Rosa Parks was not the first to refuse to leave her seat

From Wikipedia: "Claudette Colvin is an American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and retired nurse aide. On March 2, 1955, she was arrested at the age of 15 in Alabama for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus. It occurred nine months before the similar, more widely known incident in which Rosa Parks helped spark the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Colvin was one of four plaintiffs in the first federal court case filed on February 1, 1956 to challenge bus segregation in the city. On June 13, 1956, the judges determined that the state and local laws requiring bus segregation in Alabama were unconstitutional. The case went to the United States Supreme Court, which upheld the district court's ruling. One month later, the Supreme Court affirmed the order to the state of Alabama to end bus segregation."

The heir to a British fortune, he died of a heroin overdose in a hotel in Afghanistan

From The Guardian: "Many people die in Peshawar, violently or otherwise. Carlos Mavroleon didn't want to die here. Certainly not in the small, claustrophobic hotel room where they found his heroin-soaked body, on 27 August 1998. He had packed it in to his 40 years. The old Etonian heir to a £100m fortune, he had been a war correspondent, a Wall Street broker, a lover of glamorous women from glamorous political dynasties. He had been a gimlet-eyed war reporter, blowing off the tension in the bars of Notting Hill. He commanded a unit of Afghan Mujahideen against the Red Army and had been a bodyguard for a Pakistani tribal chief. And, for most of his adult life, Carlos had been a regular user of speed, coke, Ecstasy, heroin and a variety of other pharmaceutical products."

Fossil hunter discovers a chunk of 66 million-year-old fish vomit in Denmark

From the BBC: "A piece of fossilised vomit dating back to the time of the dinosaurs has been discovered in Denmark. Local fossil hunter Peter Bennicke found the fossil at Stevns Klint - a Unesco-listed coastal cliff in the east of the country. The self-declared "fossil geek" said he came across some unusual-looking fragments which turned out to be pieces of sea lily - an underwater species related to starfish and sea urchins - in a piece of chalk. Mr Bennicke took the fragments to be examined at the Museum of East Zealand, which confirmed the vomit could be dated to the end of the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago - a time when dinosaurs including Tyrannosaurus existed. Jesper Milan, a palaeontologist and curator at the museum, told the BBC it was truly an unusual find as it helps explain relationships in the prehistoric food chain."

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.

A trip to hear an organ play a single note in a 600-year-long performance

From The Spectator: "In the year 2000, in a small east German town, work began on the construction of an organ that had one purpose: to perform John Cage's ORGAN²/ASLSP for precisely 639 years. The late avant-garde composer’s only instruction for the piece was to play the piece ‘as slowly as possible’. And so in 2001 the world’s longest organ recital began in St Burchardi church with a rest lasting 17 months before the first chord commenced droning in 2003. It consisted of two G sharps and a B. Two weeks ago, I – along with several hundred others – made the pilgrimage to witness the work’s latest chord change.To eliminate the need for an organist, a system of sandbags suspended by strings delivers the pressure. Thus, the only threats to this performance are the survival of the organ, the will of the unborn and the erratic tides of arts funding."

Doctors can use a blind person's tooth to rebuild the eye and restore their vision

From the Vancouver Sun: "Her friends’ faces. Blooming flowers. And her local golf course, where she fell in love with the sport. Those are the things Gail Lane misses seeing since she went blind a decade ago. She has no idea what her partner of eight years looks like, as they met after she lost her sight. But all that could change on Tuesday, when Lane becomes the first patient in Canada to undergo a rare and bizarre procedure that could help to restore her vision: One of her teeth will be extracted, a hole will be drilled into the tooth, a lens will be glued inside, and then the tooth will be sewn into her left eye. It sounds crazy, ophthalmologist Dr. Greg Moloney admits, but he’s performed osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis, also known as tooth-in-eye surgery, on seven patients in his home country of Australia. Those patients, like Lane, had severe scarring on their eyes, caused by some type of trauma, and most of them can now see again." (Thanks Steve!)

Lighting a disposable lighter with a single tooth on a piece of heavy equipment's tractor belt

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