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Iceland is known to the rest of the world as the land of Vikings and volcanos, an island caught between continents at the extremities of the map. Remote and comparatively inhospitable, it was settled only as long ago as the 9th century, and has seen little additional in-migration since. Even today, more than 90 percent of Iceland’s 390,000 residents can trace their ancestry back to the earliest permanent inhabitants, a Nordic-Celtic mix. The tradition of the Norse sagas lives on in the form of careful record-keeping about ancestry—and a national passion for genealogy. In other words, it is not the place to stumble upon old family mysteries. But growing up in the capital city of Reykjavík in the 1950s, neurologist Dr. Kári Stefánsson heard stories that left him curious. Stefánsson’s father had come from Djúpivogur, an eastern coastal town where everyone still spoke of a Black man who had moved there early in the 19th century. “Hans Jónatan”, they called him—a well-liked shopkeeper who had arrived on a ship, married a spirited woman from a local farm, and became a revered member of the community. The local census did record a man by the name of Hans Jónatan, born in the Caribbean, who was working at the general store in Djúpivogur in the 19th century—but that was all. No images of the man had survived, and his time in Iceland was well before any other humans with African ancestry are known to have visited the island. If tiny, remote Djúpivogur did have a Black man arrive in the 19th century, the circumstances must have been unusual indeed. It was an intriguing puzzle—and solid grounds for a scientific investigation. Given the amount of homogeneity in the baseline Icelandic population, the genetic signature of one relative newcomer with distinct ancestry might still stand out across a large sample of his descendants. Geneticists thus joined locals and history scholars, and they pieced together a story that bridged three continents. Continue reading ▶
It’s been a busy summer, and the large shortfall in donations last month has been demoralizing, so we’re taking a week off to rest and recuperate. The curated links section will be (mostly) silent, and behind the scenes we’ll be taking a brief break from our usual researching, writing, editing, illustrating, narrating, sound designing, coding, et cetera. We plan to return to normalcy on the 11th of September. (The word “normalcy” was not considered an acceptable alternative to “normality” until 14 May 1920, when then-presidential-candidate Warren G. Harding misused the mathematical term in a campaign speech, stating that America needed, “not nostrums, but normalcy.” He then integrated this error into his campaign slogan, “Return to Normalcy.” Also, the G in Warren G. Harding stood for “Gamaliel.”) While we are away, on 06 September 2023, Damn Interesting will be turning 18 years old. To celebrate, here are the first emojis to ever appear in the body of a Damn Interesting post: 🎂🎉🎁 If you become bored while we are away, you might try a little mobile game we’ve been working on called Wordwhile. It can be played alone, or with a friend. If you enjoy games like Scrabble and Wordle, you may find this one ENJOYABLE (75 points). Launch Wordwhile → And, as always, there are lots of ways to explore our back-catalog. View this post ▶
In the late 17th century, natural philosopher Isaac Newton was deeply uneasy with a new scientific theory that was gaining currency in Europe: universal gravitation. In correspondence with a scientific contemporary, Newton complained that it was “an absurdity” to suppose that “one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum.” The scientist who proposed this preposterous theory was Isaac Newton. He first articulated the idea in his widely acclaimed magnum opus Principia, wherein he explained, “I have not yet been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity from phenomena and I feign no hypotheses […] It is enough that gravity does really exist and acts according to the laws I have explained.” Newton proposed that celestial bodies were not the sole sources of gravity in the universe, rather all matter attracts all other matter with a force that corresponds to mass and diminishes rapidly with distance. He had been studying the motions of the six known planets–Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus–and by expanding upon the laws of planetary motion developed by Johannes Kepler about eight decades earlier, he arrived at an equation for gravitational force F that seemed to match decades of data: Where m1 and m2 are the masses of the objects, r is the distance between their centers of mass, and G is the gravitational constant (~0.0000000000667408). But this is only an approximation; humanity may never know the precise value because it is impossible to isolate any measuring apparatus from all of the gravity in the universe. Fellow astronomers found that Newton’s theory seemed to be accurate–universal gravitation appeared to reliably forecast the sometimes irregular motion of the planets even more closely than Kepler’s laws. In 1705, Queen Anne knighted Isaac Newton to make him Sir Isaac Newton (though this honor was due to his work in politics, not for his considerable contributions to math or science). In the century that followed, Newton’s universal gravitation performed flawlessly. Celestial bodies appeared to adhere to the elegant theory, and in scientific circles, it began to crystallize into a law of nature. But in the early 19th century, cracks began to appear. When astronomer Alexis Bouvard used Newton’s equations to carefully calculate future positions of Jupiter and Saturn, they proved spectacularly accurate. However, when he followed up in 1821 with astronomical tables for Uranus–the outermost known planet–subsequent observations revealed that the planet was crossing the sky substantially slower than projected. The fault was not in Bouvard’s math; Uranus appeared to be violating the law of universal gravitation. Newton’s theory was again called into question in 1843 by a 32-year-old assistant astronomer at the Paris Observatory, Urbain Le Verrier. Le Verrier had been following the Uranus perturbations with great interest, while also compiling a painstaking record of the orbit of Mercury–the innermost known planet. He found that Mercury also departed from projections made by universal gravitation. Was universal gravitation a flawed theory? Or might undiscovered planets lurk in extra-Uranian and intra-Mercurial space, disturbing the orbits of the known planets? Astronomers around the world scoured the skies, seeking out whatever was perturbing the solar system. The answer, it turned out, was more bizarre than they could have supposed. Continue reading ▶
An American Indian man on horseback stood outlined against a steely sky past midday on 05 October 1877. Winter was already settling into the prairies of what would soon become the state of Montana. Five white men stood in the swaying grass on the other side of the field, watching the horse move closer. Four wore blue uniforms, another in civilian attire. One of the uniformed men was tall and stout, with bright blue eyes and a large, curling mustache. He watched the proceedings with an air of self-importance. The surrender of the man on horseback might have been inevitable, sure, but it was nevertheless a nice feather in his cap. Perhaps his superiors would finally grant him that promotion after this whole affair was over. The other four men were more apprehensive. All of them were experienced in fighting American Indians on the frontier, but this opponent had been different. One man, with a full, dark beard and right arm missing below the elbow, looked at the approaching chief with grudging respect. The man had lost his arm in the American Civil War 15 years earlier, so he knew battle well. And in his opinion, the man across the field was a tactical genius, a “Red Napoleon.” Despite overwhelming odds, this Red Napoleon had wormed his way out of battle after battle, somehow always coming out on top. Continue reading ▶
More in travel
The person who holds the world record for basketball free throws shot over 2,000 consecutive baskets in a row. But if you put them in a stadium and a tight score between the teams, they might not have been able to shoot two. The main difference between playing basketball in a rec league and playing […] The post Professionalism and pressure appeared first on Herbert Lui.
After waking up yesterday I checked my router in case my broadband had restarted overnight. Still red, so no. "We wanted you to know that the fault you reported to us is now fixed. Please turn your router off and on, and your service should be fully restored." Ho-bloody-rah. Which was odd because the BT Service Status Checker now thought everything was now fixed. I re-reported the fault and they sent me another text message. "We can see that the line from our network to your home is working so let's take a look at the connection in your home. The good news is that these issues can often be fixed quickly and easily with a few simple checks. You can check find assistance on our website at [link] to guide you through what to look for. Let's see if that fixes the problem." This was their list of things to try. 1. Use the BT Broadband troubleshooter 2. Make a call on your landline 3. Restart your Hub 4. Check the lights on your hub 5. Power cycle your modem 6. Try your test socket I now had no broadband but BT didn't think I had a problem, This was even less ideal. There really was a fault, nothing had been fixed and they didn't know how long it might take to solve. I was back to square one. But I have no idea how long this is going to last - it could be only a few more hours or it could be another fortnight. Also trying to contact BT is easy but speaking to a human is hard. Every path through their customer service telephone portal seems to lead to a text message or a website and them ringing off, thinking their job is done. "We're working on it" is all very well, but by Day Six you really want to know more than that. i) offering up useful advice ii) advising me to do something I'm already doing iii) mitigation I have no intention of pursuing iv) a suggestion someone else has already suggested v) explaining how best to complain vi) recounting how it all went wrong for you vii) telling me I'm foolish for not having done something viii) detailing a separate problem you have ix) claiming BT are the spawn of the devil x) frenetic spleen Generally the nearer to the top of that classification the more useful, and the nearer to the bottom the more I roll my eyes. Aim high, ladies and gentlemen. Commentswise I also note that collectively you're far more interested in my broadband woes than say buses through the Silvertown Tunnel, so why struggle to write 1500 words about the suburbs when corporate failure is an easier target? Do please bear with me during this difficult period. Full refunds are available if you don't think you're getting the service you deserve.
This was a lesson one of my bosses shared with me: most people don’t improve consistently every quarter. Instead, progress ebbs and flows. Sometimes—maybe many times—you might feel like you’re going through a plateau. Many other people would quit. If you remain confident you’re heading in the right direction, then you need to stick with […] The post Progress ebbs and flows appeared first on Herbert Lui.
When the Silvertown Tunnel opens next week, one thing the Mayor will enthuse about is the new Superloop bus route running through it. People like the Superloop, they know it gets them places fast, so no doubt they'll be enthused too. But the new SL4 isn't going to be as super as people might think, nor as fast, because in this case SL might as well stand for Stopping Lots. the SL4 is about to do. eight times on the way to the tunnel. Every stop between Canary Wharf and the tunnel portal gets an SL4 tile, every single one. Then comes the big dive under the Thames, deliberately not stopping at North Greenwich because that would slow things down. And after climbing to the fringes of Blackheath it then stops at every single stop all the way to Grove Park, every single one. Nine stops, three mile gap, seventeen stops. Hardly Super. This is the last stop before the Silvertown tunnel heading north. It's at the Sun-in-the-Sands roundabout where Shooters Hill Road meets the A102 dual carriageway, two whole miles from the tunnel portal. It's not near any stations, nor an especially easy place to get to, nor somewhere you can reach North Greenwich quickly from. And yet this is the last place south of the river you can board or alight, the stopping pattern assuming that what you really want to do from here is go to Canary Wharf, not anywhere inbetween. It's just as non-stop on the northern side. The SL4 emerges by a snazzy new gyratory but there's nowhere to stop so it doesn't. City Hall is close by, also the Royal Docks, the Dangleway, Royal Victoria DLR and lots of flats, but no way to get on or off. Indeed although the SL4 emerges in Newham it doesn't stop anywhere in the borough so there's no easy way to make onward connections. Serving Newham is the 129's job, the other new bus through the Silvertown Tunnel, but at no point do the SL4 and 129 stop anywhere near each other so potential interchange doesn't work either. This is Orchard Place, a backwater road which ten years ago you'd only have visited if you were hiking to the cultural outpost of Trinity Buoy Wharf. It first gained a bus service in 2017 when hundreds of new flats started to be built at City Island, joined since by hundreds more at Goodluck Hope. Route D3 already terminates here four times an hour and is about to be joined by the SL4, in both directions, running twice as often. That's brilliant if you live here and want go to Canary Wharf, but less useful if you thought you were riding a fast bus and find yourself dawdling down here instead. 2022 consultation TfL asked whether respondents would prefer the new bus to take the most direct route or to go via Orchard Place to serve the Leamouth Peninsula. "Our preferred option is the direct route", TfL wrote. But the public disagreed, quite significantly... A total of 613 respondents answered with the majority, 58 per cent, preferring the route to go via Orchard Place. This is compared to 19 per cent who preferred the most direct routing, and the remaining 24 per cent of respondents who had no preference. ... hence the extra twiddle. My hunch is that the London City Island and Goodluck Hope Leaseholders’ and Residents’ Association strongly encouraged their leaseholders and residents to respond to the consultation, and this pile-on swung the results decisively in favour of Orchard Place. The LCIGHLRA didn't get everything their way. In their submission they also asked for a 'vital' extra stop at North Greenwich for the benefit of their residents, and also could the bus please go to Lewisham because Grove Park lacked useful amenities. But they did get TfL to gift them 250 extra Superloops per day, so you can curse them for the delay should you ever decide to take a ride. remarkably often - every eight minutes from 6am to 8pm - based on the untested proposition that thousands of people want to travel by bus to Canary Wharf from a thin sliver of southeast London. detail on why they chose this particular route. I summarised what they said in this post here, and basically it's because their planning models suggested this was the best way of maximising demand. If you want to mouth off and say "But I don't see why they didn't..." go read that first. My hunch is that the SL4 will be an insanely frequent white elephant of limited use, made worse by the lengthy gap in the middle. But it'll also be free to use for the first year which'll bump up its ridership no end, especially for local journeys in Lewisham where only a fool would board a 202 or 261 when they could board the SL4 for free. It will thus appear hugely successful, its ridership figures inherently meaningless, and the Mayor will clap his hands and say I told you it'd be brilliant. As with so many dubious projects it'll only look great to those who've never ridden it, the frankly baffling SL4, Stopping Lots.
