let's microwave hamsters for their own good, help rogue miners compare vehicles and cheeses, learn statistics & languages, read short stories, appreciate art, & get swole

“By a strange twist of fate, the microwave was invented to meet a need to heat hamsters humanely in 1950s laboratories.” (The Independent, 1997)

And apparently it worked!¹ The whole Tom Scott video (complete with interview with the 101yo scientist who came up with the idea back in the 50s!!!) is incredibly worth watching:

“Don’t try this at home. You won’t be doing medical research; you’ll be doing a crime.”

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Price per Pound: Vehicles vs Cheese (interleaved) by Andrew McCalip, again via Tom Scott

Unrelated, Ginger is a "novella within a dictionary", written by somebody called Kevin, who "wants to know what a home is". You have to learn a made-up language, which you then speak by using your “WASD, space bar, shift and arrow keys to operate your character's tongue, lungs, vocal cords and lips”. It sounds like trying to read the Codex Seraphinianus crossed with QWOP but for linguistics!

And here’s another completely unrelated wild story from last year, where Zijin gold mine in Colombia lost 38% of its total production last year to rogue miners who got access to tunnels by offering a cut of the spoils to a drug-trafficking gang who were able to commandeer and defend the tunnels for them. (WSJ)

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I always imagined Florence Nightingale as some sort of brow-wiping nurse character, but in fact she was a statistician who proposed medical reforms based on data she collected showing that the primary killer in the Crimean War was preventable disease.

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short stories i recently read & enjoyed

• After the Invasion of the Bug-Eyed Aliens by Rachel Swirsky (via)

• The Last Great Repair Tech of the American Midwest by Ellis Nye (via) - a short fictional obituary about someone who fixed things

• The Debutante by Leonora Carrington (via) - a very practical young lady and her friendly hyena impersonator

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Friday the Thirteenth, 1965 by Leonora Carrington (1917-2011)

actually, Leonora Carrington turns out to be pretty interesting - she was a painter (and sculptor) as well as a writer, she was expelled from two schools as a kid for “rebellious behavior”, and she had a psychotic break (or so they say) after her lover Max Ernst was arrested by the Nazis

Portrait of the Late Mrs Partridge, 1947 by Leonora Carrington (1917-2011)

her parents stuck her in an asylum, and when they later tried to send her on to a sanatorium in South Africa she fled in Portugal and ultimately escaped by marrying the Mexican ambassador (who she met via Picasso, who knew him from bull fights).

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“Can I make a beetle stronger?”

I’ve finally been getting back into the gym, so of course I started wondering if insects can work out to get swole too. Looks like yes! But only immediately post-eclosion, before their exoskeletons harden (and therefore limit muscle expansion).

(can’t have a newsletter without bugs in it, OBVIOUSLY)

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1. “Furthermore, a single rat was reanimated 10 times” - Andjus & Lovelock, 1955