Independence Day should be on July 2nd or August 2nd

From Now I Know: "Some believe that July 4, 1776, is not truly America's independence day. That honor should fall to either July 2, 1776, or August 2, 1776. On June 11, 1776, the Continental Congress created a sub-committee of five delegates – Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman – empowered to write a first draft of a declaration of independence. Jefferson took the lead and the quintet delivered their draft on June 28th. After a few days of debates and revisions, the Congress voted to declare independence – on July 2nd, not July 4th. nstead, we Americans celebrate independence on the 4th, the day the Continental Congress ratified the text of the document. Ratified – but not signed. According to National Geographic, many of those who signed the famous piece of parchment were not present on the 4th of July and the document wasn't signed until August 2nd."

Scientists are using the bodies of dead spiders as miniature claw machines

From Scientific American: "Spider corpses turned into robots sounds like the far-fetched plotline of a B horror movie. But researchers from Rice University have created just that—dead wolf spiders that can be used as machines to pick up and put down objects. In a paper published in Advanced Science, researchers have dubbed the use of biotic materials as robotic components “necrobotics.” They say this area of research could be used to create biodegradable grippers for very small objects. “We understand that many people are put off by the sight of a spider, but from an engineering point of view, the spider’s mechanism of movement is very interesting,” said Faye Yap, a mechanical engineer at Rice. The research began in 2019, when the scientists noticed a dead spider curled up in their lab. Yap and her colleagues did a quick search and discovered that spiders have a hydraulic pressure system that controls their limbs." 

He runs a Florida restaurant and is the best Pac-Man player in the history of the game

From Oxford American: "Billy Mitchell, the most knowledgeable and masterful Pac-Man player ever to drop a quarter in a machine, is a hard man to find. When I asked one of his best friends, Walter Day, the best way to get in touch with him, Day told me, “First I spend an hour praying to God, then I visit a psychic, then I place a classified ad, then I hire a plane to carry a banner that says CALL ME BILLY! and make it fly all over South Florida. Because he might be anywhere.” After some seventy phone calls, I manage to arrange a meeting with Mitchell at Ricky’s, the restaurant in Hollywood, Florida, that he took over from his father in the mid-1980s. Mitchell is probably the greatest arcade-video-game player of all time. In 1999, he executed the first-ever perfect game on Pac-Man. The feat requires navigating 256 boards, or levels, and eating every single possible pellet, fruit, and ghost, for the highest score of 3,333,360."

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.

Public contests advanced the science of canning and also navigation

From MIT Press: "Cancer remains an unsolved problem, and thousands of scientists worldwide are working diligently to make progress in its treatment. What sequence of actions will lead to a better way to block that channel? How can that cell type be detected in early stages? How can that tumor be targeted without harming healthy cells nearby? What treatment will work to eradicate the tumor without making it resistant to the treatment? Scientists, like game players, must thread an incredibly narrow path through action space. There is a long history of games and competitions for public good. Modern canning and jarring techniques originated in part from a reward offered during the French Revolutionary Wars to anyone who could devise a cheap way of preserving food. In 1714, British Parliament passed “An Act for providing a Public Reward for such Person or Persons as shall discover the Longitude at Sea,” establishing prizes with payouts tied to improvements in accuracy. The rewards were paid out for over 100 years, and the results had a lasting impact on timekeeping."

The ancient Greek guide to how to succeed at philosophical dinner parties

From Atlas Obscura: "Imagine that you have just been invited to a dinner party in third-century Rome. This is going to be a very fancy kind of affair. It’s going to be some high-profile guests, and you want to make sure that you’re going to make a good impression. Luckily, you own a copy of a work of literature called the Deipnosophistae, which in Greek can be translated as “the philosophers at dinner” or “the wise people at dinner.” The framing device is that it’s a bunch of people talking at a dinner party. So it’s kind of structured that as the courses of the dinner are coming out, they see a dish and it inspires them to talk about that ingredient. And they’re telling stories and they’re quoting a lot from other authors. It also contains the oldest recorded known recipe in Greek. During this time, the Greek cities in what is now Sicily were known for kind of fancy haute cuisine. And so the recipe that we have in Deipnosophistae is for a grilled fish. It’s called ribbon fish, and it’s topped with grated cheese and olive oil."

A group of Amish men carry a building down a road for over a mile

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