How a pet fish committed bank fraud using a Nintendo Switch

From TechSpot: "In a freak series of seemingly random events, a Switch owner's pet fish accessed his eShop account and added funds to it using his credit card. The crime was caught on video during an unsupervised live stream. Hundreds of viewers watched as the little fish stole their owner's identity while he was gone. The entire heist started as an experiment to see if fish could complete Pokémon Scarlet and Violet unassisted. To do it, Japanese YouTuber "Mutekimaru Channel" set up a webcam focused on his fish bowl. Motion-tracking software monitored the fish as they swam across an overlaid grid populated with controller inputs. If a fish paused or changed direction, the correlating controller input registered in the game. Mutekimaru had done this experiment before. In 2020, his fish successfully completed the test, finishing Pokémon Sapphire in about 3,195 hours — something an actively playing human could do in around 30. However, this time around, things did not go as quite as planned."

Why the Russians decapitated Major Tom after his last space mission

From Nautilus: "It was a little before 7 in the morning in western Russia when Major Tom reentered the atmosphere. Though he had no window to see the approaching Earth, the return had been announced earlier that day, when the braking engines were activated for six minutes, and his recovery capsule separated from the rest of the spacecraft. After having endured 30 days in space, it was about time to come back. As soon as the capsule reached the atmosphere, the heating and the G forces began. Major Tom was thrown against the roof of his compartment while the air slowed the capsule and the outside temperature rose to about 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius). At 7:11 a.m. on Sunday, May 19, 2013, the Bion-M1 spacecraft finally landed in the green field of a Russian farm. Alexander Andreev-Andrievskiy would arrive 10 minutes later. The 30-year-old biologist had been awake all night worrying. “I was very anxious,” he told me. “I did not know if the mice were doing well.”

Myrtle Corbin was born in the 1800s with four mostly functional legs and had five children

From Wikipedia: "Josephine Myrtle Corbin, born in 1868, was an American sideshow performer born as a dipygus, or conjoined twin. This referred to the fact that she had two separate pelvises side by side from the waist down, as a result of her body axis splitting as it developed. Each of her smaller inner legs was paired with one of her outer legs. She was said to be able to move her inner legs, but they were too weak for walking. Corbin entered the sideshow circuit with the moniker "Four-Legged Girl from Texas" when she was 13 years old; one of her first promotional pamphlets described her as being as "gentle of disposition as the summer sunshine and as happy as the day is long." Her popularity in the industry was such that other showmen turned to exhibiting four-legged fakes. At age 18, she married, and had four daughters and a son."

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.

How a 13-ton meteorite that hit the Earth millions of years ago was stolen

From the Smithsonian: "Millennia ago a piece of the sky fell toward East Africa, streaking overhead, born of an ancient collision. The meteorite landed, probably with more of a thud than a boom, in a river valley where camels now forage near the village of El Ali in Somalia. Known locally as Shiid-birood (“the iron rock”), the El Ali meteorite is 13.6 metric tons of iron and nickel. For generations it rested in the ground some 24 kilometers (15 miles) outside the village, becoming a landmark that was featured in folklore, lullabies and poems. Over the centuries people hammered the brown rock from the heavens with stones, banging off flakes of cold iron, or used it as a whetstone. Children pretended to ride it like a horse. Now, though, the El Ali meteorite is gone. Shaky cell-phone videos suggest the rock is being stored in China, where sellers likely hope to hock it for millions, either whole or in pieces. How did it get there?"

The people who make government pens have never seen them

From Now I Know: "The pen reads "SKILCRAFT-U.S. GOVERNMENT." And if you have worked for an American government institution, you know that – because they are everywhere. At roughly a buck a piece if you qualify for government pricing, the pens are the only ones you will see at most government institutions. Which makes you different than the people manufacturing the pens. The workers who put Skilcraft pens together don't see their work – and for good reason. They are blind. In 1938, the United States was still in the midst of the Great Depression, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Wagner-O'Day Act, which aimed at providing upward economic mobility for the blind by requiring that when the government purchased specific goods, those goods were made by blind Americans. Today the company employs over 5,000 blind workers in 44 states, producing a full arsenal of office supplies, janitorial equipment, etc., with the pens being produced in factories in Wisconsin or North Carolina."

China is testing robotic traffic cones that move themselves into place in an emergency

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