,000 inhabitants and killing at least 1,500 more. Volcanic debris “poured across the land,” wrote the Roman lawyer Pliny the Younger, and blanketed the town in a darkness “like the black of closed and unlighted rooms.” For years, scholars and armchair archaeologists have argued about pretty much every facet of the disaster. They still can’t agree on the day Vesuvius blew its top, the height of the umbrella-shaped cloud or the length and the aggression of the blasts. A report published by the Archaeological Park of Pompeii resurrected the once widely accepted belief that the cataclysm began to unfold on Aug. 24, the date put forward by Pliny. This walked back some of the recent enthusiasm for Oct. 24 as a possible start date, a theory that had been fueled by the 2018 discovery of a scrap of graffiti on a wall of the site’s freshly excavated House of the Garden."

He started the first computer dating service in 1966 even though he didn't own a computer

From Slate: "It was January of 1966. I had just turned 18 and was a freshman in college, stranded in the middle of Indiana. I was bored. There was, however, a new TV program on Monday nights: The Dating Game. A young woman would ask three men questions and pick one of them to go out with. It was much more fun than my homework. Then I read an article about some students at Harvard who were using computers and punch cards to try to match fellow students. If they could do it, why couldn’t I? I placed an ad for my brainstorm in the school newspaper, the Daily Student. “Heard of Computer Dating? Why Not Try Project Flame!” My pitch: Just send in your name and address and $1 and within a week you’d receive a questionnaire and an IBM punch card. Clients would fill out the questionnaire and write their name and address on the computer punch card. I suggested that their answers would be coded on the punch cards, and a university computer would analyze the data."

An NFL linebacker finds it impossible to get past a sumo wrestler

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