How an Olympic snowboarder got on the FBI Most Wanted list

From Toronto Life: "From the moment he was born, Ryan Wedding was the family darling. He belonged to a sporty, tightly knit clan with a shared love of the outdoors. In the 1960s, his grandparents, Laurence and Marlyn Spiess, had purchased the Mount Baldy Ski Area, a ski club near Thunder Bay. Skiing was the family religion. Wedding started snowboarding at age 12, shortly after he moved with his parents and two younger sisters to Coquitlam, BC, for his dad’s work. He won the first race he entered and caught the attention of Bob Allison, a former professional skier. Wedding was the baby of Allison’s team, the cherubic blue-eyed kid. At 15 years old, Wedding made the Canadian national team. Soon, he was competing internationally in the Alps and the Andes. Success fed his rapidly growing ego — he became obsessed with winning. Eventually, Wedding gave up on the Olympics, but he didn’t give up on his ambitions. Instead, he learned something that eludes many of his athlete peers: if adventure, glory and status are your goals, there are other ways to get them."

At 17 years old she solved a major mathematical problem

From Quanta: "A paper posted online in February left the math world by turns stunned, delighted and ready to welcome a bold new talent into its midst. Its author was Hannah Cairo, just 17 at the time. She had solved a 40-year-old mystery about how functions behave, called the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture. “We were all shocked, absolutely. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like that,” said Itamar Oliveira of the University of Birmingham, who has spent the past two years trying to prove that the conjecture was true. Cairo grew up in Nassau, the Bahamas, where she was homeschooled. She started learning math using Khan Academy’s online lessons, and quickly advanced through its standard curriculum. By the time she was 11 years old, she’d finished calculus. Her parents found a couple of math professors to tutor her remotely, but much of her education was self-directed, as she read and absorbed, on her own, the graduate-level math textbooks that her tutors recommended."

The longest lightning strike ever recorded stretched for more than 500 miles

From Scientific American: "Guinness World Records may be the go-to organization for measuring the extent of (sometimes dubious) human achievement, but for natural phenomena, the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO’s) Committee on Weather and Climate Extremes sets the bar. Recently the committee certified a new record: the longest lightning strike ever measured. The bolt, which materialized on a stormy day in October 2017, spanned a total of 515 miles from East Texas to an area near Kansas City. The previous record-holder, a bolt of lightning measuring 477 miles that struck during a storm in 2020, also originated in Texas. This is no coincidence. The south-central Great Plains in the U.S. represent one of few hotspots in the world for the giant complexes of thunderstorms in which these “megaflashes” are most likely to occur. They arise when many smaller storms coalesce into one large system⁠. The 2017 complex spanned all the way from Texas to Minnesota."

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.

When British television had to hire "translators" to read statements from English speakers

From Now I Know: "On August 20, 1988, members of the Irish Republican Army bombed a bus carrying British soldiers, killing eight soldiers and injuring 28 more. In response, the British government voted to censor Irish republican leaders who wanted to appear on British-run TV and radio. Journalists throughout the nation objected to this, calling it censorship, but to no avail. The voices of the sanctioned speakers were barred, but the words they spoke were not, resulting in the unique workaround for which the ban is now chiefly remembered: six years in which anyone claiming to speak for Sinn Féin would have their voices dubbed by actors. First tested in a Channel 4 documentary in which Stephen Rea voiced Gerry Adams, the process was soon applied across the board, leading to the ubiquitous process of dozens of elected representatives and spokespeople having their words dubbed from English to English on all platforms."

What were the blobs of gelatinous goo that fell on a town in Washington State?

From Discovery: "In the summer of 1994, the small town of Oakville in Washington State experienced an extraordinary phenomenon. Instead of water, it began raining blobs. Gelatinous, clear goo splattered across windscreens, covering buildings and earth. And that’s when people began getting sick. This strange phenomenon became known as the Oakville Blobs. Oakville was accustomed to rain, lots of rain. However, the torrential kind that fell on 7th August 1994 was no ordinary rain. Residents in the small city reported that what fell from the sky was not water, but gloopy, translucent blobs, each no bigger than a single grain of rice. One police officer, David Lacey, recounted seeing the goop hit his windscreen while on patrol at 3am and compared it to Jell-O. The very day of the raining blobs, people started getting sick, both Officer Lacey and Dotty Hearne among them. There were reports of people developing flu-like symptoms from contact or proximity to the blobs, even of animals dying."

Father of the year teaches his son how to play Ding Dong Ditch

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