When one of the coldest cases in Texas got even weirder

From Texas Monthly: "The day before he would take off his clothes and vanish into the rural countryside on a frigid night — defying logic, devastating those who loved him, and baffling some of the best criminal investigators in Texas — Jason Landry was thinking about socks. Not just any socks, but a colorful pair that featured an image of a monkey in a suit and tie holding a briefcase in one hand and a banana in the other, with the words “monkey business” stitched across each ankle. Socks were the highlight of an extensive, bullet-pointed Christmas list that Jason texted to his mother, Lisa, on Saturday, December 12, 2020. Jason, a lovable 21-year-old goofball who always seemed to be smiling, was normally the opposite of a list maker. Unlike his older siblings, both of whom were regimented and rule oriented, Jason eschewed rules and hated planning. In the days before he disappeared, Jason appears to have done lots of self-medicating. In Instagram messages that were later released by law enforcement, Jason told a close friend that with the help of drugs, he’d found God and seen him for the “first time ever.”

A brain implant allowed a man with ALS to speak and even sing musical notes in his real voice

From Scientific American: "A man with a severe speech disability is able to speak expressively and sing using a brain implant that translates his neural activity into words almost instantly. The device conveys changes of tone when he asks questions, emphasizes the words of his choice and allows him to hum a string of notes in three pitches.The system — known as a brain–computer interface (BCI) — used artificial intelligence (AI) to decode the participant’s electrical brain activity as he attempted to speak. The device is the first to reproduce not only a person’s intended words but also features of natural speech such as tone, pitch and emphasis, which help to express meaning and emotion.In a study, a synthetic voice that mimicked the participant’s own spoke his words within 10 milliseconds of the neural activity that signalled his intention to speak. The system, described today in Nature, marks a significant improvement over earlier BCI models, which streamed speech within three seconds."

A physicist fascinated by the fourth dimension wound up inventing monkey bars

From NPR: "This story starts in the fourth dimension. Or, more specifically, with a British mathematician who, in the late 1800s, was intrigued by the fourth dimension and how to teach disinterested children about it. Charles Hinton wore a lot of hats. He wrote sci-fi stories before there was sci-fi — he called them "scientific romances." At Princeton, where he worked for a time as mathematics instructor, he invented a baseball pitching machine powered by gunpowder. He also practiced polygamy, which was against both the mores and laws of his native England. And when he was convicted of bigamy in the 1880s, he was forced to move his young family to Japan where he found work teaching mathematics. Hinton was a mathematician who explored the concept of the fourth dimension and how to represent it. His model of a tesseract as a way to represent the fourth dimension in geometrical space has since inspired a long lineage of science fiction writing and movies. While living in Japan, Hinton struggled to get his students to wrestle with the concept of the fourth dimension."

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.

Someone trapped an LLM on inferior hardware and infused it with existential dread

From XDA: "This amazing yet haunting project was brought to us by Rootkid on YouTube. The art piece is called "Latent Reflection," and its goal is to allow an LLM to reflect on its own existence. To do that, AI has to reach a point where things come to an end. Rootkid achieved this using a Raspberry Pi 4B and installing the Llama 3.2 3B model on it. Rootkid opted for this model because he could squash it down to 2.6 GB in size, allowing it to live within the Raspberry Pi 4B's 4 GB of RAM. There's just one problem. The LLM can start on 4 GB of RAM, but as it thinks and considers things, it slowly eats away at its available RAM. Eventually, it will run out of RAM to think with; at this point, the LLM crashes and restarts itself, beginning a whole new "life." To really hone in on the feelings of a restricted LLM, Rootkid gave the LLM a grid of 96 sixteen-segment LED modules to "speak" with, and cut off its internet connection."

Tree rings could help solve the mystery of the decline of ancient Roman Britain

From Nautilus: "Roman Britain collapsed into chaos in the spring of 367 A.D.—the rival Picts attacked by land and sea, while the Scotti barged in from the west and Saxons from the south. Anarchy ensued in an event that’s now known as the Barbarian Conspiracy: The invaders captured and murdered senior commanders, and some Roman soldiers may have even joined in. It’s considered a pivotal event in the abandonment of Roman Britain. Historians have surmised some of the potential causes behind this rebellion, like the Western Roman Empire’s fading control of the region and its growing financial troubles. But these circumstances don’t fully explain the abruptness with which Roman Britain fell to its foes, and the scarce written records from the time don’t offer solid explanations. For clearer answers, researchers are asking the trees."

How a pencil sharpener really works

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