This Sherpa guide has climbed Everest a record 30 times

From AP: "One of the greatest mountain guides will attempt to scale the world’s highest peak for the 31st time — and possibly the 32nd time as well — and break his own record. Kami Rita, 55, flew to Mount Everest from Kathmandu to lead a group of climbers who will try to reach the 8,849-meter summit during the spring climbing season. He holds the record for the most successful ascents of Mount Everest at 30 times. In May last year he climbed the peak twice. His closest competitor for the most climbs of Mount Everest is fellow Sherpa guide Pasang Dawa, who has made 27 successful ascents of the mountain. Kami Rita first climbed Everest in 1994 and has been making the trip nearly every year since. He is one of many Sherpa guides whose skills are vital to the safety and success each year of foreign climbers aspiring to stand on top of the mountain. His father was among the first Sherpa mountain guides."

These techno-utopians want to colonize the sea

From the New York Times: "Forty-six hours before Rüdiger Koch officially seized the Guinness World Record for the longest time spent living in an underwater fixed habitat, I took a 15-minute motorboat ride from Linton Bay Marina, in north-central Panama, to visit him. It was a warm afternoon in January, and Koch was approaching a full 120 days spent working, eating, sleeping, drinking and smoking cigars in a room 36 feet below the surface of the Caribbean. His 304-square-foot habitat was inside the underwater buoyancy chamber that helps stabilize a floating home called SeaPod Alpha Deep. Koch arrived here, in small part, via a San Francisco-based nonprofit called the Seasteading Institute, which promotes “living on environmentally restorative floating islands with some degree of political autonomy.” The Institute’s president, Joe Quirk, once said the vision is “startup societies where people could form whatever kind of community they wanted” — a libertarian-inflected world where you could “vote with your boat.”

Thanks to a quirk in a 100-year-old contract they get millions from royalties on Listerine

From The Hustle: "For the 26 years that Catherine Schweitzer has worked at the Baird Foundation, a nonprofit based in Buffalo, her organization has relied in part on a peculiar income stream: the mouthwash Listerine. For every 2,016 ounces of Listerine sold Johnson & Johnson pays a total of $6 to Listerine’s royalty holders. For Baird that's about $120,000 a year. The inventor of Listerine, J.J. Lawrence, was a doctor and drug developer who fought in the Civil War. In the late 1860s, Lawrence decided to create a formula that could comfortably clean and disinfect wounds, named for a scientist called Lister. The new antiseptic didn’t catch on. So when a local pharmacist named Jordan Wheat Lambert asked to buy the formula, Lawrence didn’t have a problem licensing it out. The contract stated that for every gross of Listerine sold, Lambert would pay Lawrence’s heirs $20. And the contract was unusual in one way: it didn't specify an end date."

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.

How a simple car accident in Los Angeles turned into a classic LA story

From Substack: "Just minutes before she would have arrived at my son’s school, a driver ahead of my wife on the 134 East freeway hit a car to his right and then yanked his car to the left across three lanes and took out another car. The man who swerved the car was driving with two passengers. All three of them abandoned the vehicle and ran across the highway in different directions. One of them jogged away holding his clothes in one hand and an electric guitar in another. He then attempted to blend into the posh L.A. neighborhood by stripping down to his boxers and jumping into someone’s swimming pool. Meanwhile, police had blocked off much of the neighborhood while they searched backyards. At one of these backyards, a 51-year-old mother of two came out of her house with a 9mm handgun and pointed it at the police. This was Jillian Lauren, the wife of the bassist of the band Weezer, Scott Shriner."

Biologically speaking, snakes break almost all of the rules that we know of

From Nautilus: "Research has shown that pythons can genetically enlarge organs like the heart, intestine, liver, and kidneys to process their huge meals, then genetically whittle away the extra tissue when they no longer need it. In humans, an enlarged heart is a medical condition known as cardiac hypertrophy, a disease state; in snakes, it is a healthy adaptation that allows the creature to pump blood thickened to the consistency of whipped cream. Some snakes bear live young, others lay eggs, and still others can clone themselves through parthenogenesis. Some have chromosomes that resemble birds; others have chromosomes that resemble mammals. Meiosis, the crucial process of genetic recombination during the creation of sex cells, varies from snake species to snake species. Some imitate the process found in birds and dogs, others resemble that of mammals. Male snakes have two penises and females can store sperm in their bodies for up to eight years and delay reproduction for nearly a decade."

Shanghai has an ATM where you can melt down your gold jewelry

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