This forgotten pioneer was the Jackie Robinson of golf

How good a golfer was Ted Rhodes? At the 1948 US Open, he finished the first round just three shots behind the leader – and eventual winner – Ben Hogan. But there’s more to the story: Rhodes was the first Black competitor in the tournament in its modern era, during a time of widespread segregation in American sport. In addition to reintegrating the US Open, Rhodes was part of a 1948 lawsuit against the PGA, which had restricted membership to white people. The PGA responded with a settlement and a promise to change, but according to the book, instead it shifted the status of tournaments from open to invitational, allowing the organization to tacitly continue segregation. Before the PGA reversed its stance, some courses welcomed Black players for PGA events, including Phoenix Country Club for the 1952 Phoenix Open, where the Black entrants included Rhodes and a crucial figure in his life: boxing great Joe Louis. It was golf that connected them – when not in the ring, the heavyweight champ liked to go out on the links, with Rhodes as his teacher. During and after his playing career, Rhodes helped spread interest in golf among Black people through his instruction. (via The Guardian)

Some scientists believe we would be better off burying plastic garbage instead of recycling it

Every child is taught that landfill is the worst place our trash can end up. It is the sad consequence of a failure to recycle: a mountain of waste leaking chemicals and smells, blighting the land forever. What if that picture is wrong? What if landfill, properly done, is actually one of the cleanest, cheapest, and most environmentally sensible things we can do with our waste? It turns out that for much of what we throw away, the humble landfill beats the recycling bin. The case against landfill has two parts. The first part is that there are efficient, cheap, or environmentally friendly ways to practically reuse or recycle materials, rather than landfilling, meaning that there is a reasonable alternative. The second is that landfill itself is unsustainable, or environmentally unfriendly, meaning that we need an alternative. Both are false. It’s natural to assume that reusable always means better. But this intuition treats different materials as interchangeable and ignores the cost of making them in the first place. Once we account for energy, labor, and other inputs, reuse pays off only in selective cases. (via Works In Progress)

Pigeons don't seem to learn from rewards and punishment and scientists aren't sure why

Strutting and fluttering around their urban homes, pigeons have adapted to an ever-shifting environment. Their surroundings aren’t the only things that are constantly changing: New research suggests the birds themselves avoid stability in their decision-making, instead choosing to live “at the edge of chaos.” When learning something new, people and animals alike tend to repeat behaviors that are rewarded. This principle, which was first proposed by Edward Thorndike in 1898, is so well established in psychology that it’s become known as the law of effect. To see how rewarded behaviors vary, the researchers gave pigeons a series of five colorful buttons to peck. They could peck any buttons in any order, but as long as they pecked five times, a treat would appear. The scientists expected the pigeons might eventually slip into a routine, but instead they continued pecking in a variety of patterns.The team theorizes that pigeons’ devotion to variability might be an evolutionary advantage that aids coping with new challenges in their environment—and they expect the birds aren’t the only ones resisting uniformity.  (via Scientific American)

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.

An island suddenly appeared in a lake then disappeared and then reappeared 20 miles away

thickly forested island appeared mysteriously on a western Canadian lake. Nearly 150 metres (500 feet) long and 75 metres (250 feet) wide, the land mass took local people and experts by surprise. It wasn’t on any maps or navigation charts. One boater approached and took a video of the island, capturing nearly 100 trees undulating in the chop of the lake. And then, within days, it disappeared. On Monday, the island made its second appearance – nearly 20 miles from its location earlier in August – in stunning aquatic displacement that has left residents wondering how an entire island can seem to simply vanish. The mystery has unfolded in the middle of Williston Lake, a long and narrow reservoir created after the W.A.C Bennett dam flooded the region in the early 1970s. At nearly 1,700 sq km (650 sqmiles) it is the largest body of freshwater in the westernmost province. Satellite imagery confirmed the island was in fact real, and floating in the main body of the reservoir, roughly 60 miles west of the dam. (via The Guardian)

Vietnam became a coffee empire thanks to a partnership with East Germany

The GDR always struggled to procure enough coffee for its population because it couldn’t grow its own and had to buy it on the world market. That not only cost money but was also fraught with difficulty. For the first two post-war decades, West Germany attempted to isolate East Germany with the so-called Hallstein Doctrine, which amounted to a trade embargo. So that only left socialist countries to source coffee from, but the Soviet Union had decided to stop its coffee exports to the GDR in 1954. So the GDR regime had to buy it wherever it could and whatever the cost, spending around 150 million West German marks a year to do so. Then the coffee crisis of 1977 hit the world. Bad harvests in Brazil, combined with the oil crisis, created a perfect storm of global coffee shortages. Suddenly the GDR’s import costs more than quadrupled, and the situation was unsustainable. Given that the Vietnam War had ended and the last Americans left in 1975, leaving the country devastated but communist, there was an ideal opportunity here to grow real coffee in a “brother state”. Vietnam also desperately needed to rebuild and recover, and the GDR could help with that. A deal was struck in 1980. (via Zeitgeist)

I guarantee you will never guess what they are arguing so passionately about

Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places 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 and Why Is This Interesting by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com