Most of what we know about a famous brain injury case is wrong

From Aeon: "In September of 1848, Phineas Gage was using an iron ‘tamping rod’ to pack an explosive charge into a hole. The charge exploded prematurely, firing the iron straight through his head. Miraculously, Gage survived, but his doctor noted a marked change in Gage’s personality: he had become ‘fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity’ and ‘a child in his intellectual capacity.’ The doctor concluded that this decline was a consequence of the damage done by the tamping iron to the frontal lobes of Gage’s brain. More than a century later, Gage’s transformation would still be referenced as the quintessential case study. ‘He took to gambling and sleeping with prostitutes,’ neuroscientist David Eagleman said in a talk at the Royal Society for the Arts in 2010. ‘He could not be trusted to honour his commitments,’ wrote neuroscientist Hanna Damasio and colleagues in 1994. The sensational impact of this version of Gage’s story would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that it’s largely fictional."

He bought a house and then found a massive model train setup underneath the floor

From SBS News: "After Daniel Xu and his wife finalised the purchase of their house in Melbourne's northern suburbs, he found what can only be described as a train enthusiast's dream beneath their feet. Underneath his new home, Xu discovered a model train setup, designed around an extensive network of train lines and miniature landscapes. With plans for renovations, Xu needed to get beneath his house, much of which is raised, sitting above a carport. Entering the undercroft of his new home via a small door, Xu was shocked to find the area, which is just tall enough to stand in, entirely taken up by the elaborate setup. He said nothing had been mentioned about model trains during the open home inspections. Coincidentally, Xu is a train enthusiast. He works as a rolling stock engineer for a company that manufactures new trains."

Even etymologists and linguists aren't sure where the word dog came from

From Dead Language Society: "If we look at the languages most closely related to English, we would expect the word for ‘dog’ to be hound. German has Hund, Swedish has hund, Dutch has hond — all clear relatives of hound. So hound is a very old word. And yet, by around AD 1500, it had been largely replaced by the word dog. Hound does survive in some compounds (hellhound), fixed expressions (release the hounds!), and as a more specific term for hunting dogs, as in the Hound of the Baskervilles (which wasn’t a shih-tzu). But the generic term for a domestic canine today is decidedly dog. What’s particularly strange about this replacement is that (a) we don’t have any earlier forms we can derive it from, and (b) it came almost out of nowhere. Other than a few instances of dog-like words in Anglo-Saxon land charters, where it’s used to describe property boundaries or in place names, for example: doggene ford ‘dogs’ ford,’ doggene berwe ‘dog’s hill,’ doggiþorn ‘dog thorn,’ the only place we see a dog-like word in Old English is in a gloss from around AD 1050 to a Latin text."

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.

Robot-powered artificial beehives are helping to save the bee population from colony collapse

From Phys.org: "Lifting up the hood of a Beewise hive feels more like you're getting ready to examine the engine of a car than visit with a few thousand pollinators. The unit — dubbed a BeeHome — is an industrial upgrade from the standard wooden beehives, all clad in white metal and solar panels. Inside sits a high-tech scanner and robotic arm powered by artificial intelligence. Roughly 300,000 of these units are in use across the U.S., scattered across fields of almond, canola, pistachios and other crops that require pollination to grow. It's not exactly the romantic vision of a beehive or beekeeper lodged in the cultural consciousness, but then that's not what matters; keeping bees alive does. And Beewise's units do that dramatically better than the standard hive, providing constant insights on colony health and the ability to provide treatment. AI and robotics are able to replace "90% of what a beekeeper would do in the field," said Beewise Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Saar Safra."

In the Ming dynasty there was a scorecard for what would earn you karma points

From East Asian Science: "In his translation of Huang’s letters, Lehnert includes an extensive discussion of similar lists and how an individual receives merit or demerit points for his deeds as well as a list of moral retributions, or moral payoffs, for different annual moral balances. The list reproduced by Lehnert contains, for example, “building warehouses and stabilizing prices (of rice and wheat),” which earned one merit point, and “saving the life of a useless animal,” which earned three. “Preventing the drowning of a girl which would prevent another family from having male offspring” earned one hundred merit points, while “possessing arms to kill or entertaining murderous thoughts” earned ten demerit points, and so on. Clearly, the number of points attributed to different kinds of deeds entails a moral order of some kind."

The Mola is a relative of the sunfish and can grow to be more than 5,000 pounds

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