They carried a trampoline up one of the Great Pyramids

From Ironic Sans: "George Nissen didn’t invent the first ever trampoline, but he popularized trampolines for sports and recreation from the 1950s through the 1980s, and came up with new designs. One story tells how George and his son Ron tried to get a trampoline up to the top of one of the Great Pyramids in Egypt. At some point in its history, the very top of the Great Pyramid of Khufu was taken off, and left the top of the pyramid with a flat surface. In 1977, since Ron and George were going to be in Egypt for a trampoline event anyway, they wondered if they could get one up to the top of the pyramid. They carried a mini-trampoline to the top of the pyramid, where 63 year old George Nissen did flips. But that wasn’t the dream. The dream was a full-size trampoline. Inspired by how the pyramid had been built one stone at a time, they came up with a way to bring a full size trampoline to the top of the pyramid in pieces."

She didn't know what it was like to see the world in three dimensions until one day she did

From NPR: "Dr. Oliver Sacks, famous author and neuroscientist, was at a party a few years ago and he was introduced to another neuroscientist named Susan Barry. They got talking and she said that she had been born cross-eyed, so she had never been able to see with both eyes at the same time – no stereoscopic vision. Sacks asked if she could imagine what it's like to see the world with two eyes, and she said yes. Three months later she wrote him a letter and said she was wrong, and described how she had started training her brain to see in three dimensions and it had suddenly worked. After three weeks, one morning she got into her car. She glanced down at the steering wheel and the steering wheel was floating in front of the dashboard. "It was in its own three-dimensional space," she wrote. "I had never had that type of perception before and I didn't believe it, cause I knew that this was impossible. So I tried to put it out of my mind."

The thousand-year tale of how we wound up eating with a fork

From The Conversation: "In today’s world, we barely think about picking up a fork. It is part of a standard cutlery set, as essential as the plate itself. But not that long ago, this now-ordinary utensil was viewed with suspicion, derision and even moral outrage. It took centuries, royal marriages and a bit of cultural rebellion to get the fork from the kitchens of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) onto the dining tables of Europe. Early versions of forks have been found in Bronze Age China and Ancient Egypt, though they were likely used for cooking and serving. The Romans had elegant forks made of bronze and silver, but again, mainly for food preparation. Eating with a fork – especially a small, personal one – was rare. By the 10th century, Byzantine elites used them freely, shocking guests from western Europe. And by around the 11th century, the table fork began to make regular appearances at mealtimes across the Byzantine empire."

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 Japanese custom allowed young men to sneak into houses to have sex with unmarried women

From Wikipedia: "Yobai, also known as 'night crawling.' was a Japanese custom  usually practiced by young unmarried people. It was once common all over Japan and was practiced in some rural areas until the beginning of the Meiji era and even into the 20th century. At night, young unmarried men silently entered houses with young unmarried women. A man would silently crawl into a woman's room and make his intentions known. If the woman consented, they would have sex. By the morning, he would leave. The girl's family might know about it but pretend they did not. It was common for young people to find a spouse like this. In some areas, any post-puberty woman, married or unmarried, could be visited by any post-puberty man, married or unmarried, from the village and even by men from other villages and travellers. In other places, only married women and widows could be visited, while single girls could not."

An unusual gravitational wave may be a sign of a wormhole connecting two universes

From ScienceAlert: "In 2019, LIGO and Virgo recorded something truly bizarre – a gravitational wave event less than a tenth of a second in duration. Compared to the drawn-out chirps of black hole binaries on decaying orbital spirals, it was a sharp crack. The best explanation of the event, named GW190521, was a chance encounter of two black holes snaring each other in passing. Now, a new paper has presented an alternative, far more exotic option: The echo of a black hole collision in another universe, reverberating through a collapsing wormhole that formed as a result of that merger. If it were indicative of a wormhole, GW190521 and  gravitational waves like it wouldn't just confirm the existence of these wild, hypothetical structures: they would also give us a new tool for probing the physical properties thereof. That's a very large if."

Lord Mackenzie describes why he didn't report his wife's credit card as stolen

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