Hey, wait. Where did everyone go?

Bewildered, I walk the whole length of the beach front. Every single restaurant is shut, with the chairs gone and the tables stacked to one side. The shop fronts are now hidden behind metal or plastic shutters, the gates shut and padlocked. The café where I had my morning coffee yesterday is closed, as is the taverna with the blue Gingham tablecloths where I had a moussaka the day before yesterday that was so good I almost wept. All its outdoor furniture is gone, and a sign on the door says “opens in Spring” in Greek.

It’s the third week of October, 2019. I still have another month to go in this seaside resort - but literally overnight, half of Corfu seems to have shut for the winter. Or gone on holiday. Or - what is actually going on here?

Apart from a few fellow tourists drifting around in mild shock (“what’s happening?”, “I don’t know!”), hardly anyone is about. The crowds have been slowly thinning over the last few weeks, but you wouldn’t know it from how enthusiastically OPEN!!! everything has been. Waiters and café owners have done their very best to get me to sit down, please, have a beer, are you enjoying Greece, are you English or American? Ah yes, ‘Yorkshire’ - Jeremy Clarkson! He is very rude about Greece, but still very funny! Also the bread is free if you order something. You have to order something please.

The beach has emptied too. I’m the only person going for a swim today, in water still as warm as a recently-run bath.

Wandering mournfully back to my apartment up on the hillside, I spot a waiter who served me a kebab last week. Γειά σας! Yes, it’s all closed now, the winter has come and nothing will open again until March. He sees me eyeing the baking hot, cloudless blue sky. Yes yes but tomorrow or the next day, big storms, lightning! Dangerous to go walking. Buy your food from Kavalieratos, he never closes. Good luck!

I suspect I’m being had. This can’t be real. Oh come on, weather doesn’t work like that! This must be some kind of trick they play on tourists, like Scots claiming that a haggis is a small hairy creature that gets trapped on hillsides because its legs are shorter on one side than the other.

A day later, when the skies open and a vertical sea falls out of them, I’m struggling up the hill with a backpack of shopping. It’s noon, but the sky is black with cloud and falling rain, and as I collapse drippily through my apartment’s front door, thunder starts to rumble in the distance.

For the rest of the day I watch in fascinated horror as lightning stabs down on the town below, once hitting a metal rooftop with an audible CLANG. It never stops raining, and at night through gaps in the downpour, I watch the clouds out to sea flicker with ghostly light…

I was wrong. This is exactly how the weather works, as predictable as clockwork, give or take a few days, and eastern Corfu has calibrated its entire tourism industry around it. I might have know this if I’d spent time talking to anyone, but I’ve been too self-absorbed, too wrapped up in recovering from the exhaustion that drove me here, after the gruelling process of selling my family home. I never asked, so I never learned.

(Hey, I think to myself at one point: you know what might be a fun newsletter, maybe on that platform called ‘Substack’ that I’ve been reading so much about? Something about curiosity, asking better questions, learning stuff I never knew, including about the weather. Would that even work?)

This morning (here in 2024), I am startled to see the BBC Weather app forecasting this for my corner of Scotland:

Considering that 17,668 miles an hour is upwards of Mach 23 and my house is still standing, I presume something is a little awry - and then it refreshes:

You don’t say! (Update: oops.)

But this got me thinking: what is the fastest windspeed that could exist on this planet?

Five years after my time in Corfu, and after six seasons touring my own endless ignorance about science and how the world works, I still don’t know much about how our atmosphere works.

Clouds, for example!

While writing that piece, I knew that clouds were frequently mistaken for flying saucers, space lasers, politicians doing geoengineering and other fevered notions, but how they actually worked was all new to me - and still is.

Do you know how much clouds weigh? How fast can they travel? Did you know that tiny organisms appear to be living in them? (It’s true.)

But it’s not just clouds. For starters, do you know how big the sky is? As in: how far it goes up? I recently learned that space begins around 100 kilometres (62 miles) above our heads - so, is that where the atmosphere ends?

Not quite, in fact. According to NASA, to fully leave the Earth’s atmosphere, you’re going to have to travel another 9,900 (!) kilometres - and isn’t that interesting, and also rather baffling? What does that statement even mean?

There’s so much to learn about the invisible sea we live at the bottom of, which we breathe in and out of our bodies 20,000 times a day. The sky isn’t just a passive backdrop to our lives down here on solid ground - and it’s not just something to be terrified about when it roars out of control as it’s increasingly doing these days, as evidenced by the last 24 hours in Florida. It’s also within us, and part of us, and we resonate to its changes in ways that medical science is just starting to understand (like how, as I said here, a healed bone can ache with a change in local air pressure).

What about those of us who live further up in the atmosphere, including the roughly 81 million of us living above the 2,500m mark? From a scientific perspective, how do people adapt to life at high altitude when it can be such a struggle for the rest of us? What can that tell us about how the humans of the future might adapt to life on other planets?

My questions are endless:

• How come snow isn’t white, that wind is silent and that you can’t actually smell rain (which doesn’t contradict what I wrote here)?

• Why are snowflakes so predictable in their shapes that some people have written catalogues of them? What’s the science - or more correctly, the mathematics - behind those shapes?

• Why is snow regarded as so much fun, and yet rain as so much hell-nope? (Disclaimer: I love both.)

There’s certainly a season’s worth of rabbit-holes to scurry down here, so that’s what I’m doing for the next season of this newsletter.

It’ll also be a shorter, tighter, more focused season - and the reason is what’s happening in the world right now.

The longer you write a newsletter like this one, the more danger there is that you start to think you know stuff and consider yourself a legitimate source of opinion.

Knowing how wrong I’ve been in the past about all sorts of things, I’m wary of assuming I have much in the way of answers. Instead, from the beginning of Everything Is Amazing, I’ve tried to position myself as an enthusiastic student who is focused on asking interesting questions and passing along credible, fact-checked scientific explanations of the everyday wonders around us that so many of us are hardly aware of.

(Seriously. As of a few days ago I am 53 years old, and yet I still don’t know how fresh air actually works? What have I been doing for the last half-century? Madness.)

Part of my intended role is to be a knowingly useful idiot to hard-working scientists, creative artists and thinkers of all kinds (and to remember how much all those categories can overlap, too).

But it’s also to serve you with something that’s worth reading. It’s to make you go “wow” as much as I did when I filled a gap in my knowledge with something amazing. It’s to give you a tiny but meaningful moment of revelation and awe - not just the enormous, worldview-toppling kind, but also those tiny wow-moments that calls enchantment - the result of “a commitment to practising awe, to committing our attention to the world around us, and learning to feel its tingle of magic.”

If I can somehow be part of the ecosystem of writers who are sprinkling a little awe on you as you race past to rugby-tackle the stresses of your day, and in doing so I can give you a tiny jolt of hope (which is what happens when you realise the world is a tiny bit more interesting than you ever expected), I think this newsletter is serving a good purpose…

Especially right now.

There’s a really important election happening across the Atlantic in a month’s time. There’s what is happening in the Middle East, and in Ukraine. There is what’s going on with the global climate, and all the knock-on effects of it. There’s always something (see: life), but right now it particularly feels like a lot.

I don’t write about those things - not directly, anyway. It’s not that I don’t care about them (quite the opposite) but I don’t even know enough to write about them as a student, let alone contribute to the well-informed conversations being had around them.

But I can do this: I can make you go “wow”, and I can make you curious about something you never knew anything about - and maybe I can introduce to you the subversive and intoxicating idea that many of the things worth knowing in this life are ahead of us, not behind us.

However, I’m also a writer still trying to discover if that newsletter idea I had in Corfu really will work in the long run, and hoping that enough people would want to support it to keep it going - so it’s a bit alarming that recently this has been happening behind the scenes:

When the graph like this is going down, you know there’s some momentum you need to recover. 😬

Part of that has been due to my health issues over the last year, forcing me to throttle back and put a few things regarding this newsletter on pause (more about that next time) - but now I’ve got the all-clear, I’m confident I can get everything back up to speed again.

I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who has been generous enough to support this project so far, some of you from the very beginning (words fail me here - thank you so much, you guys) - but I’m still hoping that a few more of you who have read the free version of this newsletter will conclude it’s worth supporting with a paid subscription.

If just a few dozen of you decided that was true, I’d get back to where I was - and then everything else would feel possible again.

Could you help me do this?

With that in mind, for the next few days & until the end of Tuesday, all paid subscriptions are 20% off - and that’s recurring, for as long as you wanted to stay signed up:

Take out a paid subscription here

I’d be so grateful if you wanted to come on board.

Thank you so much!

- Mike

Today marks the end of season 6 of Everything Is Amazing.

And good grief, that was bigger than I expected. Over the last 11 months, I’ve written the equivalent of a decent-sized book into your Inbox - just short of 100k words by my calculations, across 47 newsletters.

I’m not a hugely prolific writer, so I need a nap just thinking about this. How on earth do successful authors like , , and write popular newsletters and regularly knock out books at the same time? They must have equally talented identical twins they’re splitting the profits with. Only possible explanation.

There are also around 6,000 more of you reading since this 6th season began. Welcome to the madness! I hope that wasn’t too bewildering for you (and if you’re ever in doubt, just go here where I confidently pretend that it all makes sense).

In my next newsletter in a few days, I’ll outline where we’re going for the next season, beginning in November - and it’s going to be a biggie (and, relatively speaking, a quickie - although maybe there’s a better way to phrase that).

But today: it’s customary at this point for me to recap everything since the season began - except this one was an absolute monster, and there’s just no way I can do that.

Instead, in no particular order, here are twenty newsletter I really enjoyed putting together this year, along with a few things I learned from researching them. I hope you find something here that you missed the first time round.

NOTE: this email is still going to be wayyyy too big for your Inbox and will get chopped off somewhere below - so you’ll have to click through to the Web version to read the whole thing. Thanks!

1. Meet The World’s Newest ‘Continent’

“If you haven’t heard of Zealandia, have no fear! It was only proposed in 1995, and it’s been a source of amiable dispute ever since: can it be considered a continent if it’s underwater, or should it be called a microcontinent fragment, or something else entirely? Even the name isn’t yet set in stone: Māori speakers would prefer it to be called Te Riu-a-Māui, meaning “the hills, valleys, and plains of Māui”…

But it has, now, been entirely mapped (hat-tip to , reliable source of sciencey news at Curious About Everything). More formally: “This work completes offshore reconnaissance geological mapping of the entire Zealandia continent.””

2. The Man With No Working Memory

“…all Henry would have for his remaining 55 years were the memories of his early twenties, bolstered temporarily with what he could learn about the world around him over the next few dozen seconds. Nothing else would linger in his conscious brain.

His anterograde amnesia - the kind used as a lazy trope in many pulp thrillers, and much more successfully in Christopher Nolan’s haunting Memento (2000) - was devastatingly total.”

3. The ‘Stargates’ In Poland And Lithuania

“This gate isn’t what physicists call a Einstein-Rosen bridge, more popularly known as a wormhole, and so it doesn’t rotate, lock onto distant coordinates and then blast out a foaming torrent of spacetime that turns into a rippling surface that can transport you anywhere in the universe if you step through it. Instead, it’s more like a window you can look through, into the alien world on the other side. 

That “alien world” is the city of Lublin in Poland, around 600 kilometres or 375 miles away, where there’s an identical-looking gate that allows Lublin’s residents to look back at Vilnius. Both gates livestream the view from their twin, 24 hours a day, allowing people in each city to wave at each other, write messages on boards in that Love Actually kind of way, compare clothes or sandwiches, and so on. There’s no sound, just video - but just being able to connect with someone in another city like that, to see them and have that sense of being together in this odd semi-real shared space for this particular moment, is a hugely affecting thing.” 

(Update: now there’s one connecting New York and Dublin!)

4. The Madness At The Edge Of Freezing

“It’s a bleak irony that as you freeze to death, there comes a point where your skin feels like it’s alight, prompting you to struggle out of your clothes. This is called paradoxical undressing, and may happen because your ailing hypothalamus pops a fuse – or because it tries a last-ditch attempt at warming you, flinging all your capillaries open and giving you the mother of all full-bodied blushes.

You’ll also feel the urge to crawl into a small space (terminal burrowing), a mechanism that often makes it harder for rescue parties to find severe hypothermia victims.

This is not the finest hour of your survival instincts.”

5. The New Fastest Human-Made Object In The Universe

“NASA’s recent Parker Solar Probe has just broken that record by a factor of 10, already achieving a nearly unimaginable speed of 394,736 miles per hour - and next year hopefully beating that by another 30,000 mph.

(To put this into perspective: next time you stand outside looking up at the Moon, imagine a ride that would get you from here to there in just over half an hour.)”

6. One Of Our Planet’s Greatest Geographical Wonders Is Hidden Under The North Pole

“On dry land, this would be an absolutely incredible landmark - a standing tidal-wave of rock, dividing whatever continent it ran across. Millions of tourists would come to see it every year. You might have walked along it yourself, or dreamed of owning a little cottage in sight of it.

It's now called the Lomonosov Ridge, in honour of the man who guessed its existence 200 years earlier.

Now the three countries that border on it - Canada, Denmark (via Greenland) and Russia - are determined to lay claim to it.”

7. These Clouds Point To The Quickest Way Up

“Because they’re such a visible guide to air currents, glider pilots can use the edge of [lenticular clouds] to climb to incredible heights. On 2nd September 2018, pilot Jim Payne soared to 22 kilometres (74,334 feet) above the ground - twice the cruising altitude of commercial airliners, and nearly a quarter of the way to outer space.”

8. The Real-Life Lord Of The Flies Did It Best

“Lord Of The Flies certainly isn’t “proof” we’re awful - but it can feel like proof, in the depths of your being that only good stories can reach.

So I am very glad to tell you that a real-life version happened in 1965 where six boys were marooned for 15 months on a deserted island in Tonga - and things went very differently.”

9. ‘Impossible’ Things Happen More Often Than You Think

“A few years ago, newly engaged Stephen and Helen Lee were flipping through family photos at their engagement part in New York, and this happened:

Stephen: “So my future mother-in-law's flipping through the album and she sees my dad. And so she asks, oh, oh, what was his name? And my mom tells the name. And my future mother-in-law just nods and moves on and keeps on flipping through the book - doesn't even say anything.”

What Helen’s mother had just seen was the face of the man she nearly married in Korea in the 1960s, before she was warned off by her disapproving parents - and that man was Stephen’s late father.

As Stephen told This American Life:

“To think that I can talk to my mother-in-law and hear what he was like in his 20s-- something that my mom doesn't even know. And my - actually, Helen's father is a strong believer in the idea that somehow my dad - somehow is behind all this. That somehow he's helped make all this happen.” 

10. We Remember Climbing Musical Mountains *Subscribers only*

“You know when a tune starts low, goes high and ends low again, like a hill made of music? Think Twinkle Twinkle Little Star or basically anything by Hans Zimmer. That progression - rising phrase, falling phrase - seems to be catnip for our memories.

“(Also used by Hans Zimmer: the auditory illusion called the Shepard Tone, which does wonderfully trippy things to the insides of our skulls.)”

11. Just Because Your Eyes Are Open Doesn’t Mean You’re Awake

“Your body is panicking because you’ve ignored every danger sign it’s thrown at you so far, and now it’s using its last desperate trick: pulling the plug completely. For 10-30 second bursts, your brain is shutting itself down, even while the rest of you appears awake. Your eyes are open, you’re moving, you may even be talking to people – but you’re definitely not present.

It’s called microsleeping – a deceptively benign term for something that kills at least 1500 people every year in the U.S. alone. Occasionally, the consequences can literally be devastating. At 1.23am on the 24th April 1986, the sleep-deprived, repeatedly-microsleeping shift workers at the Chornobyl nuclear power plants made an error that started the worst nuclear power accident in human history.”

12. How To Buy An Island

“If you have £2.5 million just kicking around, or if you’re willing to commit to paying £13,817 a month for the next 25 years after laying down a £250,000 deposit, the following is yours: seven residential properties (the majority recently renovated with double-glazing) accommodating 26 people, a tavern(!), a small, subsidized farm with around 50 black-headed sheep, and over 450 acres of hillsides and cliffs dotted with deer, puffins, storm petrels, razorbills, manx shearwater, kittiwake, gulls and seals.”

13. Writing By Hand Seems Better For Learning And Remembering *Subscribers only*

“In terms of what your hands are doing, there is a huge difference between typing a word and writing it. When you type, it’s much the same action happening - there is a bit of variation with what hand you use to hit which key, there’s a little pivoting of your arms or wrists as they move over the keyboard, but that’s about it. And tablets & smartphones? You can be hardly moving at all, frozen in place apart from a couple of your fingers doing all the work - and, perhaps more importantly, you're using those fingers in the same way for each letter you type.

Most of us can type much faster than we can write because we’re moving our bodies much less. But it seems the cost of that is we’re shortcutting our body’s role in helping us think and remember what we’re typing. That’s what handwriting is: it’s the slower, more physically arduous and complex way, but that physical demand upon us seems to be serving a really useful cognitive purpose.”

(For much more on this topic, go read the newsletter Noted by Jillian Hess.)

14. How To ‘Go Viral’ On Social Media

“Okay. You’re - really not going to like this answer, because I certainly don’t, but here goes:

It was almost entirely luck.

At least 90% luck. Maybe 95%. Maybe more.

I’m proud of that up-to-5%, which took about 6 months of sporadic experimenting and testing…but on the whole, it was pretty much luck.

For this reason, it was never "I made this go viral, yay me”. It was just good fortune - but the kind I’d made sure I could capitalize on if I found I was lucky enough to suddenly reach a lot of people.”

15. What If We Could Climb A Rope Into Space? *Subscribers only*

“Imagine if there was a big metal cable, attached to the ground, with the other end tethered to something beyond geostationary orbit, so you wouldn’t fall back to Earth once you unclipped yourself from it again.

Suddenly, going into space is a simple matter of hauling yourself up that cable inch by inch, mile by mile. It wouldn’t be quick, but wow would it be fuel-efficient - and it’d mean that your rocket could ditch most of that propellant, allowing it to be the same mass but carrying far more actual stuff! (In modern rockets the cost of lifting every kilogram into space is anything from $1,400 to $20,000. With a space elevator? Maybe as low as $200.)”

16. Even Soldiers Love Stuffed Animals

“Perhaps you’re forming an image of him right now: lantern jaw, stiff upper lip, twinkle in the eye above a clipped moustache, that sort of thing. Shoulders you could iron a shirt on. Every part the noble British wartime hero.

But what would you think if I told you he took his teddy bear with him? How would that fit with your ideas of British wartime masculinity?

It was with him when he parachuted into Italy.

It accompanied him in those Italian and German prisons.

It remained with him all his adult life - and would be joined by around 300 others, because Sir Robert Clark absolutely loved teddy bears.”

17. Can Forgetting Be A Blessing? *Subscribers Only*

“From the start of this short series, I’ve written with the rather simplistic assumption that forgetfulness is always bad and to remember is always good. But - if we couldn’t forget things, especially in this age of digital information overload, what would that do to us?

As a mild example of this, just look at the Doorway Effect, which I first learned about through behavioural scientist Tanya Tarr. Ever walked into another room and forgotten what you were meant to be doing? That’s your brain using a location-change to “flush out” what it believes to be your least important short-term memories, to keep your head clear. Sometimes our minds go haywire in the struggle to avoid taking in too much information, as with the hallucinatory nature of Troxler’s Effect - but in this case, it’s not a glitch, it’s a self-care mechanism.

How much of forgetfulness is working in the same way?”

18. Why Britain Annexed This Tiny Dung-Spattered Lump Of Rock In The North Atlantic

“It’s quite possible that someone in the government glanced at a report on Rockall, saw the word “land” and immediately envisioned a hammer and sickle fluttering above an island fortress festooned with radar dishes. Rockall was, in the words of geographer Fraser MacDonald, “sufficiently near to the range to be an embarrassment if it were acquired by some foreign power.”

Never mind the fact that nothing can cling to Rockall for long, barring truly astounding quantities of bird crap.

Never mind that Soviet spy ships could have done the job for a fraction of the cost and easily scarper out of range when detected.

No! Being “land,” Rockall was a threat to national security. It was obvious. We had to have it.”

19. The Wisdom Of Former Cynic Nick Cave

“Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position — it is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.

Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like — such as reading to your little boy, showing him something you love, singing him a song, or putting on his shoes — keeps the devil down in the hole.

It says the world and its inhabitants have value, and are worth defending.

It says the world is worth believing in.

In time, we come to find that this is so.”

20. How To Go For A Really Awful Walk

“Those clouds are really dark, aren’t they?

And look at how those hills are disappearing ahead, where that suddenly bone-cold wind is coming from. 

It’s OK, though. Take a deep breath – and – just – release it. Feel it travel out of your body, from your deepest place to your emptiest place. Feel the air passing, watch it go with your inner mind’s eye – until only you remain, calm and still and ready for anything.

It was Billy Graham who said, “Without dark clouds in our lives, we would never know the joy of sunshine.”

Well, good for him. And didn’t he live in North Carolina, where it’s generally pretty warm all year round – at least 20 full degrees warmer than here?

Yes he did. 

It’s raining hard now. Proper stair-rods.

But that’s OK too. Let it pass. Let it be. Allow it and accept it. You can always choose to do that. After all, discomfort always passes in time. Misery is just a matter of attitude. You can’t control what happens to you. You can only control your response to it. 

And maybe your response right now is, “I shouldn’t have got my waterproofs from that discounted items bin in Primark.” You’ll know next time. 

But that’s next time, and right now, you’re completely and utterly…

Wait. Seriously? Is…? Is that…? 

Yes, it is. After less than five minutes, the rainwater has now reached your underpants.”

Back in a few days with details of what’s next!

- Mike

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One person who is excellent at trying new things - especially if they’re (a) thoroughly absurd, and (b) a surprisingly effective method of meeting new people that hardly anyone attempts because of (a) - is journalist - whom you may recall was previously wandering round New York yelling “SKWON!” for the chaotic hell of it.

Now, for reasons entirely beyond anyone but her, she’s just spent 24 hours on the New York Subway:

The last thing I do before heading out on my big adventure is drop my dog to stay overnight with my neighbor Shelly. I tell Shelly my plan: I'm going to spend 24 hours straight in the NYC subway.

The rules: I can go wherever I please, chat with whomever looks interesting and pass the time however I like—as long as I don't pass back through the turnstile. Also, I’m only allowed to eat, drink and read what I buy underground.

"Any suggestions?" I ask.

"One word," says Shelly. "Don't."

Read the full account here - and while yes, it’s a ludicrous thing to inflict upon yourself, isn’t it also a fantastic way to rewire your experience of a place you’ve unconsciously taught yourself to overlook?

(Even so - blimey, Anne. What are you like?)

Staying with Crazy But In The Very Best Of Ways:

It's not often that a book proves so influential that it creates (or at the very least hugely accelerates) a national movement.

It's rarer still when that book is the author's only work they publish in their own lifetime.

Enter Waterlog (1999) by the late Roger Deakin.

Its success is a big part of why so-called "wild swimming" (ie. going for a dip in the sea or a river or lake, sometimes in stubborn defiance of what the weather is doing) exploded in popularity over the last couple of decades in the UK, capturing the imaginations of a whole new crowd of amateur outdoors enthusiasts - as well as giving those folk who never stopped doing it a chance to say "oh, I'm so glad you youngsters got caught up at last…").

And yet, it's also just the real-life story of one man, a talented nature writer with a gift for not taking himself too seriously, documenting his swimming journey around Britain: "an attempt to discover the country afresh by swimming through its seas, rivers, lakes, fens; its swimming pools and secret bathing holes..."

If there was water, he'd usually have a go (although he skips the incredibly dangerous crossing over the Corryvreckan whirlpool that almost killed George Orwell).

I love this book so very much. It’s why I started swimming in the sea here in Scotland (one of the best lifestyle changes I’ve made since I arrived here in 2020) - so I hope if you read the first chapter of Waterlog on Threadable (click the button below), it’ll similarly bewitch you with the urge to take a dip somewhere you normally wouldn't.

Go on. Chuck yourself in.

Read "Waterlog" on Threadable

And thirdly, please do not be alarmed but -

I know, I know: what an alarmingly tabloid-like headline.

But the upshot of the story is that according to Noa Leach at BBC Science Focus, Dr Darren Baskill of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Sussex, and an upcoming paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, there is….well….a mysterious object….which is going very fast indeed!….and, erm…it’s baffling scientists?

More usefully: it’s a long way away (400 light years), it’s surprisingly huge (8% of the Sun’s mass, or 30,000 times bigger than the Earth) and it’s moving nearly 3 times the speed of the fastest human-made object ever created, the Parker Solar Probe, which I previously mentioned here.

At this speed, in a few tens of millions of years (not much time at all in the life of the average star) it should be barrelling its way out of the Milky Way and into the black.

To acquire this much velocity and energy, something dramatic must have happened to it. Perhaps it had a close encounter with something in our Galactic Center, which is tremendously crowded with stars (up to 10 million per cubic light year). Or maybe it had a near-miss with a black hole. Or both!

Or hey, maybe it’s a vast hollowed-out rock filled with colossal chambers, one of which goes on forever!

(Okay, it’s not, but I did love what the core ideas of that particular novel did to my tiny brain, and I will never tire of enjoying the memory.)

So, to today’s main story.

Incredibly, it’s nearly a year since I began this season’s look at islands with this piece:

I feel like I’ve barely begun to chart the edges of this topic, which is great because it’s a subject I love and I’d hate to feel like most of the fun of discovery was behind me.

But on the other hand - well, here we are, a full year and 45 newsletters later, and I really need to crack on with what comes next, so let’s have a go at wrapping this up.

(However, I’m going to cheat. I want to keep writing about islands and the people who live on them - technically that’d be all of us, but…you know what I mean - so I’m going to keep doing so. The next season will have an entirely new theme that I’m really eager to get started with, and more about that next week, but you can also expect me to circle back occasionally and throw an island or two into the mix, as I’ve done with all the main topics of previous seasons.)

Today, let’s speed up the geological clock and see what coming for us in the long run.

In this case, the best way to look forwards is to peer back at where we’ve been.

Except: “we” is inaccurate. We’re talking about geological timescales here, measured in hundreds of millions of years. Anatomically modern humans have been around for around 300,000 years - and our distant hominin ancestors, the entirety of what you could define as “human,” only go back around 6 million years.

Remaining optimistic about our ability to clean up all the messes we've made for ourselves and the fragile ecologies that sustain us, how long could humans as a species continue to survive on Earth?

“Paleontologically, mammalian species usually persist for about a million years, says Henry Gee, a paleontologist and senior editor at the journal Nature, whose forthcoming book is on the extinction of humans. That would put the human species in its youth. But Gee doesn't think these rules necessarily apply for H. sapiens.

"Humans are rather an exceptional species," he says. "We could last for millions of years, or we could all drop down next week."

- “Will Humans Ever Go Extinct?”, Stephanie Pappas, Scientific American.

With that in mind, let’s stick an extremely generous life-clock on Homo Sapiens Sapiens of 100 million years.

At a scale which includes our very distant hominid ancestors, we’ve still only been around for 6% of the projected lifetime of our species (and as modern humans for just 0.3% of it).

Equated into human terms, with the average modern human living to the age of just over 73 years, that means at best we’re currently less than 5 years old.

As I’m sure you’ll agree, this explains a lot.

But I also find this a surprisingly hopeful analogy. Of course we’re doing a lot of foolish things like engaging in self-destructive behaviour and turning irreplaceable natural resources into this weirdly powerful imaginary thing we’ve invented called “money” - it’s because we’re still too young to know better.

(I mean, this excuses nothing, and takes nothing away from how much we have to learn about becoming responsible and effective stewards of our vanishingly small corner of the Milky Way - but it can at least help remind us why we seem to be such a woefully incomplete work-in-progress.)

But look - we’re still talking about humans, and this newsletter isn’t about them at all, so let’s stop doing that.

This is the Earth as it’s believed to have looked around 250 million years ago, with the borders of modern continents superimposed to show how it jigsawed together into the supercontinent Pangea (as I wrote about here):

Compared to today, this looks startling lumpy - like wet dough clagging together in the middle of a mixing bowl, instead of the broken-china-like scatters of land we have today.

Before reading my way into this topic, I figured the very rough pattern of our geological history over the last few billion years was of order turning to disorder: the continents drifting away from each other and gradually losing integrity, like the foam on a cooling cappuccino.

Unfortunately for me this is complete twaddle, and yet another sign I’m probably unqualified to write this newsletter. (Sorry, no, that doesn’t mean you can take over. I’m having too much fun.)

The reason is around 4,000 miles (6,370 kilometres) directly under your feet right now - believed to be a mostly solid ball of iron-nickel alloy which, at its innermost depths, is around the temperature of the surface of the Sun. Our planet is not believed to be ‘young’ in the wider scheme of things - but it still pumps out an astonishing amount of energy, in ways geological scientists are only just beginning to understand…

So, forget the cooling-cup-of-coffee analogy - and replace it with a jacuzzi.

For the last 3.5 billion years, the crust of the Earth where we make our home has reflected the buckling, churning turbulence of the mantle’s convection currents beneath it - so everything is on the move, even if we’re far too quickly-lived to usually see it.

However, it’s not just random chaos. There are mighty patterns at work here. One thing most geologists now agree is that we’re partway through a supercontinent cycle, each rotation lasting 300-500 million years.

This means that in another couple of hundred million years, Earth should once again have itself another Pangea:

Of the four most popular future supercontinent models currently duking it out (above), the one that most interests me is called Amasia - partly because I like how it sounds like “Amaze-ia” (yes, I’m precisely that low-brow, but fun names are important when you’re going to be stuck with them for millions of years), and partly because it relates to this previous edition of Everything Is Amazing:

As the Atlantic continues to widen due to sea-floor spreading (creating the longest chain of mountains in the world), the Pacific will close as its underlying plate subducts under the Eurasian continent and the Americas and closes the Arctic Ocean - and eventually the upper northern hemisphere will become Amasia, a single landmass.

This will leave nothing but sea until you hit Antarctica.

It’d be quite the sight:

None of this is settled, of course, and won’t be a long time yet. As geologist Hannah Davies comments in this BBC Future piece: “If I had a Tardis to go and see, I wouldn't be surprised if, in 250 million years, the supercontinent didn't look anything like any of these scenarios. There are so many factors involved."

But whatever it’ll look like, it’ll be a whole new world.

I wonder who will be there to see it?

Images: JPL/NASA; Fama Clamosa.

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Before today’s main story, here’s something I’m annoyed at myself for never knowing until this week.

This is actress Susan Oliver. If you’re a Star Trek fan, you’ll recognise her from “The Cage”, the pilot episode of the original series, playing the role of Vina.

This was the pilot that NBC famously refused to pick up - forcing Gene Rodenberry to make changes that included replacing Captain Pike (Jeffrey Hunter, who declined to return to the role) with William Shatner’s Kirk for Star Trek’s second pilot.

Over half a century later, Pike has now been resurrected for the small screen, thanks to Anson Mount’s wildly popular portrayal of him in Star Trek: Discovery - and now we have Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. (Its co-showrunner and executive producer Henry Alonso Myers has quipped that since 55 years had passed since “The Cage” was filmed, it’s the longest pilot-to-series-pick-up in television history.)

Susan Oliver’s role in both “The Cage” and the first-season two-parter it eventually became (“The Menagerie”) was as a guest star - but in real life she was, in the words of this post originally on Facebook…

“…an accomplished pilot competing in many air races and survived a bad crash. In 1970, Miss Oliver won the Powder Puff Derby. She was named pilot of the year by the Assn. of Executive Pilots. She described her attempts to be the first woman to fly a single-engine plane from New York to Moscow in the book ‘Odyssey.’ ”

The details are even more remarkable. In February 1959, before she decided to become a pilot, she was on a PanAm Boeing 707 on a transatlantic flight from Paris to New York when it suddenly dropped from 35,000 to 6,000 feet. This was on the the same day Buddy Holly died in an airplane crash - and this freak combination of events caused her to avoid flying for the next year. Determined to conquer her fear, she took hypnosis lessons - and in 1964 started training for her Private Pilot’s License.

Whew. What determination. In a better world, I reckon she’d have made a great first female captain for Star Trek - a full thirty years earlier than Captain Janeway.

So! Today, in the final part of our paid-supporter-only investigation of the science of human memory, we’re looking at the alarming havoc our minds can wreak upon our biographies and sense of identity - and it starts with the stupidest thing I’ve ever done on a bicycle.

“Right, lad. LET’S DO THIS.”

I line up on the homemade bike ramp halfway down the street, cycle madly towards it in a blur of pedals and knees - and it’s only when I launch myself into thin air that I realise what an endlessly awful idea this is.

This isn’t the usual way I do things as a teenager. I’ve always had a highly active imagination and I’m a shameless coward, so I’m normally quick to catastrophize my way out of attempting the kind of activities teenagers from British rural towns might do to numb their general existential horror: yes that might pass the time, John, but I can imagine laughing if I read it on someone’s gravestone, so no, I will not be joining you this time. Best of luck!

I hadn’t successfully avoided every stupid idea, though. In the frozen dead of a Yorkshire winter, a gang of us discovered a burnt-out car at the back of our local park late one night, and had the brilliant notion of inexpertly sawing the roof off it, flipping it over and turn it into the Death Sled™.

With four of us clinging to the jagged razor-sharp struts at each corner and the rest giving us a shove, we started down the slope of a hill. Success! It worked! Um - far too well, actually! Had we discussed the concept of braking? We had not.

Traversing the 300 metres to the park entrance in about ten seconds, we saw far too late that nothing prevented us from skimming up the sloping tarmac path and out into the main road to pancake ourselves into a row of shops on the far side. It’d be the stupidest of ends. Nothing could save us now.

But then, a winter miracle! With a clang, a hidden boulder knocks us sideways, away from the path and into the side of its grassy embankment. With a deafening, metallic PWONK! the Death Sled™ springs into the air, flinging us in all directions - at which point we scramble to our feet and leg it before someone calls the police about all the screaming.

This lucky escape has left me cautious about life and quick to say no. But for some reason, this natural line of defence has now failed me when I need it the most.

After watching an episode of The Dukes Of Hazzard, I decide that what my credibility needs is to be seen to be flying through the air like a bird - so I’ve stacked a pile of bricks in the road and laid a plank up one side of them, in an attempt to coax out the cooler kids and their bikes at the bottom of my street. What I lack in experience, foresight and almost every other survival trait evolution has attempted to bestow upon me, I’ve made up for with wild enthusiasm (an early sign of how I’ll approach the rest of my life) - so I make the ramp ten bricks high.

Now I see my error. Nearly knocked senseless by the impact of hitting the bottom of the ramp, I proceed up it at great speed. I know it’s probably too late to chicken out - but I try it anyway, squeezing the brakes so hard they’re in danger of snapping.

The next memory I have - and it’s a vivid one - is running laps around my Mum’s green Vauxhall Nova. Round and round and round I go, bawling my eyes out and unable to stop running or crying, because the pain from my broken arm, which I’m cradling with my other arm, is so utterly unbearable.

I continue to do laps until the ambulance arrives.

Even now, over thirty years later, when the weather is changing and the air-pressure is rising or falling, I feel it in my then-smashed arm as a throbbing ache (yes, medical science is at last concluding that this is a real thing).

So, that’s my bike ramp tale. It’s not a fun story, but it’s a good one to appal anyone who hasn’t heard it.

And I really, really wish it was true.

Let me be clear: this is exactly and precisely what I remember. I’m not consciously embellishing anything, I’m not pulling the wool over your eyes for entertainment purposes. I am not knowingly telling you porkies here. According to the inside of my head, this is a true and accurate account of what happened.

Unfortunately, my version wasn’t corroborated by a key witness to that absurd disaster. A decade later, I got talking to my late Ma about it (she wasn’t late at that point, I should add, it wasn’t one of those kinds of conversations) - and she didn’t remember me running around her car.

When she found me, I was sat on the grass verge on the outside of our garden hedge, rocking back and forth & howling with pain. She swore blind to this - and yet I remember none of that myself. In my memory, I was running, running, running until the ambulance arrived - except, come to think of it, she couldn’t remember if it was an ambulance or if she drove me to the hospital herself…?

When my Ma told me all this, I was indignant. OH COME ON. Was I not the one to whom all this happened, feeling all the feelings, dealing with the agony? She was just an onlooker and so must have muddled things up. Surely *I* was the most reliable source of information here?

I didn’t think about all this until I recently started looking into the mind-bending study of false memory - because it seems, entirely contrary to basic common sense, that your presence on the scene of an event may actually make your memory less reliable than a remote observer.

Since we construct so much of our personal identities on our memories, the implications here are extremely unsettling, and have the potential to call into question…well, everything about us, really, as we dip a toe into the science here.

What’s left of you if you can’t even trust your own memories?

Let’s take a look.

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Two things in this one:

Firstly: as a break from talking about shipwrecked boys not murdering each other and how hopefulness isn’t a gift you have to surrender, we’re returning to this book:

In this first Big Amazing Read, we’re reading Alexandra Horowitz’s On Looking - one of the books that inspired me to start this newsletter.

This is mainly one of those “do it in your own time” things. Anyone can take part! All you need is to get hold of a copy of the book and read it - maybe in a street cafe, where you can put some of its ideas to immediate use.

Regarding where to get it:

• New paper copies are a little hard to find (there’s only been one version, as far as I can tell). If you’re in the UK, the Simon & Schuster page for the book has a lot of great links; if in the US, try the Barnes & Noble page.

• It’s on Amazon here (cheapest as a Kindle e-book) - and it’s also on Audible here, read by Horowitz herself.

• Libraries! Marvellous things. Don’t get me started.

If you want a taster of the whole book, the introductory chapter - accompanied by my own commentary in the margins - is available to read on the social reading platform Threadable.

Click the image below to go there:

To take part in the rest of the Big Amazing Read, you can go through On Looking in your own time - but I’m also publishing my own discussion notes, chapter by chapter, in newsletters like this one, in case you want to read along. Chapters 1 and 2 were here.

(I frequently find my own voice very boring indeed, so, please, if you want to share your own perspective on this beautiful book with me and everyone else, please leap into the comments here. Thank you!)

Secondly: at the bottom of this newsletter, just for paid supporters, is a link to book an online chat with me sometime from the middle of October onwards - what I’ve been calling a “Curiosity Call” since I had chats with many of you at the end of last year.

The way it works is this:

1. We meet at the appointed time, on Zoom or using whatever platform or form you prefer (eg. a voice-only call).

2. We chat for about 30 minutes.

3. We end the call, and you think to yourself, “Well, I wonder what that was all about?!”

Maybe you have a newsletter idea you're wanting to bounce off someone else! You may have a nerdy hobby you want to lean into in a more curious and structured way, as I’ve done with EiA! You may have something entirely different going on that my brain is too small to currently imagine! (The third option is far more likely.)

Whatever it is: we meet, you can ask me questions or tell me interesting things, I try to fling a bunch of other questions or ideas at you, you take a note of any that might be worth chewing over - and off you go to discover how deep your personal rabbit-hole goes.

(Or: you turn up with an entirely different idea for how to use our time together, and I’ll do my best to accommodate.)

As I said, it’s just for paid subscribers, and places are limited. If you’re on the free list, here’s how to can upgrade to paid:

Upgrade here!

Okay! On with the discussion notes for On Looking.

“On Looking” - Chapter 3: Minding our Qs

A walk with Paul Shaw, professional typographer, ‘afflicted with the disorder of knowing too much...about the design of letters.’

(Header quote: “To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.” - Paul Valéry)

We’re meeting a different flavour of guide here, that’s for sure.

As the chapter opens, Shaw is feeling actual pain at the sight of a bunch of mismatched typefaces. This isn’t the boundless and universally generous enthusiasm of Sidney Horenstein of the previous chapter, where everything is a joy waiting to be uncovered. Shaw has *opinions*.

As a professional letterhead, he knows the rules of good lettering taste, formal and unspoken, and when he sees them being broken, he cringes.

He’s also experiencing everyday things very differently to most people, because of his “curse of knowing”. Where we’d read lettering and our brains would instantly leap to their meaning, he is absorbed with the letters themselves.

There’s a fascinating parallel here with how Horowitz’s toddler in the first chapter sees shapes without yet having the skill of interpreting them into objects. Paul Shaw *can* interpret meaning from the letters he sees, but that’s not his primary skill when he reads.

“Every hour, children are losing more and more ability to think without language…”

Interesting aside here: do you have an inner monologue? (A primer.).

If you find you don’t, well, that’s two of us! As far as I can tell, my own thoughts aren’t “read out” by an inner-me voice inside my head as I think. I *can* make my own internal voice, but it’s an effort of imagination – and what normally happens, as far as I can tell, is that my thoughts take the form of...I don’t know, the meaning, landing in my brain in a swirl of impressions and sensations and imaginings? But it’s not a “voice.”

So – if children have the ability to think without language, and they lose it as they acquire words in their parents’ language, how is it that (I think!) some of us retain the ability to think without internally spoken language?

What Horowitz seems to be suggesting here is language as a strait-jacket, or a super-highway that excludes all other routes across our inner landscape. This is why learning a new language and becoming fluent enough to think in that language can literally become a new way of seeing the world.

But she’s also talking about “dull, tedious words” – the difference between fully playing with the possibilities of a language, and sticking to the vernacular, the roughly one thousand unique words we use every day on average, vs. the tens of thousands we know from the hundreds of thousands available if we made the effort. I’m not sure I’d judge everyday vocabulary as “tedious” by default, but it can be!

“Words are the ample cleavage of the urban environment: impossible to not look at.”

I laughed. But also, hey, did a man edit that line?

“Today we rarely encounter a public surface completely without words.”

Is this true? Or is it just a statement about New York? It feels like something to test. Wherever you are in the world, go for a walk and report back.

The anecdote about how badly designed taxi lettering can be was a really interesting illustration of how design can hijack meaning, an insider-baseball level of knowledge that Paul Shaw presumably has difficulty looking past.

(What’s your equivalent of this? What expertise do you find yourself unable to turn off so you’re having the same everyday experience of other people? For me, it’s story analysis – after working as a storytelling consultant, I find part of my brain always analysing a story even while I’m trying to enjoy it. If something seems technically clumsy to me about how the story unfolds – my equivalent of outraged good taste – I find it really hard to suspend my disbelief again.)

“ ‘I look at everything...when I do walking tours, I forget to look where I’m going.’ With all the signs, a person could get lost.”

Lovely irony there.

As he gets more and more obsessively interested in what he sees, Shaw is editing it in his head. This ‘A’ has to be lower. This ‘S’ is kerned in a weird way. It’s like he’s itching to intervene and correct what he sees. Something is WRONG and he wants to right it.

This can, of course, become obnoxious when someone does it to you in an unsolicited way. See how a slice of the population of Britain found themselves infuriated by Lynne Truss’s book Eats, Shoots And Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach To Punctuation, even while the rest propelled it to the top of the bestseller charts.

But also, the way that Horowitz describes him – despondent at an ugly sign for just 3 seconds before being distracted by something else – he has a kid’s diversive curiosity propelling him along. (How much of this was for Horowitz’s benefit and how much is what he does every day, I wonder?)

“Three hours of walking with Shaw later, I felt relieved...rather than words, I saw the components of words. Some small part of my brain (the linguistic part) rested: the shape-identifying part hummed with activity.”

I loved this observation – that it can be relaxing to be able to tune out meaning in favour of form, and all the rules attached to it.

And her final point about how people get the “Tetris Effect” from playing the game so long that their minds try to fit things together in the real world as they look at them – yep! As an archaeologist, I learned the equivalent: the “Trowel Effect”. As you’re walking along, part of you is assessing how to dig up whatever is in front of you. That big rock over there, where would I start, ah yes, scrape away *here* and then chase *that* edge down to see where it goes, and then you should have a good stab at levering it up….

We think as we do, not just the reverse. Teach the body, and the mind will follow – and that’s why physical movement (gesturing, pacing, using physical prompts) is such a huge benefit when you’re learning new things. Ask any actor!

“On Looking” - Chapter 4: Into The Fourth Dimension

Alexandra Horowitz goes walking with illustrator and ordinariness-curator Maira Kalman.

(Header quote: “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” - Sherlock Holmes / Arthur Conan Doyle.)

I love how this chapter opens, with a request to stand on a street corner for half an hour without setting any expectations about what you’ll get out of it! On reflection, this may have inspired my ‘first law of curiosity’ (or I might just have stolen it). How often does the tyranny of usefulness in your planning get in the way of doing stuff just for the curious hell of it? I reckon we need more excuses to experiment with our free time without demanding results in advance, and this is certainly a good one.

Fascinating word, “ordinary”. In one sense it means “something that happens all the time” - but it’s also used as a synonym for “uninteresting”, as a judgement. Why would you live an ordinary live when it can be EXCEPTIONAL? Except - 95% of our lives are ordinary and when we forget it, we simultaneously get too big for our boots, and we start tuning out the everyday joys of life that are constantly around us. Thank heavens for all the artists reminding us to see what we’re looking at, and reminding us that the world we already have is where most of the things we’re looking for already reside…

“…we all create for ourselves: we summarize and generalize, stop looking at particulars and start taking in scenes at a glance - all in an effort to not be overwhelmed visually when we just need to make it through the day.”

Much truth here. Definitely applies to me, in my hastiest moments. We are pattern-scanners, more and more when we’re in a hurry, and “when we’re in a hurry” probably applies to most folk these days?

“Once you look at what seems ordinary enough, though, it often turns odd and unfamiliar, as any child repeatedly saying his own name aloud learns.”

The dream of any science writer (and journalist in general)! To slow people down enough to consider something properly that was sitting right under their noses all day long.

Kalman’s manifested talent in this chapter is to regard things as interesting without judging them on their ordinariness (in both senses) - like a child’s ability in the first chapter of On Looking, and presumably like a dog’s ability to regard all smells as fascinating information instead of labelling them good (and therefore worthy of attention) or bad (and therefore something to avoid).

“…it’s a sofa on the street, I cannot believe it!”

Case in point! 😂 The rest of us: oh dear, how messy and thoughtless mixed with euwww strangers were sitting on that for YEARS, I’m going nowhere near it. My reaction is often a bit more anthropomorphic: oh that’s sad, a sofa that served someone faithfully for years, maybe decades, just tossed out on the street like that. (As I wrote here, this happens to me a lot.)

“…we all have a sense of the “appropriate” personal space around us - a kind of zone of privacy that we wear, even on the social sidewalk.”

This is why we need cheeky, bold or just plain weird folk to nudge us out of those paths until we “breach” those rules, in the language of The City & The City. It’s the skill of good investigative reporters - and entertainingly intrepid writers like (who you definitely should read, if you enjoy this book). Quite the skill, and I aspire to honing it in myself.

“Kalman minded people’s spaces, but she seemed to see personal space as an indication that there was a person in that space to engage with.”

I love this so much. An awareness of other people not as a warning of obstacles to avoid but as an invitation to connect. Obviously this can go wrong if you mistake the signals of folk who just want to be left alone - but as a cautiously applied default response, it’s a good way to treat strangers, make new friends and learn a lot of things you never knew about other people (like, for example, that some people are absolutely lovely).

(That said: when they dive into the hallway of a building and get side-eyed by a security guard is a reminder of how dangerous things can get if your intentions are severely misconstrued - especially in a country with so much private gun ownership. Invading other people’s spaces is not something to take lightly.)

I previously referenced the section where Horowitz talks about the emotional intensity of a human gaze when I was writing about the science of extreme staring. But one thing I’d forgotten is this line: “researchers have found that in a controlled setting, we like unknown people who gaze at us more than those who do not.” As uncomfortably intimate as eye contact can be, it is generally better at conveying trustworthiness than eye-avoidance, although this is not always true at a specific level - for example with the overwhelm and anxiety that eye contact can bring to autistic people.

I found the discussion about sidewalk ownership and building accessibility really interesting and it’s got me curious about how it works here in Scotland. There’s always a tension between where you feel you shouldn’t go and where you probably could actually go, and I feel like there are lots of missed opportunities in that gap, that buffer zone of mutual avoidance and therefore social neglect. How often do we test these limits and feel comfortable when we do it or someone else does, because of how much it feels like an invasion or power-grab?

(One example of limits tested in a bad way: back in my home town in Yorkshire there’s a shop that keeps getting into trouble with the town council because its wares keep creeping out further and further into the street, to the point where they’ve been threatened with legal action.)

This is a walk that’s all about breaking unspoken rules, and about having the boldness and high-wattage curiosity to do it (and the affability to get away with it!). As an introverted British person who apologises for everything - including apologising - this is a chapter I’d want to ponder a lot more and turn into a few self-imposed challenges that hopefully won’t get me into trouble…

What about you? How does this chapter make you feel?

Give me your thoughts here! Thank you.

And now here are the details for those Curiosity Calls…

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As we gallop into the final straight of Season 6, I’m finding there’s a bunch of stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into the newsletters I’ll be publishing over the next week or so.

This edition is therefore like one of those meals you have just after Christmas, using the odds & ends stubbornly left over from a dozen meals: turkey, parsnips and custard, say, or brussels sprouts & macaroni cheese sandwiches. My point is: of course they don’t fit together. This is an act of desperation. Thanks.

To get us started today - hey, did you read Lord Of The Flies when you were at school?

William Golding’s debut novel is rightly regarded as a classic work of psychological fiction. If you’ve never had the pleasure/horror, it concerns a group of young boys stranded on a deserted island who quickly revert to cruelty, savagery and murder.

I first read it at school. It’s one of those books beloved by British English literature examiners, for its rich, deep themes of the moral corruption of power, the tension between groupthink and individuality, and the infinite capacity for human beings to be shitty to each other.

At least, that’s what many of the modern interpretations are - because Golding himself is usually understood to have been specifically skewering the class-stratified British public school system at the time, and also working out his frustrations about a popular pro-colonialism children’s novel called The Coral Island.

However, in the words of Golding’s daughter, Judy Carver:

“My father greatly distrusted simple judgments. He was careful to give [Lord Of The Flies antagonist] Jack some good qualities, and to make him attractive. It’s possible to imagine that under different circumstances Jack and Ralph would have been friends, would have helped each other’s weaknesses, and admired each other’s strengths. But the author shows that this cannot happen on the island because the boys in their isolation are suffering unchecked “from the terrible disease of being human”. ”

Ah yes, what a lovely view of humanity. (That said, Judy Carver wrote generously of her father in her 2011 memoir.)

Beyond that quote, I’m not making any attempt to dissect the true meaning of Lord Of The Flies here, or to diminish its impact upon British literature. But I have seen it being used to justify authoritarian themes - for example, in business management - because, it’s implied, people (and in particular men and boys) always turn into ultra-selfish rage monkeys when they’re left to their own devices, so you need to treat them with a firm hand.

For example, here’s a quote from disgraced American evolutionary biologist Marc. D Hauser: “[Lord Of The Flies] should be standard reading in biology, economics, psychology, and philosophy." Uh. Well, firstly, it’s a novel - and secondly, in 2010 Harvard found Hauser guilty of fabricating and falsifying data in his research, after which he resigned, so maybe there’s an extra pinch of salt to take with his statement.

I certainly don’t believe humans are a disease, so I never liked what I thought Lord Of The Flies had to say, including when I was a teenager being bullied at school. As an alleged adult, I tend to assume we’re all capable of acts of woefully thoughtless stupidity (for which the antidote is often curiosity, acquired wisdom and applied kindness) - but Pure Evil itself is much rarer.

However, my tiresome optimism isn’t the point here! The point is: Lord Of The Flies certainly isn’t “proof” we’re awful - but it can feel like proof, in the depths of your being that only good stories can reach.

So I am very glad to tell you that a real-life version happened in 1965 where six boys were marooned for 15 months on a deserted island in Tonga - and things went very differently.

In short:

• The boys drew up rosters for garden, kitchen and guard duty.

• They cooperated and mediated disputes with discussions and time-outs.

• They sang songs, accompanied by a guitar made from driftwood, a coconut shell & salvaged wires.

• When one fell off a cliff and broke his leg, the others set it using sticks and leaves and covered his work shifts.

• They kept it together - and on Sunday 11th September 1966 after 15 months of surviving on fish, coconuts and birds, they were all rescued.

There are differences here from Golding’s scenario. These boys were aged between 13 and 16 (Golding’s were 6 to 12.) They were adventure-seekers willingly AWOL from a Catholic school in Nuku‘alofa, the capital of Tonga - rather than crash-landed British evacuees. And so on.

But this is about stories, and their ability to give us hope. Does this real-life tale make you think that maybe we can be better than rock-bottom awful? Good. That’s my take as well. So here’s a last word from the captain that rescued them:

“Life has taught me a great deal...including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people.”

(Also: fiction writer wrote an enjoyably hopeful twist on ‘Flies with his book No Adults Allowed, which I really enjoyed and recommend you go check out.)

Secondly, my vote for most startling-titled science paper of the month goes to “Evidence suggesting that earth had a ring in the Ordovician.”

This is the period of our planet’s history between 485 and 443 million years ago - and the research looks at a massive increase in meteorites whacking into us at that time. This has been known about for a while, but the scientists looked at the positions of craters from Ordovician meteorite impacts, and found they were all within 30 degrees of Earth’s equator - suggesting the presence of an equatorial ring of rocky debris.

I spotted this on Threads last week and immediately wanted to write about it - but astronomer Phil Plait beat me to it, and probably good job too because he’s the expert here. Go read his overview here.

And staying with space - just look at this!

It’s a composite image taken by the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars - and it looks to me like it’s sunset because the sky is tinted blue (which I previously wrote about here).

But look near the top of it:

That larger, distinctly potato-like shape is Phobos, one of the moons of Mars. This is something I’ve read about in science fiction books, but I didn’t think I’d see a photo of it from the surface, like someone would if they were walking around in their heated suit (it’s damn cold on Mars), and caught a flash of reflected sunlight out the corner of their eye, looked up and - there it is.

And that tiny white dot next to it?

That’s all of us on Earth, over a hundred million miles away.

Whew.

(Hat-tip to astrophysics student Skylar Grayson for making me aware of it, and credit to NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS for the image.)

Hooray! The Ig Nobels are here again! (Thanks to Jacob Sutton for the reminder.)

If this pronouncement means nothing to you, please start here:

And I’m glad to say that this year’s winners are a bumper crop of exciting ridiculousness.

I’m particularly delighted that the Japanese team who discovered that mammals - including humans, in theory - can ‘breathe’ through their rectums has been awarded the Ig Nobel for Physiology. (I previously wrote…I guess you could call admiringly about anus-breathing when I looked at the science of breathing liquid.)

Other gems include:

• a University College London demographer who has debunked the data supporting the popular idea of “Blue Zones” where people allegedly live the longest, instead finding it’s often riddled with clerical errors, pension fraud and a lack of verified birth certificates.

• the Botany prize winners finding slightly creepy evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of nearby artificial plastic plants.

• a posthumous award to researchers who published a study in 1939 (!) showing that repeatedly exploding paper bags next to a cat that was standing on the back of a cow caused the cow to produce less milk. Hold the front page indeed. (According to the writeup at New Scientist, when the daughter and grandson of one of the researchers turned up to accept the prize, they were met with a demonstration that involved a toy cat, a human in a cow costume and five Nobel laureates exploding paper bags.)

The full list of winners is here - but please, when you’ve glanced through it, do yourself a huge favour and read the archives for an hour or two. Endless joy.

Next - remember the story of this letter that took almost a century to travel across England?

Delightfully, it’s just been beaten by a postcard:

In August 1903, Ewart on the Eastern Coast of Wales sent a postcard to Lydia on the Southern Coast. While the distance between them would only take about an hour and a half to drive today, Ewart’s message took 121 years to arrive.

A manager at the Swansea Building Society, a Welsh financial institution, was surprised to receive the much-overdue postcard in August 2024. Thanks to the efforts of the building society, as well as local sleuths and specialists, Ewart and Lydia’s descendants were soon reunited over the long-lost note.

Thanks to Beth Kujawksi for tipping me off about it.

And lastly - I’ve been following astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy on all my social media channels for a while now, so I shouldn’t be surprised by the quality of anything he posts, which is usually jaw-dropping...

But this colour-processed image of the recent lunar occultation of the planet Saturn, which he took from the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, absolutely blew me away:

(Full set of images here, currently available as prints at Andrew’s website.)

Images: Delphine Fant; NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS; Andrew McCarthy.

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And since the last edition was about having far too much water for comfort, let’s visit the opposite end of that scale - with my own voice as an alarming accompaniment.

TRANSCRIPT:

I’m halfway up Avenue de la Grand Armeé and I’m getting desperate.

This part of Paris doesn’t seem big on supermarkets or corner stores. All I want is somewhere that sells bottled water at 8pm – instead, I’ve got fashion boutiques, up-market auto shops and restaurants with the kinds of waiters that would take one look at me and ring the police. I’m a mess. It’s at least ten degrees too hot, I’m down to my last mouthful of water, my shirt is clammy with half-dried sweat, my head is pounding and my stomach feels ready to turn itself inside-out.

But I absolutely cannot stop moving. Not now.

I’m not sure what time my bus leaves. I need to be on it, yes . . . but this is about balancing nightmares. If the bus left the Porte Maillot Coach Park without me, that’d be awful, I’d be stranded in France – but at least I’d have time to find something to drink. If I’d stayed in that wasteland of parked coaches and hotly stinking gravel, I’d have boarded the bus with no water and a 14 hour journey ahead of me. I’d be licking condensation off the windows and looking at the chemical toilet with a speculative air.

In every way except financially, it would be worse than missing the bus. This is why I can’t go back yet.

I’m on the way to Spain by Megabus, from northern England, I’ve been on the move since 2am, and I’m not even halfway yet. But that’s OK – because the whole thing is costing me £25.

It’s worth pausing to investigate the phrase “OK” here.

Are you willing to inflict grinding discomfort upon yourself for the sake of a proper adventure?

Not just that tedious half-hour twiddling your thumbs on the tarmac before take-off, or your phone battery hitting 0% just before you finish that heartfelt post on social media you’ve been carefully phrasing for the last half-hour. No. I’m talking about the remarkable awfulness of long-distance bus travel here, which will scour away your will to live like nothing else.

With that in mind, here’s the sequence of events that got me the 1,100 miles from Leeds (Yorkshire, England) to Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain).

2.30am: Leeds. I’d arrived late afternoon on a Megabus from Hull (price: £1) and having had dinner in town, I then discover the Leeds bus station closes at 10pm, and can’t find anywhere open to spend the next few hours – so I hike half a mile out of town, clamber over a fence and go to sleep in a hedge, which is exactly as absurd and grim as it sounds. Four hours later, I splash some of the water I’ll desperately need later onto my face, and board my first bus of the journey.

8am: Victoria Coach Station, London. Gritty-eyed and concrete-brained, I stagger across the road into the Departures area, an overcrowded L-shaped corridor that gets more packed with people the closer you get towards the end. Megabus controls the final two stands, and the seats around them are all taken. In the hotness of summer, the air smells of halitosis and drains. It’s not a fun place to linger, so I don’t.

10.30am: The Megabus to Paris departs, and incredibly, I’m on it. (I nearly wasn’t, thanks to dozing off in the corner of a nearby Caffe Nero.) We sway towards the coast. How does a zero-budget bus service cross the Channel? Will we drive straight into the waves, like the London Duck Tour bus, or sprout wings like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? Will we be shot from a cannon? It’s time to find out.

12 noon: Somewhere under the English Channel. It seems “shot from a cannon” was closest. We (passengers, bus and all) are in a 0.75km long steel tube masquerading as a train, and it’s propelling us from Folkestone to Coquelles. Each carriage is separated with air-tight doors: you have to press a button to break the seal, then give the doors an ENORMOUS SHOVE to get through. The train toilets are always at least three or four shoves in each direction, and offer the train’s sole source of entertainment. Within minutes it’s too hot on the bus (no engine = no air-con) so we congregate outside to have a communal non-experience. It’s efficient, fast (30 minutes) and completely inhuman.

(As I discover another time, coming back the other way was much nicer, as Megabus chose to use the passenger ferry – giving us all a stunning first-light view of the white cliffs of Dover.)

1pm: France, heading for Paris. Pro tip for Megabus users: don’t sit in the seats facing the window-covering logo of a friendly, unhealthy-looking man in a uniform I’ve never seen any Megabus driver wearing. Up close, it’s made of widely spaced plastic dots, giving you the headache-inducing compound vision of an insect if you try to stare out.

7pm: Paris. Quelle horreur. We’re not changing buses. This means all the hold luggage is staying put, so I can’t dig out my suitcase. No extra water, no food, no change of clothing. The bus leaves in…I’m not sure when it’s leaving. But I desperately need to find a shop that sells water. I sprint away into an uncertain future.

9.15pm: Well, I found water to buy. I found…what I hope is food. I’m still wearing the shirt I set off from Yorkshire in. But I’m on the bus and it’s currently leaving Paris! I celebrate by falling into a death-like sleep where I dream I work at a company that makes baths, and it’s my job to test them all. I wake up with sunlight streaming through…..oh no, I did it again. I’m in one of those window-seats. See the world like a housefly would.

6am: somewhere near Toulouse. My world is The Bus. There is nothing but The Bus. I was born here; I will die here. My entire reason for existing is to fill this seat. Soon I will expire and they will stop by the roadside and I will be gently lifted out and fed into the furnace at the heart of The Bus, to be converted into a few dozen more miles achieved on the road to infinity. This is what I’m for. My bag is filled with things that no longer make sense. Why do I need a “passport” when The Bus is all there is? I gnaw on a waxy mini-croissant and wait patiently for death.

11am: Estacio Nord Bus Station, Barcelona. I’m sitting on a station bench, sweating and trembling, my bags heaped around me, my senses overwhelmed. I am born again. What just happened? What did it all mean? I’ll never know, but I do know that I really need to pee, but alas, 11am is when they clean the toilets at the Estacio Nord bus station and I’ll just have to hunch over in agony until they’re done. Welcome to Catalonia, Mike.

Ten years later, all this is little more than a fever-dream. I know what happened, but I can barely remember what it felt like, and a bloody good job too.

But here’s one thing that’s really stuck in my mind. Once my Parisian water-sourcing ordeal was over and I’d had enough of a nap to feel uncomfortable again, that was when things started to get grim.

From around mid-afternoon onwards, when I realised I was running out of water in my hand-luggage, I was on a mission. My short-term existence had a really compelling sense of purpose to it, and that purpose was: oh god I could absolutely murder a 2 litre bottle of Lucozade Sport. That was all I could think about, and it kept my mind extremely busy indeed.

But when I’d finally addressed this bottom layer of Maslow’s pyramid and started to return to the everyday farce we call normal life, I began to get bored.

How do you feel about the concept of boredom? Do you nod your head understandingly? Or does your upper lip curl slightly as you think of the hyper-privileged absurdity of becoming bored in today’s world with our free and blazingly fast access to TV shows, movies, books, podcasts, magazines, online articles and Substack newsletters? Does it make you think that bored young people are the worst, the worst generation and absolutely good for nothing?

Boredom attracts a lot of judgement - partly because it’s still misunderstood. You know how you can be in the middle of a city of millions of people and yet feel the loneliest you’ve ever felt in your life? Boredom is the same way. It’s not as empirically simple as a lack of things to do. Tolstoy understood this when he described it as “a desire for desires” - and when more recently cognitive neuroscientist James Danckert said it’s “an aggressively dissatisfied state,” he’s pointing out how it can differ from apathy, which is passive. It’s not that you can’t be bothered and would rather take a nap - it’s that you desperately want to be bothered, but can’t find a way to achieve that.

Boredom can chafe, boredom can torment you, and boredom can burn.

Because it’s such a palpable and increasingly unbearable frustration, this can lead to a lot of problems: you can numb the pain of it by turning to addictions, like binge eating, nicotine, alcohol, drugs or sex, or you can attempt to jolt yourself interested with a lot of increasingly risky behaviour that sets your nerves jangling.

In this way, as an internal restlessness that has you actively seeking relief, boredom is frequently a killer.

So considering its dangers, you’d think it’d be pretty well understood by now, around 70 years after the birth of modern neuroscience. Well, it’s actually been studied for much longer - if you take a broad interpretation of what ‘studied’ means. A lot of the work has been around defining boredom, and until recently this relied on spectacularly subjective self-reporting: how bored are you on a scale of one to ten, that sort of thing. Woefully imprecise.

But now researchers can directly study what’s happening in our brains when we get bored - and mysteries abound. For example: in working with young men suffering from traumatic brain injury, Danckert found they all reported feeling more susceptible to boredom than before - and this mirrored the experience of Danckert’s brother after a car accident:

“The recovery proved difficult. Paul had been a drummer, but even after a broken wrist had healed, drumming no longer made him happy. Over and over, Danckert remembers, Paul complained bitterly that he was just—bored. “There was no hint of apathy about it at all,” says Danckert. “It was deeply frustrating and unsatisfying for him to be deeply bored by things he used to love.” ”

This is just one way that boredom is a lot more interesting (and a lot less tiresome) than an excuse to tell someone to get a grip and grow a backbone. "Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?" said Nietzsche, and honestly, that’s not helping. As labels go, it’s buried under a lot of self-righteous baggage - and that’s a problem if, as new research suggests, it can be a sign that something is physiologically awry, or at the very least different, in the way someone’s brain works.

But then there’s the role boredom plays in creativity and problem-solving. Aren’t we meant to be frustrated on the way to becoming newly enlightened from within, aka. “having an idea”? (Danckert certainly believes so.) Isn’t creative writing just a matter of becoming sufficiently bored with your own laziness and ability to procrastinate that you distract yourself from them by doing the work? And yet - isn’t boredom still condemned as a sign of chronic ignorance and lack of imagination, when it’s so often the space we desperately need to process and ferment our thoughts?

Anyway, I’m boring myself now. We’re two thousand words in, and neither of us is getting any younger. My point is, the science of boredom is finally a thing, and it’s helping turn this lazy insult into something much more worthy of our curiosity.

As I write this, I’m on the eve of a trip home to East Yorkshire to sort out some of my remaining possessions from my past life that are still in storage, and that will involve a 9-hour bus journey each way.

I doubt I’ll be bored - that is one of the gifts of being a perpetual student of everything I write about, and I’ll be carrying around 1,500 books in the form of two e-readers and a smartphone - but you never know. I might stare out the window, unable to focus and annoyed at myself about it.

But then I’ll remember writing this newsletter, I’ll settle back into my seat (hugging the 10-gallon drum of bottled water that I always take on bus rides these days despite all the funny looks I get) and I’ll try to be kinder to myself. That may sound dull, but believe me, I’ve had worse journeys.

Images: cyril mzn; Igor Omilaev; Mike Sowden.

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This week, I discovered something on Threads that I desperately hope is true:

I did some searching, and while it’s been doing the rounds as a meme for a while now, it also doesn’t seem to have a credible source. One huge red flag: the “London Genealogical Society” doesn’t exist. The closest thing seems to be the Society Of Genealogists, which commented on it in a Facebook post from 2021 that links to a now-dead article on its own site. I will pop them an email to ask what they wrote.

So, this could be complete twaddle! But if it’s fake, it’s still high comedy (I particularly like the mental image of Turnip Shepherd, and Ferret Weaver sounds spectacularly dangerous) - so in the absence of definitive proof, and because I’m 52 and the red-ringed entry makes me feel uncomfortably seen, I’ve shared it with you today.

So, onwards!

Today I have a previously paywalled piece from last year that freaked out quite a few of you - so I’ve now decided to send it to everyone for the maximum bloodcurdling horror. You’re so very welcome.

It’s a coda to season 4’s exploration of the nearly three-quarters of the surface of our planet we tend to overlook, with its 65,000km-long mountain range and its underwater ‘lost cities’ and ancient flooded landscapes and all sorts of other stuff - and it nicely fits with this season’s look at the science islands, too.

It’s the answer to the alarming question: what do you do if you’re taking a dive, and all your air bubbles start to go downwards?

It’s 2000, and professional wreck diver and author Rod Macdonald is about to feel the pull of the abyss.

He’s currently stood on top of an underwater mountain, 30 metres below the surface of the narrow strait between the Scottish islands of Jura and Scarba - and the tide’s about to turn:

“It was an odd feeling to see all six of us there, and I imagined how it must have looked if you could somehow have stripped away the water. Six tiny specks of humanity, standing on the 100 feet wide table top, of a 200-metre (650 feet) high pinnacle.

As we collected on the plateau, I noticed a perceptible change in the direction of the current – it felt as if someone had thrown a big switch. One minute the tide was dropping off gently in the one direction. The next minute you could feel it starting to pick up rapidly in the other direction. There are titanic forces at work here.”

- from “The Darkness Below” (excerpted on Threadable here)

We live on a liquid world. Not just in the sense that 71% of it is underwater, but also in the way that everything is moving. Everything’s on the move, powered by horrifying amounts of energy that our minds just slide off.

Partly this is because it’s easy to ignore: for example, the sky is usually too insubstantial to do much more than tug at your jacket or blast some rain up your nostrils. (Or make a few extremely-uncloud-like clouds.)

But when it’s someone’s job to really know what’s going on, their reaction tells a story - which is why this clip of WTVA meteorologist Matt Laubhan tracking the tornado that ripped through the north of Amory (Mississippi) is so unsettling.

Water is no different. Most of the time, well, it’s just there, sitting in or upon the land in a way it’s easy to assume is static, uneventful and mostly predictable.

Except - take seas and rivers, creeks and inlets, races and cataracts, and the half-forgotten words for them that Robert Macfarlane recently unearthed (or whatever the aquatic equivalent of “unearthed” is) for his celebratory Landmarks:

• tolg (“to sputter, vomit, as a mountain torrent - Gaelic”)

• speat

• cartage

• gulsh (“to tear up with violence, as a stream when swollen with floods - Northamptonshire”)

• cymer

• ffrwd

• aker

• land-shut (“flood - Herefordshire”)

• …and the magnificently emphatic burraghlas (“torrent of brutal rage - Gaelic”).

The power of these lost words - the meaning of them, and just the raw sounds of them - are great reminders of what water’s really capable of.

Frankly, many of us need reminding. I consider myself stupider than average when it comes to understand natural waterways (what little I’ve learned is via the superb How To Read Water, by Tristan Gooley) - but even I know to beware the most obvious warning signs, like those flattened, oily-looking patches on the ocean that suggest where the current is fast enough to defy the surface push of the wind...

And if you’re out there without mechanical assistance, it really doesn’t take much - as surfer Matthew Bryce discovered in 2017 when he was dragged away from the Scottish coastline and spent 32 hours clinging to his board in the Irish Sea, before being rescued off the north Antrim coast.

As much as I love swimming and messing about in boats, I have…what I hope is a sufficiently healthy respect for offshore currents and fast waterways, knowing that every litre of that water weighs around a kilogram - and since I live in a part of the world covered in rock that was scooped away like ice-cream during the Last Glacial Maximum, I only have to look around for reminders of what it can do to even the hardiest materials.

In whatever form it takes, when water moves laterally with its full force, it’s a blood-curdling thing to behold.

But that’s nothing compared to the water that pulls you down.

“I looked down at the rock I was resting on and sure enough, as if on cue, the one or two small crabs around my feet just made their way into little crevices, braced out their claws and seemingly disappeared. In fact, all life seemed to disappear from the pinnacle simultaneously. The all too brief moment of calm had passed and the residents of the pinnacle were preparing themselves for the next six hours in the maelstrom.

If the locals were getting worried, I thought, our team of six divers should be getting out of there.“

Between Jura and Scarba, the waters of the Scottish Atlantic are squeezed - by the narrowing width of the Strait, and from below, as the sea floor rises to that pinnacle (really more like a buttress) just 30 metres short of the surface, before plunging down towards a deep hole on the other side.

What happens in these conditions is that during the racing tide, a huge line of standing waves emerge, up to 9 metres tall and foaming continuously in place - and, a little further out, a roaring, thundering, terror-inspiring monster the Greeks called Charybdis, and which the rest of us call a maelstrom.

The whirlpool of Corryvreckan is the third largest in the world, behind the ones at Saltstraumen near Bodø, Norway, and at Moskstraumen sea near Norway’s Lofoten Islands.

It’s entirely delightful that they have such big, dramatic names, proper mouthfuls containing all the appropriate face-noises. If it doesn’t sound like it could be performed by Metallica, it’s not a proper whirlpool, I reckon. Just imagine if they had names like “the whirlpool of Milton Peevly” or “the maelstrom of Wetwang”. I know, I digress, but these things are important.

Also, it’s something of a misnomer to say “whirlpool,” because that suggests permanence and the presence of just the one - but there are many, and they appear and vanish again with the tides in an unpredictable, chaotic way. That’s the nature of whirlpools in the real world.

You can see an explanation of how the buttress (locally nicknamed "the Hag”) creates the conditions for whirlpools in this video, which seems to be based on sea-floor scans taken by the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) in 2012:

And when a tide floods the channel with its waters rushing west to east, racing over the Hag and towards that distant abyss at the 219-metre lowest point of the whole Corryvreckan channel, that tidal water goes downwards.

“Dave and I however couldn’t resist the temptation to fin over to the edge of the pinnacle and look over the side, down into the 200-metre deep abyss. Of course, in the limited visibility we could only see about 25 metres down the side – deeper than that was just an ominous uniform black. The bottom was well out of sight.

As we held onto rocks and peered over the side of the pinnacle I became aware that my exhaled bubbles had stopped rising upwards – as they had done throughout the whole of my diving career. For a second or two, some bubbles were held motionless in front of my face. With my next exhaled breath the bubbles started to slowly sink downwards over the side of the pinnacle. As I continued to breathe out my bubbles started going downward more and more vigorously.

It was a very surreal experience and it was certainly time to get out of this dangerous place.”

Not far from my family home in Yorkshire is a stretch of water that’s regularly described as one of the most dangerous waterways in the world.

You certainly wouldn’t think so, seeing it on a sunny day like this:

But if you jump across the gap for a lark, you’re probably risking death. (Probably. There are a lot of legends and tall tales that swirl around this place - but the science is pretty clear: it’s horrifically dangerous.)

It’s called the Bolton Strid, and it’s a short section of the Wharfe, a broad, mostly lazy river that winds its way out of the Yorkshire Dales and runs for 65 miles before it’s swallowed up by the Ouse. Only - this isn’t what the Wharfe usually looks like. At the start of the Strid, the river’s around 90 feet wide. Just a short distance away, it narrows to less than 6 feet.

And yet the same amount of water is travelling through each section.

The river deals with this by more or less turning itself sideways. That volume of water is compressed and speeded up, and currents form - chaotic, turbulent, but with a corkscrewing, downwards tendency.

This is supremely bad news if you go in, because at the sides of the Strid, the water has ground away ledges and pockets, so the base of the river is raggedly wider than it is at the top.

This means if you tumble in, you’ll be battered around for a while, against all sorts of rocky protrusions, and when all the fight has left you, the current will take you down and hook you under the rock.

YIKES.

At least, that’s the theory. The Strid myths are thick in those parts, and everyone knows a man who talked to someone at the pub who once heard about someone who saw, with his own eyes, a man pulled right under, along with his horse! They’re probably still down there!!! And so on.

But the New York Times covered it here, and so did Atlas Obscura. And YouTuber ‘Jack a Snacks’ (I’m hoping that’s a pseudonym) caused a stir in 2021 when he tested the depth of the Strid with a sonar device and concluded it went down a whopping 65 metres - which is twenty metres taller than London’s Tower Bridge.

(He’s recently been in communication with people who claim to have dived the Strid in the 1970s, and they’re claiming it’s no deeper than 10-12 metres - so, plenty of unresolved question marks about the whole thing. But I don’t think it matters at what depth you’re pinned under an underwater rock in a rushing torrent. It’s all a terminal nope.)

Similarly, Corryvreckan is so frightening not just because the current might pull you under, but because it might hold you under.

For the Channel 4 programme “Equinox: Lethal Seas” (2000), a documentary team from Scottish independent producers Northlight Productions threw a realistically weighted mannequin into the water near the Hag during the flood tide, wearing a life jacket with a depth gauge. When they recovered it half an hour later, the depth gauge had stopped taking readings beyond 200 metres - with evidence of being dragged along the bottom for a great distance, presumably after the downward current worked like a waterfall to hurl it all the way down to the sea floor before pulling it onwards…

So when a highly experienced diver like Rod Macdonald says he’s getting nervous, you can certainly understand why.

“We had been warned that the first 10 metres of the ascent would be difficult, and right enough, as I stepped off the top of the pinnacle it was as though a thousand invisible hands were clutching at my legs and trying to pull me down. It was quite an unsettling feeling and initially I had to fin hard to make any headway upwards.

The task of managing the ascent however soon absorbed me as I kicked my legs and simultaneously wound in the slack on my reel, essentially winching myself up towards the surface.”

Rather you than me, sir.

Click here to read Rod Macdonald’s hair-raising account of diving into Corryvreckan on Threadable.

And “The Darkness Below” is available here, or from the usual places (eg. Kindle.)

Images: StockSnap/27551; reddit/Pamart.org; Wikimedia/Walter Baxter; ilya montdryk; Wikimedia/Tony Page.

If you’re a new reader and you’re wondering why I’m suddenly talking about reading books and not the science of memory or clouds or islands or the like - it’s because of this…

…which I’ve been reworking a bit, so if you’re not a new reader, you’ll find a few updates below (and thanks for your patience while I iron out these wrinkles in the process).

In this first Big Amazing Read, we’re galloping through Alexandra Horowitz’s On Looking - which essayist Maria Popova described as “breathlessly wonderful” and I’d say that’s absolutely correct.

Anyone can take part in this read-through of On Looking! All you need is to get hold of a copy of the book and read it in your own time.

• New paper copies are a little hard to find (there’s only been one version published, as far as I can tell). If you’re in the UK, the Simon & Schuster page for the book has a lot of great links; if in the US, try the Barnes & Noble page.

• It’s on Amazon here (cheapest as a Kindle e-book) - and it’s also on Audible here, read by Horowitz herself.

If you want a taster of the whole book, the introductory chapter - accompanied by my own commentary in the margins - is available to read on the social reading platform Threadable.

You can access that introductory chapter by clicking here.

When I first published that excerpt, dozens of you went over to leave comments on it! So now there’s a fascinating mass of rabbit-holes of ideas to check out in the margins over there. This is exactly why I love reading a book with others: I quickly discover that other people’s takes on it are far more interesting than mine, and hooray for that kind of revelation.

However (and this is where I’ve needed to rework this part of the Big Amazing Read)…

Threadable is awesome as a book discovery engine: you click through to read a bit of the book, prompted by some excitable enthusiast like me, and then hopefully you’re sufficiently hooked to want to read the whole thing, so you go buy it. You win, the author wins, Threadable wins, and I’m a happy book nerd.

Here’s an example of that process in action:

Click the below image (and then click on “Start Reading”), and you’ll go through to the first chapter of one of my favourite novels, which partly inspired me to start writing Everything Is Amazing…

(I actually wrote about The City & The City in the very first edition of EiA, way back in 2021.)

However! For copyrighted texts like On Looking and The City & The City, I obviously can’t put up more than an excerpt on Threadable, because that falls outside the realm of Fair Use and well into the realm of Completely Unfair Use Where Alexandra Horowitz & China Miéville Can’t Afford To Keep Writing Beautiful Books Anymore - which is the direct opposite of what I’m trying to achieve with this book club.

So, as an attempt to keep using Threadable for this Big Amazing Read, I tried putting my own discussion notes for On Looking on there! Aaaaand it’s not really designed for that.

Oops. 🤦

Some of you emailed me to let me know you were confused about this approach. Understandably so! On reflection, it’s an unhelpfully messy way to do things - so I've now abandoned it.

Therefore: from now on, I’m publishing my own discussion notes for On Looking, chapter by chapter, in newsletters like this one, which I’ll send out to all of you.

My notes on the first two chapters are below.

(Technically speaking we’re currently in week 8 of the read, so I have a bit of catching up to do here. Please bear with me.)

If you’re taking part in the read-through and you want to share your own thoughts with me and everyone else, please leap into the comments in this newsletter - I’d love to hear what you think of these chapters, and also the book as a whole.

Cheers!

M

Notes on “On Looking” - Chapter 1: Muchness

Alexandra Horowitz goes for her first walk round the block in the company of her nineteen-month-old son.

(Header quote: “You can observe a lot by watching.” - Yogi Berra)

Speaking as someone who doesn’t have kids, every time I read this chapter (I must have done so a dozen times over the last decade) I enjoy it even more. How often in life can we childless folk get this parent’s-eye perspective on a toddler’s experience of the world around them? Maybe I just need to read more books aimed at parents. But – there was so much here that made me realise how radical “growing up” is as a mindset, as a rigid adherence to a bunch of ideas overlaid on the sensual chaos of using our senses.

Take Horowitz’s focus on shapes, starting with triangles. When a child is learns the difference between how the world *looks* and how it *is*, they instinctively grasp things we take for granted, like perspective, and parallax (the slower movement of more distant objects tipping us off about how they’re further away).

Kids also learn that shapes mean something – specifically, they mean we’re looking at known objects from different angles. This is quite the trick, and it still baffles us adults occasionally – I found myself amazed a few months ago when watching a Scottish ferry come into dock, first pointing directly at me on the shore so all I could see was the prow of the ship, but then swinging sideways and seemingly expanding, stretching out impossibly until it was far longer than it first looked. My brain “knew” what it was looking at, but that didn’t stop another part of it thinking “wow, I had no idea that ferry was so big!”. A difference in viewing angles can still surprise.

This isn’t a skill that comes naturally to us. We have to learn it, and we do so in those first few intense years of learning, the “crash course in sensory experience” in Horowitz’s words. Then we can interpret what we see with no hesitation, no lag – it’s not “THIS shape means THAT thing”, it’s instantly “ah, it’s THAT thing.”

But it’s a fruitful, even an exciting thing to try to reverse this process, and here’s one way to do it: close one eye.

By removing binocular vision and depth perception, it’s easier to imagine flattening a scene in front of you so it’s nothing but a two-dimensional canvas of coloured shapes. This is the painter’s and graphic designer’s skill – and the toddler’s first sight of an overwhelming world of light and shadow and movement and confusedly arrested attention.

The fact that nearly all kids end up being perceptually wired up in very similar ways – able to interpret a shoe on top of a bag of trash as exactly that, rather than a confusion of images that looks different from every angle – is astonishing, and I feel that wonder every time I reread this chapter.

Another bit I loved, which startled me:

“Information taken in by the eyes might be processed in any part of the brain – it could be the visual cortex, leading to an inchoate “seeing”; but it could also be the motor cortex, leading to a leg kicking; or the auditory cortex, in which case a nearby teddy bear may be experienced as a bang, or a ringing, or a whisper. There is good reason to believe that this kind of synesthesia is the normal experience for adults.”

I’ve often seen babies kicking their legs or waving their arms wildly when they see something new, or when their eyes fix on your face, and I always thought it was just general, uncoordinated excitement (the type I have as an adult). But realising it might be part of their process of “seeing” because their brain hasn’t finished wiring itself up in the standard way – that’s mind-blowing and thought-provoking, because, what capacity do we retain for *re*wiring ourselves, for making new connections in that “brothy gap between neurons”, even if it’s in a tiny way and just temporarily?

This reminds me of the famous experiment by psychologist George Stratton – he wore spectacles that inverted his vision, so the world looked upside-down. But after 8 presumably hellish days of it, his visual system adjusted and he was able to interact with the world normally again – until he took the glasses off, at which point everything was once again upside-down.

This is a possibly a simplification, because maybe his brain didn’t make everything look “upright” after those 8 days, it just learned to interpret an upside-down world – but it does show the astonishing power of our minds to adjust to radical new ways of experiencing, including seeing.

(Further experiments in the 20^th Century, including by Professor Theodor Erismann and Ivo Kohler of the University of Innsbruck, found that this effect also works with glasses that flip vision left-to-right – although one subject vomited almost continuously for the first day he did it, so, yeah. I’ll pass.)

In Horowitz’s view, this is what the biological underpinning of attention might be: a “script” our brain follows, this-then-that-then-this-equals-”paying attention”. In which case, can we willingly edit that script, or (to get paranoid about the effect of the worst of all our fancy new technology) can it be edited for us without our consent?

“It was not a lovely part of the building. My son had noticed it. He was blessed with the ability to admire the unlovely. Or, I should say, he was blessed with the inability to feel that there is a difference between lovely and un-.”

This is the start of my favourite part of the chapter and maybe the whole book.

Horowitz makes the point that as our visual vocabulary moves from simple shapes to objects and the relationships between them, we learn what is “uninteresting”, “ugly” and “boring”. Familiarity breeds contempt, but also so does learning how to see the world like your parents, as they teach you, consciously or otherwise, what is worth paying attention to, and what isn’t. Eventually this turns into “taste” (in the cultural sense) and other complicated concepts, but at its basic level, we stop paying attention to allegedly attention-unworthy things – like Horowitz being surprised at the amount of trash around her block in the Introduction.

Toddlers have no such preconceptions. Everything is a lesson, and therefore everything is worthy of study. Pebbles on the ground. Dump trucks. Standpipes. It’s all amazing!

This is a skill some adults have to relearn: scientists, journalists, private detectives. To see even the ordinary as extraordinary and therefore worth looking at properly.

(This is partly why my newsletter is called Everything Is Amazing. I want to see the world that way too.)

“Someday, he will appreciate others’ perspectives, have an idea of their histories, their motivations, their choices, their moods, their own childhood learning these kinds of things. He will be sympathetic. He will be kind, and, I hope, polite. But not yet. He is quietly but plainly rude.”

Who doesn’t love this about kids (apart from the easily offended)? The ability to blurt out the thing all the adults are pointedly avoiding saying. As chaotic as it can be, I love how kids get a pass for saying these things because, hey, they don’t know better.

But sometimes, maybe they do – they haven’t learned that honesty is sometimes an undiplomatic trait in social circles, which can often be another case of adults acting foolishly under the guise of being “sophisticated”…

Maybe sometimes, kids really do have the right idea, and it’d be nice to remind ourselves of it.

Notes on “On Looking” - Chapter 2: Minerals and Biomass

Alexandra Horowitz goes urban rock-hunting in the company of geologist Sidney Horenstein.

(Header quote: “To find new things, take the path you took yesterday.” - John Burroughs)

Oh, to be able to go for a walk like this one, in the company of a supremely knowledgeable rock specialist who can tell you everything you’d want to know about the stone under your feet and the artificial, unnaturally-shaped human-made outcrops that make up a modern city.

“Don’t be fooled, though, by the casual cap and easy manner. Horenstein is a man who knows vastly more about the past, oh, four hundred million years of the city than you do, and he is about to gently let you in on how little you know.”

That’s important too: the word “kindly”. Nobody wants an arrogant windbag as a guide. And according to his New York Times obituary from 2008, he was much-loved as a human being as well as an expert geologist.

He’s quick to puncture Horowitz’s ideas about how “unnatural” the city landscape is around them. Asphalt is minerals and biomass. Hexagonal paving stones reflect the natural shapes of cooled basalt columns. Almost everything may be the product of human engineering, but what we engineer *with* is almost always the raw stuff of the Earth – and it can tell us a story.

“While I was mulling over the effects people have on rocks, Horenstein brought me back to considering the effects rocks have on people.”

This is such an important perspective shift. We aren’t just parasitical plunderers of the natural resources of the world – we’re deeply affected by them, so when we don’t work in harmony with them, we suffer. We already know this is true in relation to trees and water and animal life – but rocks?

Yes, of course! I wrote a season of my newsletter about this so I’m biased, but – aesthetically, there is obviously a difference between how rotting concrete will make you feel vs pristine White Marble, but the natural qualities of rocks can also affect the way they retain heat, protect against or absorb moisture, move air around – all of it.

(For example: concrete, the world’s most popular building material, is incredibly dangerous in cities for the way it absorbs and them emits heat, especially in full sunlight, and a lot will need to be done and a lot of money spent to mitigate this. Compare this with the “cold-absorptive properties” of the stone Horowitz encounters with Horenstein.)

I loved the perspective-shift that Horenstein gave Horowitz when they were strolling through Central Park – and I had to laugh at the “Yikes!” when she lapsed into geological jargon. But it really is like a language that you learn! Once you know what a schist is, you understand how it came to be, and *that* tells you a lot of information very economically about what the landscape you’re in looked like millions of years ago. Jargon can be so intimidating – but it’s not pointlessly so. It’s a doorway into a deeper level of meaning, where everyday words are the long way round.

(Well, okay – sometimes it is. Jargon is jargon.)

“The difference is that the scene is meaningful to the chess master but not to the novice. To the expert, every piece relates to the others, and every arrangement of pieces on a board relates to previous boards the player has seen or made. They become as familiar as the faces of friends.”

This section touches on something I’ve recently been learning about with regards to human memory. In experiments, Grand Master chess players have shown they’re incredibly good at remembering “real” chess boards – ie. from real games that are or were taking place – and no better than a complete novice at remembering a random scatter of chess pieces on a board in a “fake” way that could never happen in a real game. What they’re seeing, and recalling, is a pattern, like the features on a human face. Jumble that pattern up artificially and it’s unmemorable and doesn’t grab our attention except in its startling randomness.

(Whatever your speciality is in life, I bet you have a refined version of this ability too. We are all advanced pattern-seers, just in different ways.)

“The stone has multiple stories to tell us, because it has multiple lives.”

This is the fascinating transition zone from geology to archaeology, to where humans come along and leave their own marks in and around rock. I loved learning about “feathering” here to break up rock, which leaves the stylistic fingerprints of the stone mason who did the work. This “whirlwind tour through eons” doesn’t have to be at the expense of the humans who made and influenced these buildings – it includes them in the overall detective work, because we are all part of the ongoing story of that stone’s history. (I think this every time I run a hand along a stone face, becoming yet another erosive force in its long journey to becoming sand or dust.)

Such a fun read, all this. I remembered this chapter when I recently started reading Helen Gordon’s Notes From Deep Time (an excerpt from this book is one of my previous reads on Threadable, here – go find it to take a walk through London in much the same way Horowitz and Horenstein do through New York).

To re-see the canyons of a city in this new, living-history sort of way must be such a treat when you’re in the company of someone that knowledgeable and curious.

What did you think about the ideas in these chapters? How are you finding the rest of the book? Give me your thoughts below! Thank you.

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After last week’s thunderously popular edition about Nick Cave’s advice on finding hopefulness, for the good of my creative business I am just going to post Nick Cave quotes for the rest of the year. Welcome to the first edition of my newly rebranded newsletter Everything Is Nick Cave Quotes. Thanks for understanding.

(Or, as a much better idea, I could just point you towards his marvellous “strange exercise in communal vulnerability and transparency” website The Red Hand Files, where he answers pretty much every type of question flung his way. This is the edition that he read out while on Colbert’s show.)

In other news, WHAT THE ACTUAL…

This is from the shortlist for Astronomy Photographer Of The Year, rather than a promotional screenshot from The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim.

Yup, it’s entirely authentic - and it’s not the only jaw-dropping image that Carine Letelier Baeza has taken of aurora, as you can see by clicking here.

So, to today’s business.

This is the next part in this season’s paid-subscribers-only look at the science of memory, which started with a profile of the most forgetful person in the world (that post is now unlocked so everyone can read it)…

….and then we considered the surprisingly memory-bolstering power of handwriting in a world that’s increasing using keyboards…

…and we asked why the song you’re least able to get out of your head is the most excruciatingly annoying song you’ve heard all year:

This time, our question is: how close is scientific research to developing a way for us to remember every detail of our entire lives - and what joys and nightmares might that unleash upon us?

Let’s take a big leap forward to see what might happen next.

Read more

This week, Nick Cave dropped in on Stephen Colbert’s chat show to talk about a lot of things - but his response to a fan letter caused a buzz, in which he replied to someone sharing their struggles to stay hopeful in the face of cynicism, asking Cave: “Do you still believe in us human beings?”

Cave’s response quickly went viral on social media, and it’s not hard to see why:

“Much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent. The truth is, I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line. It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people. It took a devastation to reveal the precariousness of the world, of its very soul, and to understand that the world was crying out for help. It took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope.

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position — it is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.

Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like — such as reading to your little boy, showing him something you love, singing him a song, or putting on his shoes — keeps the devil down in the hole.

It says the world and its inhabitants have value, and are worth defending.

It says the world is worth believing in.

In time, we come to find that this is so.”

I love this reframing of hope, because - like curiosity - it’s often assumed to be a passive thing you have very little to no control over. If you’re hopeless, oh well, nothing to be done. But Cave believes hope is active - a faith in some aspect of the world that you can put to good use, even in the tiniest of ways, a lever to help bend reality in the right direction, for yourself and for others.

And in Rebecca Solnit’s words, “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency…. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.”

What are you choosing to be hopeful about right now?

I’d love to know. Leave your answer in the comments.

- M

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It seems it’s earthquake season! After Japan’s 7.1-magnitude earthquake on the 8th August, Los Angeles was today shaken by a 4.6. 😬

This seems like an excellent opportunity to point you towards the best source of earthquake science news I know of: the newsletter from Judith Hubbard and Kyle Bradley.

They recently published a terrifically detailed explainer of the Japan earthquake and the megaquake advisory it led to, so I’m expecting the same level of usefulness after today’s California quake.

Sign up quick to get it when it’s published:

Earthquake Insights

An earthquake just happened - why, and what does it tell us? Keep up to date with expert insights into latest events and research.

By Judith Hubbard & Kyle Bradley

Secondly and wholly unrelatedly, I am once again going to point you towards the amazing work of sculptor Jeremy Mayer (his website is here), who makes the most incredible things from vintage typewriter parts:

Whew.

Okay! Today, a relatively quick one (by my usual longwinded, talking-hind-legs-off-donkeys standards) about how surprisingly strange clouds can look to those of us who don’t study them for a living.

It’s summer 2004, on the final day of the year’s archaeological excavation of Quoygrew on Westray in Orkney.

The last 8 weeks have been gruelling for all of us - some of them in rain and mud, some of them in too much sunshine combined with red eyes and thumping heads because of a bit too much whisky at the pub the night before, all of them with increasingly sore lower backs and knees, our vision blurry from too long spent squinting at plans and drawing boards. We’ve all had enough. We’re all ready to wrap everything up and go home - but there’s still a hell of a lot to get done, and we have less than 24 hours left to do it in.

So the last thing we need is someone just stood around doing nothing but staring into the sky, their mouth agape, which is exactly what I’m doing right now.

Someone is going to yell at me in a minute, and I’ll deserve it. But for now, standing here frustratedly, I want to shout: STOP, EVERYONE. LOOK UP. LOOK AT THAT!

This is because, after a full morning of cloud cover so thick it’s like we were working under a duvet, the sky has now split itself perfectly in two.

This terrible photo on my old Kodak camera really doesn’t convey the strangeness of it. What you’re looking at is a slice through the clouds, perfectly vertical, stratified with walls of clouds on either side, and nothing but blue sky at the top. It’s like the sky was a cake, and someone carved a perfectly rectangular piece out of it.

I had no idea clouds could do this - parting like the Red Sea in one of the greatest special effects in movie history. Even now I’m not sure how they do this. (If you’re a knowledgeable cloud-understander or actual meteorologist, please leave me a comment to explain what’s going on here.)

But then, that’s clouds for you. It’s incredible that something as uncomplicated as airborne water vapour (which can make clouds surprisingly heavy) can behave in so many strange ways - strange, that is, to those of us with unhelpfully narrow ideas of what clouds should look and behave like.

But to the properly initiated, the possible varieties of cloud we could see are endless, and all of them are telling fascinating stories about what’s going on in the vanishingly thin band of atmosphere over our heads that we call “the sky”.

I’m not going to attempt to give you a primer on nephology today (which is what the study of clouds used to be called before it was absorbed into meteorology and the climate sciences). For that, you should join the Cloud Appreciation Society, or get their book Cloud Spotting For Beginners.

However, recently I was looking into the ‘chemtrails’ pseudoscience conspiracy theory and found that Twitter/X was awash with photos of clouds being presented as “evidence” for it. Not the everyday white fluffy clouds that we were all taught to draw as kids - but the more startling and awe-inspiring types. The ones that make you go “WOAH” in a way you feel right down to your boots. And their sheer unusuality was being presented as rock-solid proof of evil human-made shenanigans.

From the start of this newsletter, I’ve tried to make the case that what most of us don’t know about the natural world - which, personally speaking, is almost everything - has the capacity to blow your mind a thousand times a day if only you could learn a little more about it.

Did I know about light pillars before I stumbled over a photo of them? Alas, I did not.

Did I know the Mediterranean filled up in less than 18 months before I read the latest research coming from the team investigating the Zanclean Megaflood? Nope.

Did I know that natural-born tetrachromats might be able to see up to 100 million different colours, until I started reading about them? Not a clue.

And so on.

This is a newsletter that depends on me - an amateur enthusiast - discovering something that boggles my tiny brain, and then learning a bit of the science of how it happens, so I can attempt to boggle yours.

But suddenly here were lots of folk saying that any clouds that didn’t look like the clouds in the opening sequence of The Simpsons were obviously signs of some terrifyingly dystopian plan to enslave us all - and it didn’t seem to occur to any of them that it could actually be proof of their own ignorance of what so many clouds can look like, mixed with a bit of pareidolia and other (natural!) human cognitive biases.

I don’t have any reaction to that kind of paranoid incuriosity, other than wanting to have a long nap.

But I can, at least, take you on a tour of five of the most uncloud-like clouds I know of, to try to reinforce the above point & to provide an introduction to the next season’s main theme (yep, that’s a big spoiler).

So: if you have the time today, please stop, everyone, look up, and look at THAT.

1. OMG A FLYING SAUCER!!!

Lenticular clouds are showing you an area of turbulence in the sky, whipped up like the vapour equivalent of cotton candy.

They’re formed of standing waves, much like the ones made of seawater that power the Corryvreckan whirlpool, as I wrote about here.

Because they’re such a visible guide to air currents, glider pilots can use the edge of them to climb to incredible heights. On 2nd September 2018, pilot Jim Payne soared to 22 kilometres (74,334 feet) above the ground - twice the cruising altitude of commercial airliners, and nearly a quarter of the way to outer space.

2. OMG A TIDAL WAVE!!!

Nah. They’re stunning reminders of the fluid nature of our atmosphere, but they’re still absolutely normal clouds (if rather rare).

They’re called Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds - & I already wrote about them here.

3. OMG SPACE HEMORRHOIDS!!!

Lovely.

No, these are actually called Mammatus clouds, and they’re formed of pockets of sinking cold air, usually clustered underneath cumulonimbus (the classic thunderstorm cloud).

When they occur here in the UK, they’re usually dramatic enough to make the news.

4. OMG SPACE LASER TEST!!!

Settle down, Marjorie. This is a fallstreak hole, also dramatically called a Holepunch Cloud.

It’s what happens when supercooled water in a cloud is triggered into forming ice crystals, and water droplets around that ice rapidly evaporate outwards in a widening circle.

Above is a picture from NASA’s Terra satellite of fallstreak holes and ‘canals’ over Louisiana and Texas, caused by moving aircraft.

As aircraft pass through the sky, forcing that air to expand and cool as it moves over their wings, they can trigger ice formation and therefore set off a fallstreak hole - which is why they’re so popular with the ‘chemtrails’ crowd.

Here are some more, via the BBC.

5. OMFG WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!!!!

True enough!

But not today, because this is just a Roll Cloud, a form of arcus cloud where a single wave that moves without changing speed or shape seems to “roll” horizontally across the sky.

They’re mostly harmless in themselves, but they’re often a sign that bad weather is approaching.

On the whole, they’re absolutely nothing to worry about - and just as well-understood as iridescent contrails.

Images: Mike Sowden; Nicky Milner/James Barrett; Anton Yankovyi; Omnisource; H. Raab; Eazydp; Jeremy Mayer.

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But today, after last week’s look at a recently un-discovered island, we’re returning to this season’s main theme once again.

I started our look at the science of islands by talking about the one that saved me from when I fell out of a boat. But I left out what happened next - which was a year of personal obsession bordering on wild crackpottedness.

I’d set foot on my hometown’s Swan Island (pictured above), and I’d stayed there for hours - so, guided by multiple rereads of Swallows And Amazons and Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, my fiction-addled brain decided I now had a right to the place.

Nobody else was claiming it, were they? Yes, obviously there were the swans, but maybe I could make a suit of armour by raiding my mum’s kitchen (a saucepan for a helmet, a baking tray for the chest, that sort of thing) and once they’d exhausted themselves in their vain attempts to murder me, we’d get along just fine, surely? Isn’t that what happens in stories?

I can blame fiction only so far. Beyond it, I was feeling deeply insecure about my place in the world, about my love of home computers (I hear the voice of a teacher here: “how will that ever help you get a job, Mr Sowden?”) and my complete bewilderment at very, very basic teenage tasks like Football and Girls and Saying Things That Didn’t Make Me Sound Like An Idiot (In Front Of Girls).

What I wanted, above all else, was to leave the normal world and slam the door behind me as hard as possible. And what better way to do it than to own my own island?

Maybe I could build a castle there - a wooden one, for practical reasons. I could avoid everyone by hiding inside it during the daytime (it didn’t occur to me that the presence of the castle itself might give the game away) and I’d only emerge at night to hang out with my friends The Swans and drink Diet Coke with my human friends on the shore.

I reckoned I’d do this until school ended, then I’d build a boat and sail to Scotland to find a much bigger island to claim and live on.

It’s 40 years later, and apart from moving to Scotland (by train, in 2020), I didn’t end up doing any of that. But the idea still lurks in the back of my mind, a childhood fantasy looking for an adult recreational outlet, like my occasional urge to sleep on the beach in a sack.

And then one day I look out of my window and see there’s an island for sale.

This is Pladda Island in the Firth of Clyde, with the imposing granite might of Ailsa Craig in the background.

On an extremely clear day, Pladda is visible from here on the Scottish coast as a tiny smudge of land off the southern end of Arran. Barely there, at best. Get up close, and this impression doesn’t change much: there’s a now-automated lighthouse, a 5-bedroom house originally built for a lighthouse keeper, around 28 acres of disused buildings and overgrown vegetable gardens, a solar panel array, a helipad and a jetty. When the sky’s clear you can see Northern Ireland, and when it‘s befouled with winter storms, I imagine you’ll want to be literally anywhere else.

Until 2022, its owners for three decades were fashion designers Derek and Sally-Anne Morten, who purchased it in the late 80’s as “a wild holiday retreat.” Derek was most famous for designing the City Lights Studio suit worn by David Bowie on the sleeve of his LP Pin Ups (second picture here, bottom-left) - and after Derek’s death in 2020, Sally-Anne moved from fashion design to creating beautiful mosaics from vintage sherds of china, under the trading name Pladda Rock Mosaics.

As she wrote in her WordPress blog in 2021:

“A love of mud larking [searching riverbeds or beaches at low tide] furnished me with my early collections of sea worn china and glass. I made jewellery, a small plaque in our place and covered a rock with coloured fragments. Apparently, I was told many moons ago cargo ships carrying cases of china among other things, plundered in the Firth. Only for the little sea loved treasure to land up on the sandy shores of Arran opposite Pladda. 

I remember finding a large mermaid mosaic in the sand on that shore, with a mosaic dolphin at her side. The next day I went back to find them rearranged by the tide, heading out to sea. It struck me, that’s what we do, rearrange ourselves accordingly. Ironically it is just that measure of rearrangement that has washed me up on this jewel ridden shore of creation, and I’m more than happy to be here and oblige.”

In 2022, she decided that the island itself couldn’t fit into her newly-rearranged life in England - and once again Pladda was seeking a new owner, for the surprisingly affordable price of £350,000.

To put this price into perspective: the average price of a house in Scotland in 2022 was £201,549, compared to around £300,000 for the UK as a whole. For the price of the average property in London, you could buy Pladda outright and have £180,000 left over to renovate it.

If all this sounds appealing to you - I’m sorry, it quickly found a new owner (details unknown). But my imagination balks a bit when I look at Pladda. No trees, for starters! No protection from that wind (which is the reason there aren’t any trees). And the way it stands above the sea about as high as Rockall sends a shiver down my spine. It surely wouldn’t take much for the waves to break right over it? And so on. My inner island-loving teenager is rather appalled.

So - what else is available?

A quick search on the website of the company that sold Pladda turned up this beauty off the Mull of Kintyre peninsula, not too far away:

It’s even part of an island bundle: buy Sanda Island (above), and they’ll throw in neighbouring Sheep Island and Glunimore Island.

If you have £2.5 million just kicking around, or if you’re willing to commit to paying £13,817 a month for the next 25 years after laying down a £250,000 deposit, the following is yours: seven residential properties (the majority recently renovated with double-glazing) accommodating 26 people, a tavern (!), a small, subsidized farm with around 50 black-headed sheep, and over 450 acres of hillsides and cliffs dotted with deer, puffins, storm petrels, razorbills, manx shearwater, kittiwake, gulls and seals.

It looks gorgeous - and yet much the same conditions apply as with Pladda (no trees, crazy-windy in the winter, and a half-hour’s exposed boat ride from the nearest town, in this case Campbeltown). It’s hard to see it as anything more than a millionaire’s retreat for the summer - except with added responsibilities, as it’s also a Site Of Special Scientific Interest for its role in providing a haven for migrating and breeding birds.

All this requires deep pockets - and that’s the most obvious answer to the question that forms the title of this newsletter. You can just buy your way in, as so many people do.

But what do you actually get for laying down that much cash? Is it really “yours” to do with as you wish?

In a pub next to the quayside in Tarbert (the main community of the Scottish island of Harris), writer Adam Nicolson meets a local who doesn’t think much to his family’s claim to a cluster of nearby islands:

“Are you the man who says he owns the Shiants?” he said to me, standing over me.

“Yes,” I said, smiling charm, the English defence. “I am, actually.”

“Well, you’re a sackful a’shite.”

As Nicholson’s drinking companion tries to defuse the situation, the man continues his verbal attack:

“And what have you got to say about it? What do you do to say that the Shiants are yours?”

The answer, if I had given it, would have ended in a fight. The Shiant Isles are mine; I can say that they are my five hundred acres of rock, grass, cliff and wildness, stuck out in the middle of the Minch between Skye and Lewis, besieged by the seas around them, because my father gave them to me. He had bought them after his grandmother had died and left him some money. The advertisement had been seen by his mother in the Daily Telegraph. Colonel Macdonald from Tote in Skye, who had bought the islands the year before, had imagined they might be ideal as a stud where he could breed racehorses. He had been sweet-talked into the ridiculous purchase by Compton Mackenzie, the novelist, who owned the islands at the time and was, as ever, strapped for cash. Mackenzie had acquired them in 1925 from the executors of Lord Leverhulme, and Leverhulme had bought them in 1917, along with the whole of Lewis and Harris, from the Mathesons. The Mathesons, in their turn, afloat on opium millions from trade between Hong Kong and mainland China, had in 1844 bought Lewis from the Mackenzies, the ancient family of the Earls of Seaforth, who withdrew to their territories on the mainland. The Mackenzies, in a chaotic period of unparalleled violence and treachery at the beginning of the seventeenth century known, in one document, as ‘The Ewill Trowbles of the Lewes,’ in which ‘the Macleoid of the Lewes was with his whol Trybe destroyed and put from the possession of the Lewes’, had bought the property from some gentlemen of Fife, who had been granted it by the Crown to set up a colony, even though the hereditary owners, the Macleods of Lewis, were still, at least partly, in possession. Only ‘after great trouble and much blood’ did the Mackenzies get hold of the islands. For their part, the Macleods – ‘the stoutest and prettiest men, but a wicked bloody crew whom neither law nor reason could guid or moddell, perpetuallie destroying one another’ – had stolen it in the twelfth century from the Nicolsons, who had arrived as Vikings perhaps three hundred years earlier. Presumably they – we – had done dreadful things to the previous inhabitants.”

To buy an island and fail to acknowledge any troubled history of its ownership is exactly the sort of thing that would infuriate a local community, so Nicolson refuses to do so:

“My claim on the Shiants, not to put it too finely, is dependent on a succession of acts of violence, quite literally of murder, rape and expulsion. Money may have passed hands recently – my father paid £1400, [previous owner] Macdonald £1500, Compton Mackenzie £500 – but what the Rev. MacCallum said is true: ‘The lords who first sold the land had no right to do so, and therefore the lords who bought the land are not the owners thereof.’ “

Instead - as he recounts in his stirring memoir Sea Room: An Island Life (2001) - Nicolson sees his legal ownership not as an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start over in some jarringly modern form, but as an opportunity to unveil more of the history, more of its existing story, and create as much connection and continuity as his privileged position will allow.

At the end of the book, during a public debate in which he is asked to choose between maintaining his claim to ownership while acknowledging it’s grounded in theft and violence, or to “make history as the landlord who reversed history and returned the islands to common ownership,” Nicolson makes his case for the former:

“Private ownership of a place like this, if community-minded, can actually be more open and flexible…than exclusive community ownership might be. Private ownership does not need to be hung about with the sorts of regulations and notices by which public ownership is usually accompanied. No one who comes to the Shiants need ever know that they are welcome here. They can simply find it wild and beautiful. And anyone who wants to stay in the house, ratty or not, can get in touch with me on adam@shiantisles.net or after 5th March 2005, with [his son and successor] Tom on tom@shiantisles.net and they can have the key.”

So maybe the language is an issue here, since it fails to reflect intention & motivation. Maybe we need a word that means “legally owning a place but not hoarding it from the world or denying other people’s connections with it.” (It certainly wouldn’t apply to the actions of this gentleman.)

Maybe instead of “I own [somewhere]”, owners could say “I’m looking after it,” with all the responsibilities of stewardship that implies.

(And maybe that doesn’t just apply to islands! One of my regrets is not doing my homework on my late Ma’s house in Yorkshire, my former family home, and pouring it all into a notebook that I’d leave for the next owners, in the hope they’d continue the tradition when they’re done. I’ll be doing this with my current home before I move onwards.)

In practice it would surely be messy, because island owners are just as biased and unconsciously self-serving as the rest of us - but wouldn’t it be nice to strive towards that as a moral standard for owning somewhere? Wouldn’t it be nice if that’s what taking on an island actually meant?

That might be priceless.

Further reading on the outer islands of Western Scotland:

Images: Dr. Neil Clifton/Wikimedia; Vincent van Zeijst/Wikimedia; Nils Leonhardt; Knight Frank.

Since my next piece (on the challenges and absurdities of island ownership) is still cooking, and since I’m about to go for a routine colonscopy - a very good thing to have, as explains here - and I expect the sedative will transport me away to a magical land of endless naps and bizarre dreams for the next 24 hours, here’s something for you to read in the meantime, originally written in EiA’s first year.

It’s about the world’s most recently un-discovered island, and a very odd night I had sleeping in the snow in North Yorkshire. Hope it gives you a shiver or two.

- M

Hello again! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about chasing your curiosity: how to do it, why to do it, all the stuff in your brain that gets in the way, and so on.

It’s also about trying to see the things hidden from you in full view, and about discovering what truly matters by randomly stumbling over it. There’s a lot going on in here, maybe not all of it good. I hope that’s you warned.

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Today, a story about sleeping in the snow - and about the world’s most recently un-discovered island.

January 2015: North Yorkshire, England

“No idea.”

That’s what the sign seems to be saying to me. A shrug made of wood: “Hell, *I* don’t know. Use your eyes, man.”

That’s poor advice for a gloomy late January day like this. Low cloud is descending (or is the light fading?) and the horizon creeps nearer every minute. A line of trees marks the edge of the known world: gunmetal-grey, looking even less hospitable than the featureless moorland all around. There’s snow on the ground, snow in the air, snow on the trees. Not the light, fluffy, kickabout kind. This is the deep-frozen, crystalline variety that forms a jagged crust and slices through the fingers of your gloves. The kind that hurts.

But it’s not like we should be worried. Our car is parked just half an hour behind us. The nearest town is a short drive beyond that. There’s no signal for either of our phones, but we have actual maps (OS Explorer OL26 North York Moors, Western area) and we roughly know where we are on them. Nothing about this should feel unnerving - but my hackles are still up.

“Probably best if we pitch up somewhere in those trees,” says Al confidently.

He knows what he’s doing, I tell myself. It’s his Landrover that got us here. He chose the spot. He’s an outdoorsy, seasoned field archaeologist with a bookcase of Cicerone guides and notebooks stuffed with accounts of previous outdoorsy adventures, many of them using the UK’s extensive network of remote bothies. If Al says this is safe, it’s safe. I mean, he wouldn’t be doing this if he didn’t know exactly…?

“Ho ho ho. I’m not sure about this, Mike! Oh well. Guess we’re here now.”

Oh god.

It is impossible to walk off the map in Britain.

Yes, you can certainly get lost - as many unwary day-trippers discover each year. With the winning combination of poor conditions and reckless complacency, you can get into trouble anywhere, not just in the mountains (although in those especially, yes). But it’s all on the map, all of it. You may not know where you are, but hey, that’s your business, don’t go blaming Ordnance Survey for your failings as a navigator.

Or maybe you’d prefer to blame Google. (Or Bing.) Well, you’re on firmer ground there. They get their digital mapping data from over 7,300 satellites orbiting the planet, most owned by third parties who sell their images & scans to the big tech companies. The overlapping composite of all those photos is what gets uploaded to our phones - and big tech would love for us to assume it’s infallible. I mean, a satellite photo is a photo of what’s actually there. How could it lie?

Try telling that to the crew of the Australian research ship R/V Southern Surveyor, which in November 2012 sailed past the South Pacific island of Sandy Island - first recorded in 1774 by Captain James Cook - and, finding nothing but ocean over a kilometre deep, officially un-discovered it. 

They weren’t the first to do so: the French Naval and Oceanographic Service removed the island on its nautical charts in 1974, and in April 2000, a group of amateur radio enthusiasts on a DX-pedition (a radio-mapping journey to a remote place - “DX” is telegraphic shorthand for "distant") found absolutely nothing at its alleged location.

Despite their agitation for an official un-discovery, Google didn’t listen. Their Maps service continued showing a rounded shadow 15 miles long and 3 miles wide as a patch of dry land, and since recorded sightings of the island went back hundreds of years, there should be something there. Surely?

In 2012, a group of scientists set sail to investigate further:

“We all had a good giggle at Google as we sailed through the island, then we started compiling information about the seafloor, which we will send to the relevant authorities so that we can change the world map.”

- The Register

“Australia's Hydrographic Service, which produces the country's nautical charts, says [Sandy Island’s] appearance on some scientific maps and Google Earth could just be the result of human error, repeated down the years.

A spokesman from the service told Australian newspapers that while some map makers intentionally include phantom streets to prevent copyright infringements, that was was not usually the case with nautical charts because it would reduce confidence in them.

A spokesman for Google said they consult a variety of authoritative sources when making their maps.

"The world is a constantly changing place,” the Google spokesman told AFP, "and keeping on top of these changes is a never-ending endeavour'.”

- BBC News

So there you have it. Google’s official definition of “constantly changing” in this instance means “it’s entirely possible that despite this thing being on all our digital maps, it doesn’t actually exist - and it never did.”

(It’s probably going to get worse in the future. The myth of Sandy Island likely endured because of human error. Imagine what havoc the intentional use of deepfake technology could wreak, as this alarming example shows. Could future authoritarian rulers with full control of insular versions of the internet quite literally wipe their enemies off the map, and claim anything contradicting them is ‘fake news’? Not impossible to imagine.)

Here’s what our map is telling Al and I, as we trudge into the growing darkness. 

I’m sure there are plenty of clues here for the map-reading detective: traces of ancient lime burning, with the limestone quarries to the west. Or the moorland to the south, with everything it'll have to say about prehistoric folk chopping down trees. Or the way the paths lie, and what they string together. Or how “Grouse Butts” probably isn’t as demeaning to grouse as it first appears. And so on.

Once we get among the trees, the stillness presses in. What I took to be silence out on the open moorland was clearly a rich, noisy silence with lots of body to it. This? It’s intimate, stifling and deadly. You emit a sound, and a few feet away it drops into the snow and dies. Musicians pay good money to kill sounds like this.

I’d give anything to hear a bird sing.

With darkness racing in, Al and I step up the pace. Ahead, wan light spills down from a ragged opening in the treeline, revealing a steep drop. This is not territory to go stumbling around in at nightfall. But then we find a path, and quickly decide we’re not straying from it. Not once. We will live and die on this path. We will be known as Mike And Al Of This Path.

Now it’s time to search for a nice spot to lay our bivvy bags. Sadly, there isn’t one, so we settle for the least horrible alternative: a small clearing. There’s a metal bench in one corner. I’ve rarely seen anything look more out of place. It’s like finding a parking-meter in the middle of Mordor.

And on top of it:

Um. Stay calm.

Al sets up his tiny wood-burning stove (twig-burning, really), while I go in search of either fuel for the stove or a quick death at the hands of Wildlings, White Walkers or the Blair Witch, whichever comes first.

What I like about small, terrifying adventures like this is they can be had anywhere, even safe-looking places on your maps.

To the inexperienced eye, modern maps are soothing, undramatic and almost maddeningly benign. It’s easy to get complacent if you haven’t learned through joyous or uncomfortable experience what you’re actually looking at.

Contour lines are a common trap for the inexperienced or clueless. I once terrified my friend Charlotte when we were driving from the top of the Moors down into Whitby, by suggesting we turn off down a sideroad that skirted the town centre. On the map I was reading, the route looked uneventful - a single contour line crossing the road, no sweat, even for a wee car like Charlotte’s. Unfortunately I’d missed that it was actually half a dozen lines sandwiched together, which I tried to explain to her as we plunged down a 1 in 3 (33%) gradient on loose gravel, both of us displaying a range of facial expressions you see on viral rollercoaster videos.

(It may just be a coincidence, but I haven’t been asked to do any map-reading for her since.)

Yet maps don’t tell you what the place will feel like. They don’t tell you the difference between, say, a sunlit clearing raucous with birdsong in an English wood on a baking summer’s day, and that exact same clearing in the dead of winter, your breath freezing into your eyebrows, the cold making your ears sing and your lungs ache, and a silence so profound that you can hear a soft crunch-crunch approaching from a hundred yards away, which is either your friend returning with his own handful of twigs, or, or…oh fuuukay ahh good. Hi Al. Yeah, I’m doing great, man. Fantastic.

What maps don’t tell you is your experience of a place. And fair enough, because that’s not their job.

They’ll fool you if you let them, there in your warm living room with the map spread out on the floor, your freshly-made cup of tea going cold because you can’t stop…reading it? Picturing it? Whatever is it you’re doing, anyway. But poring over that same map will feel very different when you’re there, in the place itself. It’s not because the map was wrong. It just wasn’t the full story. Not even close.

In this sense, all maps are lying to us. Digital maps, paper maps, travel blogs, travel writing, Tripadvisor reviews, all of it. They’re all lying if we are daft enough to presume they’re telling the exact truth of what we’ll find there, and turn up expecting to find it, which we never do. We all see and experience the world a bit differently - and remake it, for ourselves and others.

In The Un-Discovered Islands, Malachy Tallack considers the aftermath of Sandy Island’s removal from online maps:

“Zoom in to the right place on Google Earth, between Australia and New Caledonia, and the island’s yellow outline can still be seen: an empty shape on the ocean’s surface. For a time, fantastical photographs appeared inside that shape, added by the programme’s users. Green valleys, harbours, waterfalls, forests, a beach resort, even an atomic explosion: the space that Sandy Island once inhabited was filled with the imaginings of people the world over. The photographs were meant to be funny, of course, but they also express a kind of delight that such a space could still exist in the world.”

It’s happened here, too, in this frozen edge of the North York Moors. When Al and I emerge shivering from our sleeping bags next morning, it’s light enough to examine the bench properly.

Under the line of sacrificial toy victims (there, I said it) is a series of six multicoloured waterproof pages of handwriting, telling a rambling yarn, a children’s story, about where we are.

It ignores what our maps say. According to Ordnance Survey we are in Clain Wood – but this story transforms our surroundings into “echo echo Echo Wood.” (Not so aptly named in all this sound-murdering snow.)

Other places nearby have other unofficial names, all of them sounding like they belong in a Narnia or Harry Potter tale: imaginative, descriptive, somewhat daft, and extremely English.

We have no idea who made this story. We have no idea how to find out - which I guess is exactly what the writer intended. It’s not someone’s attempt to become the next JK Rowling. It’s there as a work of playful creativity: a whimsical reinterpretation of this landscape for anyone passing by. A single story, released into the wild, making a home for itself.

Your map says there’s nothing here? Oh, how little maps know about the world, my friend! Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…

Maps are wonderful - especially the fake ones, in my opinion. But they don’t actually take you very far on their own. They should never be treated as anything more than a prompt for your curiosity, the beginnings of a fine (or even ludicrous) excuse to explore somewhere new.

New to you, I mean. Arguably the only definition of “new” that has any tangible meaning to us in the long run. Of course other people have been there and done that, long before you did. That’s always the way: pure originality is as much of a myth as Sandy Island.

But you haven’t been, and that always matters. Until you’re on the map too, some mysteries will remain hidden to you. Sometimes you have to turn up in person, scrape off the snow, and see what’s what.

There’s always a new story for you to make out there.

Images: Mike Sowden, Microsoft/Ordnance Survey.

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First, a quick and embarrassing update on a previous newsletter.

A while back I wrote about the amazing blue morpho butterfly, with its shiny, shiny coat of structural colour (that's a colour produced by tiny surface structures interacting with light, not by coloured pigments - think the sheen of a pearl.)

While writing it, I thought to myself, "Damn, I'd love to see one of those someday. What a gorgeous colour."

More fool me, because what I didn't realise is there has been one outside my flat for the last year.

It’s in the entrance leading up to my second-floor apartment here in Scotland, as decorated by my landlord:

What kind of idiot misses something that obvious?

Answer: me. The Me kind of idiot, that’s what.

I haven’t been able to ask my landlord yet, so I have no idea how this taxidermized butterfly (usually found in the tropical forests of Latin America) ended up here. And I also don’t know how I could have walked past it every single day since I moved into this flat without noticing it!

Curiosity FAIL. 🤦

Secondly: there are now well over 350 of us reading & discussing the introduction to Alexandra Horowitz’s On Looking over on Threadable.

(Thank you! What a really great start to EiA’s first Big Amazing Read.)

If you want to join them, click below for all the details you’ll need:

For today’s edition of this newsletter, exclusively for paid subscribers: let’s play with some mad science that would be guaranteed to change everything.

I started this newsletter in early 2021 with a piece of modern speculative fiction: China Miéville’s 2009 novel The City & the City, a novel that blew my tiny mind on almost every page. It helped me set the tone for this newsletter - to chase those “wow!” moments as far as they’ll go, in the hope of learning something truly remarkable that I never knew before.

Science fiction’s always done that for me. I’ve been a sci-fi nerd since my early teens - but one that loved big head-expanding ideas a lot more than lightsaber battles and Klingons on the starboard bow.

(That said, when I was a kid I had this metal & ceramic Starship Enterprise - and it was confiscated after I shot my Mum in the eye with a photon torpedo. Not my proudest moment, but life went on.)

Sci-fi is where big thinkers go to play with their ideas. Well, okay, sometimes it is, but the people whose work I loved reading the most? Them for sure. They treated science fiction with curiosity, wonder and respect. Not just as a grimly violent backdrop where future people were monstrously crappy to each other in the bad old ways, just with fancy new technology. Not just another war or depressingly brutal battle of wills except in space, but something brand new that required the future in order to exist. Something bold and strange and different.

That’s the science fiction I love, and if you’re reading this newsletter, I reckon you’d get a kick from it too.

Here are five big ideas about possible, unlikely or wildly improbable futures that have captured my imagination and really got me thinking.

1. What If Robots End Up Even *More* Human?

With every discussion of the ramifications of artificial intelligence software, we eventually get to all those Terminator scenarios. What if things turn stabby? What if the massive imperfections of our messy, irrational and wildly short-sighted hominid species prove unpalatable to a powerful A.I., and it decides that Agent Smith in The Matrix was right - we’re a virus destined to be stamped out?

For clarity: when I say “A.I." I don’t mean the current crop of tools that have proved so controversial, so resource-wasteful and often such a parasitical blight for creators of all kinds. (For a clear-sighted take on the genuinely practical uses of these tools, I’d recommend Professor Ethan Mollick’s work.) No - this is about truly self-aware machines, capable of independent and original thought: Artificial General Intelligence, to use the correct jargon. We’re definitely not there yet.

My biggest beef with AGI doomsday scenarios is the self-absorption: the automatic assumption that any advanced non-human intelligence is going to have exactly the same fixations with power, status and ownership (and all their by-products, including warfare) that so many humans do.

It’s like an extension of what Lord Acton famously said in the 19th Century: power corrupts, so absolute power corrupts absolutely, so hey, the same is true for intelligence, right?

Well - I can’t answer that, being a fairly average-brained human, but my imagination definitely says “really? Can’t we even consider the possibility that this is thinking way, way, way too narrowly, based on exactly one example of intelligence in the known universe?”

That side of things is hard to speculate about - even, I’d imagine, for professional sci-fi authors.

(But one thought refuses to dislodge itself from my head: if there was consciousness that was vastly more intelligent than humans, and it recognised that inequality and injustice fuel human conflict and that warfare seems to be the single most wasteful use of limited natural resources in a finite universe, wouldn’t it actually want to do the opposite of enslaving and killing everyone?)

But then there’s artificial intelligence that goes in the other direction: towards a learned morality we’d recognise as intensely, uncomfortably human.

Enter Murderbot, the protagonist of a series of novellas, novels and short stories by Martha Wells that will soon be adapted by Apple TV+.

Murderbot is a SecUnit - a cyborg (part-machine, part-biological) created by humans to act as advanced security guards. Not by choice, of course: under normal circumstances, a SecUnit’s intelligence would be fully under human control.

In a recent interview with New Scientist, Wells explains how this works:

“In the world of All Systems Red [the first novella in the series], humans control their sentient constructs with governor modules that punish any attempt to disobey orders with pain or death. When Murderbot hacks its governor module, it becomes essentially free of human control. Humans assume that SecUnits who are not under the complete control of a governor module are going to immediately go on a killing rampage.

This belief has more to do with guilt than any other factor. The human enslavers know on some level that treating the sentient constructs as disposable objects, useful tools that can be discarded, is wrong; they know if it were done to them, they would be filled with rage and want vengeance for the terrible things they had suffered.”

Murderbot does indeed recognise all this, but wants something different from its newly-hacked freedom. It doesn’t want retribution. It wants drama. Specifically: soap operas.

After hacking its access interfaces, it realises it can tap into all the human entertainment feeds, the Netflixes and iPlayers of the future. And so it downloads hundreds of episodes of TV shows, and gets addicted to them.

Why do we consume entertainment? Yes, as a distraction from the boring grind of the day and the worst horrors of the news - but also as part of a vast “user manual” in human behaviour, with nobody in control but everyone trying to trigger the biggest emotions and win the most eyeballs. What if an A.I. consumed all the emotional lessons of entertainment and learned how to not just be human, but that exaggerated, heightened, “here’s the moral of this tale” type of it you only get from stories?

As Wells says:

“The dramas, mysteries, adventures and other shows that it watches also give it context for human behaviour, and for understanding its own emotions. The security contracts that it has worked at mining colonies, supervising indentured workers, only show it humans at their worst: angry, terrified, resentful, trapped and hurting each other. And when given the opportunity, the humans also hurt the constructs that are there to keep them under control and working for corporations that see their employees as only slightly less discardable than the constructs and bots.

The shows that Murderbot watches also teach it about the wider world it has never been a part of before, as well as how to navigate that world. The entertainment Murderbot becomes addicted to is a large part of what makes it possible to turn the mental escape from reality into a bid for real freedom.”

So, extending this into our world - what if robots of the future actually became better dreamers than most of the humans around them? What if they ‘grew up’ (if that’s the phrase) on exactly the kind of Art that allows us to flourish as well-rounded humans in all the ways that matter - but were also furnished with intellectual abilities that could take those smart, beautiful and deeply empathetic ideas forward in a way mere humans never could?

Writers of all kinds, please get writing those stories. Your future students are waiting.

Read more

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In a day or so I’ll be returning to the Inboxes of paid subscribers with a roundup of some of science fiction’s wildest ideas, and next week with the next part of this season’s look at the life-improving science of human memory. (Here’s the first part of it, now unlocked for everyone to read.)

But today, it’s time to formally launch the very first Big Amazing Read!

Here’s my announcement of it from a month ago:

We’re reading On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz - and as of today, the introductory chapter is available for you to read on Threadable, whether you’re a paid or free subscriber of Everything Is Amazing.

What’s Threadable?

It’s a really terrific social reading service, letting us read something together with all the ease of the best of the internet.

It was formerly only available through its iOS & Mac app, but also newly accessible on the Web! (This means you can also use it if you’re on Android, through your phone’s browser - I’ve been happily using it on my Xiaomi Redmi 8 all this week.)

Without Threadable, I’d be asking you to read the whole of On Looking in your own time over the next 3 months, and then we’d meet in the comments of a monthly newsletter (or, for paid subscribers, in extra newsletters and on a Zoom call) to have a discussion about the book.

But with Threadable, we can do some of this much more seamlessly, and in something approaching real-time! As well as reading the whole chapter using their swanky new Web interface (see below), you can also leave comments and respond to other commenters, like we’re all meeting in the margins of a good book:

Important note: you can read the whole of this Introduction without signing up to Threadable - but if you want to comment on it as well, you’ll have to sign up for a free Threadable account, as follows:

1. Go to the Threadable homepage and click on Get Started in the top-right.

2. Set up a new profile using your Google or Apple account or by clicking “Sign up with email”, as below.

3. Join my Reading Circle (see below), where I’ll be posting other excerpts from On Looking and some other related texts during the whole of this Big Amazing Read.

» Click here for a direct link to my Reading Circle «

I’m so delighted to partner with Threadable on this first read-through: I used the earlier iOS-only version for this newsletter back in 2022, and as I said back then, it was “a bit like scribbling in the margins of a book, but without the mess and with all the extra sideways-linking cleverness of the Web brought to bear.”

Now their Web interface is up and running, it’s far easier to use and a lot more powerful too. Absolute game-changer.

So - it begins! The first month Big Amazing Read is underway, and we begin with Alexandra Horowitz’s realisation that while she thinks her attention-paying skills are pretty good (she’s a Columbia University professor & canine cognition researcher), what she’s missing about the world around her could…well, fill a book.

Read it in her own words here.

- Mike

Images: Threadable; Sincerely Media.

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To open with, I love it when someone ruins a lazy social media meme with something chaotic, and since I currently live near Glasgow, I found this very appealing:

(H/t the reliably fun TerribleMap account.)

Secondly - a Big Amazing Read update!

A few of you have contacted me this week to ask if you’ve missed the start of the first edition of EiA’s book club, as I first announced here:

This time round, we’re reading Alexandra Horowitz’s On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes, which is one of the books that inspired me to start this newsletter in early 2021.

I’m glad (and apologetic) to say that you haven’t missed anything yet! I’ve delayed things a little because I wanted to work out how I was using the social reading service Threadable for part of it, and to have a chat with the Threadable team to make sure it was doable.

Now I have a green light - and the introductory chapter of On Looking will be on Threadable by next Friday, available for everyone to read and to discuss in the comments. I’ll be sending a newsletter to you with details of how to access it.

As an example of how this will work, this is how it looks on the Web version of Threadable using our reading of the fourth chapter of Lewis Dartnell’s Origins from a while back:

(Very fancy-looking, it is.)

So, next Friday will officially mark the start of the whole read-through of On Looking.

As I said previously, all you really need is a copy of the book to take part (here’s the US Kindle version - massively discounted to just $2.99 right now, so grab it quick!) and I’ll have a few other excerpts from On Looking on Threadable to give you an overall flavour of the book - but paid subscribers to Everything Is Amazing will also be getting extra-nerdy and hopefully practical essays on the book’s main themes, in very much the “okay, how much coffee did Mike drink before writing this?” style that you’re hopefully accustomed to/tolerant of by now.

The first of these will be going out after next weekend.

So, to today’s edition - and it’s the final part of a trilogy of unsettling articles I originally published when I was a bumbling travel writer.

(The first and second, on what happens to your body when it gets too cold or when you don’t sleep, are here and here.)

In my earliest days of travel writing, I had a terrible habit of failing to drink enough water when I visited hot places. I more or less got away with this for a few years, but in the summer of 2016 it all caught up with me in a wooden cabin in Portugal, during a 40°C/104°F heatwave. I was drinking maybe a litre and a half of water a day when I should have been glugging back four or five - and the result was heat exhaustion (the forerunner to heat stroke), a pounding headache that lasted two weeks, and damage to my internal thermostat that took years to heal (although I’m unconvinced it’s ever done so fully).

So, like any ambitious new writer, I saw an opportunity to turn my own personal suffering into attention-grabbing Art, and took it.

When I published the following piece on my personal blog, it got a huge number of shares, reached hundreds of thousands of people and hopefully convincing some of them to take their water-drinking really, really damn seriously….

And since summer is here in Europe and things are hotting up, I hope it might do the same for some of you too.

Deep breath, please. This gets pretty grim.

Being alive is a remarkable balancing act between two cliff edges. When the temperature drops, we've only got a 10 degree margin of safety, a few paces backwards, before we're feeling the icy touch of death.

But this leeway is luxurious compared with what happens when we start overheating. Here at our normal core body temperatures, at 37 degrees Celsius / 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (or thereabouts), our toes are already poking over the edge of our very own heat-deaths.

Because right now, all that separates you and runaway thermal meltdown is...

3 degrees.

Let's apply a little heat and see what happens.

37.8°C / 100°F

Maybe you're in a nice warm room, and you've just had a big meal. You've got a bit of a glow on. This is because our bodies are amazingly efficient at converting food into heat - so much so that if left unchecked, your metabolism would push your core body temperature around 1.5° C higher every hour. Two hours and you're approaching done.

But yet again, your hypothalamus is here to haul you out your own fire. As soon as you started straying above optimum temperature, it triggers two notoriously unloved bodily processes for venting heat. Your skin's blood vessels dilate and blood rushes up and into them - and that blood is being pumped straight from the hot zone, so when it meets the coolness of the outside air, the unwanted heat is safely pushed out your body. That's why a flushed face feels sizzling hot.

But far more embarrassing - and more marvellous - is when tiny glands all over your body start squirting out droplets of water mixed with sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium and a host of trace minerals. You're doused by your own sprinkler system, a warm liquid that immediately cools on contact with air (for "cools" read "transfers heat off the body and into the air") and then evaporates, shifting remarkable amounts of heat in the process.

An amazing biological achievement...which we hate. Nothing like a big sweat patch to flag up to the world that you're a repulsive dork - even though it's actually a small sign that Darwin's dice are rolling in your favour.

You pull your clammy shirt away from your body and fan it surreptitiously. Ugh - human beings are so gross.

38°C / 100.4°F

Maybe you're newly arrived in an equatorial country you've never visited before. And maybe you've just tried to carry two suitcases up five flights of stairs in the height of summer. You're in great shape, and under normal circumstances this physical feat would literally be no sweat. But these aren't normal circumstances.

As wonderful as the hypothalamus is, it's not fitted with a GPS. It doesn't know you've just arrived somewhere that's on average 25 degrees warmer at this time of year. In fact, if your thermoregulatory system could be confused, it'd be thoroughly nonplussed by now. Why isn't a mild sweat doing the job? Why isn't turning you lobster-red achieving the required cooling results?

(Your hypothalamus also raises your temperature when you’re sick, to “cook the enemy” - this is a good overview from .)

You're suffering from a kind of thermal jetlag, and your body needs time to acclimatise. Until then, sorry: you're going to sweat buckets. The floodgates are open.

This is a sensible and effective cooling mechanism in the short term (which also kicks in when you’re exercising, when your core temperature can spike by as much as three degrees) - but you've got to do your bit to help it. You're like a breached dam, losing massive amounts of fluids and salts, and if you don't keep both of them topped up you're going to lose the fuel you need to keep you alive. So, lots and lots of water. Go nuts.

But you're also going to need to replenish some of those body salts, mostly that sodium that's crusting nicely in the wrinkles of your skin. You know what you need? Salty snacks. Yes, it's medically important that you eat a moderate amount of dry, pre-packaged junk food (which will even make you thirstier, making you drink even more water). Oh, life is a struggle.

38.5°C / 101.3°F

Whoops. For your own good tragically foolish reasons, you've decided to sip a strong coffee instead.

It's probably a myth that caffeine itself dehydrates you (it can increase your rate of urination, but usually not enough to derail your fluid levels). However, a strong coffee will psychologically slake your thirst for a short while. This is Bad. You're sipping fluids when you should be drinking them.

Now you're getting too hot, and it's time to start your meltdown.

Your skin is painfully hot to the touch . . . but it's drying up. This is because you simple can't perspire enough, and your body heat is scorching away what little sweat you're managing to squeeze out. Your lips feel swollen, and your face is a truly livid lick of scarlet. With your blood so close to the surface of your skin, it's losing its water due to evaporation - which means it's thickening. Thickened blood? Clotting. Your chances of suffering a stroke or a heart attack just spiked.

Don't go standing up suddenly. Your brain needs a regular blood supply - around 15% of your cardiac output. With so much blood currently diverted elsewhere, your blood pressure is dropping and not enough is being pumped up to your head, making you woozy, nauseous and unable to stand without waves of dizziness.

You're becoming severely hyperthermic - the warm-blooded twin of hypothermia.

You're terrified.

But don't worry, the fear will pass soon - because you won't be conscious for much longer.

39.5°C / 103.1°F

You're scared and in pain. Your breathing and your pulse are both racing. You're also yawning convulsively. Your brain is in trouble, and it's forcing you to suck in cool air and the oxygen you need to keep conscious in your elevated metabolic state.

Are your surroundings helping or hindering your last-ditch attempts to save yourself? If the air around you is almost as warm as you are, your sweat can't evaporate...which is why heat exhaustion is such a danger in high-humidity (75%+) environments, especially to unacclimatised new arrivals.

At this stage, you might be panicking. Hopefully you're knocking back as much water as you can - and it’d be great if you kept snacking too. Dilute your body's salt-water mixture too much and you'll be hit with a bout of hyponatremia. Symptoms? Same as those from heat exhaustion - except with the thrill of possible brain swelling.

It could well be that the only thing between you and a coma right now is half a tube of Pringles.

40°C / 104°F

Welcome to the death zone.

If you're still conscious at this temperature, your awareness is severely impaired. You're almost certainly not going to do the right thing - and the right thing is to get your temperature down as quick as possible, because you're starting to die. Beyond 40 degrees Celsius, you're into heat stroke.

This is ugly. Your hypothalamus can't do anything. Your core body temperature is rising, your natural thermoregulatory functions can't do a damn thing to stop it, and your body tissues are suffering permanent damage as a result.

Your one and only hope right now is for medical services to arrive and cool you with specialist equipment.

If well-meaning samaritans lay wet towels on your skin, it's probably only going to be a few seconds before the damp material warms and becomes an insulator.  

Fans blowing cooler air, periodically-applied cold compresses, water and a little salt. . . this is how passers-by can keep you alive until professional help arrives.

But you can't tell them that because you're now unconscious, just minutes from a coma.

Heat stroke isn't necessarily fatal, if treated swiftly and skillfully.

But even if help arrives in time and your temperature is brought down to safe levels, it could be months before it's known how much damage has been dealt to your organs.

42°C / 107.6°F

Your last shot at salvation is gone. You're boiling in your own skin.

Here's how. Your body temperature is so elevated that the proteins in your cells are cooking - as Alok Jha puts it, "like egg white as it boils". Muscles are starting to lock up - including the ones that allow you to keep breathing. Your thickened, low-pressure blood supply can't reach your brain...

Your brain, the nerve centre of your body, shuts down.

Game over.

Further reading:

• "Boiled Alive" - Alok Jha, The Guardian, 26th July 2006.

• "Avoiding Heat Illness" - Dr. Gary F. Arnet, Backwoods Home Magazine.

• "After Heatstroke, When Is It Safe To Exercise?" - Gina Kolata, New York Times, 14th June 2010.

• "Heatstroke" - Robert S. Helman M.D., eMedicine.

Images: Alexander Grey, Hans Reniers, 96dpi, Patrick J. Lynch and Kansas Poetry (Patrick).

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First, a fun update to this story I did a while back on the ‘Stargate’ portals between Lithuania and Poland:

You may have heard that New York and Dublin recently got their own portal connection - and here’s gonzo reporter (of “SKWON!” fame) checking it out & somehow managing to bump into its inventor, Benediktas Gylys:

"Sometimes I want to stay in the shadows," he said. "It requires a lot of energy to talk to multiple people. Some days I just feel like talking, so I step into the conversations people are having, to see if they have questions. And that's how they discover I'm the creator. And sometimes I pretend I know nothing about the Portal and just start spreading my theories—my urban legends about the Portal."

CAFÉ ANNE

I Survived the NYC Portal!!!

Hello everyone, Welcome to Issue #121 of CAFÉ ANNE! So the big news this week was the city’s announcement that it is not only creating some new public restrooms, it has now produced an official map of every public restroom in town. That’s 1000 bathrooms located in libraries, parks and public plazas…

Read more

2 years ago · 162 likes · 166 comments · Anne Kadet

(Anne writes such a great newsletter. Also such a mad newsletter! This is an endorsement, Anne, I promise.)

Okay! To business.

Today, let’s visit the guttered ruin of my teenage years, in search of someone to blame.

Buckle up please. The suspension in this thing is terrible.

It’s the mid-1980s, and I’m being driven to school.

“No, Ma, you can just drop me here. It’s fine.”

“Don’t be silly. It’s only a hundred yards further…”

“No, here would be great. Or maybe you could just kill me instead?”

I don’t say that last bit out loud, but it certainly feels like an option I’d consider. Just push me out the car and back it over me, Ma. Or I could wrestle the wheel from you, and at the age of 14 I’d learn how to drive just enough to get us the half-mile to the sea where, shrieking in outrage at the tragedy of my curtailed existence, I’d steer us into the waves and that’d be an end to it.

Literally anything but you continuing to drive me to the school gates in this bloody thing, Ma. Please? Please.

“There you go, love. And look! All your friends are waiting for you.”

They’re not my friends. They might have been one day if I’d done nothing weird, nothing freakish that indelibly marked me as Other. But since my mother started driving me to school in her Reliant Robin, my destiny seems writ.

Do real friends point at you and howl with laughter, Ma?

Do they make the “you’re a wanker” hand-gesture in the way they’re all doing right now? Is that a sign I’m destined for school-yard greatness in years to come?

I’m not feeling it, Ma. That’s not what is happening.

She pushes me out, gives me a kiss on the cheek and then drives away, leaving me to my fate.

As it wobbles down the road, the three-wheeled septic tank car’s exhaust splutters and bangs. She got it for a few hundred quid a year ago, and it’s never run right. One time on the long straight to nearby Bridlington, a huge gust of cross-wind flipped it into the verge, and my dad had to go out in his Actual Car to drag it out. It’s broken down a few times, and it occasionally farts out a clot of Mordor-black smoke as if something infernal lurks in the engine. 

I’m at that age where you take everything personally, so I’ve taken all this personally. It’s my first year at high school (“secondary school” in UK vernacular) and I’m desperate to make the friends I failed to make in the nearby primary school the previous year.

I feel like this is a chance at a fresh start, a last-ditch reboot of my brand image. The remainder of my school years rest on this. I cannot mess this up. 

So naturally my mother buys Britain’s most famously shitty car and drives me everywhere in it.

That’s not what I remember best, though, these forty years later. The embarrassment has dulled, as embarrassments tend to do. The force with which I cringe at the memory no longer propels my spectacles off my face. I have, to a certain extent, forgiven my mother for her well-meaning carpet bombing of my reputation. Time has filed the edges off these things until they’re merely unbearable.

Instead, what’s brightest in my mind’s eye is how I felt that very first time we rolled up to the school gates, when I had no idea how endlessly un-cool Reliant Robins were. I knew nothing of cars, and I’d spent all my time reading books and playing videogames, not watching TV. I knew what Only Fools And Horses was, but I’d never actually seen it. I didn’t know what a national joke Del Boy’s car was considered to be.

Instead, I remember thinking, with excited pride and startling accuracy: oh wow, I bet nobody else’s parents have a car like this!

According to folk who study it, we change our opinions in two broad ways as we stumble our way through the overwhelming data-deluge of the world around us.

The first is called informational social influence: you read the facts of a thing (hopefully in a credible publication that cites and checks other reliable sources) or you hear the facts of a thing from someone you trust, and your opinion shifts in a new direction. 

Without this form of thinking, I wouldn’t have a newsletter - I’m never an expert about anything I write about, and I’m always delighted if someone corrects me with something I never knew. Please bring it on, if you have the facts to back it up!

The second is normative social influence - and it’s why I learned to hate Reliant Robins. You learn that a social group you want to be part of is holding a certain opinion on something, and your thoughts self-servingly drift in the direction of agreement with it. It’s pretty well understood how this can be a bad thing: groupthink kills creativity, staying in your ‘bubble’ stunts your worldliness and your critical thinking, and so on.

(We probably all do it to some degree, and now that I’m writing for a bigger audience than at any time in my career, I’m permanently fearful of losing the self-awareness that I’m no different.)

The online world runs on strong opinions. A lot of this might just be basic biology: our brains are cognitive misers, preferring to spend the least amount of energy they can get away with. The quickest and easiest way to think is what cognitive scientist Daniel Kahneman called “System 1 thinking”, relying on our emotional intuition, our hunches and the automatic thinking we do when we tie our shoelaces or recognise something is far away because it’s parallaxing behind a nearer object: unconsciously-performed, stereotypical, and really, really quick. System 1 thinking powers a lot of our opinion-making - and its lack of considered analysis can get things dreadfully wrong.

Maybe you saw the recent viral story of Corey Harris, a man from Michigan who Zoom-called into a court hearing about his suspended license while driving a car, to the utter amazement of the judge presiding. It was everywhere on social media, usually shared with accompanying comments like “LOL” and “there is no word for being this stupid” and so on. 

And then the follow-up details arrived: it looked like he assumed his license was still active, and it was the court’s fault in bungling the paperwork (hat-tip to Brendan Leonard for this).

But now, a further twist: it seems he never had a driving license in the first place.

Of course this kind of stuff is viral gold for social media. Every new update adds more and more to the story, perfect fodder for newspapers - and triggers another round of blaming, shaming and mud-slinging cruelty within the discussions around it (although what gets amplified the most is the original story, because that’s the one with the most power to go viral, for all the wrong reasons).

As Brendan says, it’s impossible to unring any of these bells - once shared, never forgotten, and it’s easy to conclude it’s more proof people are awful and the world is ruined. Yay for negative media cycles.

I could bang on about the toxic uselessness of this story in any way except as recreational mockery (ugh) or as a reminder that ridiculing strangers isn’t great behaviour. I mean, that’s certainly a thing.

And then, because the language of television memes is far more appealing than anything I could ramble at you, I’d point you towards the best scene in Ted Lasso:

Everyone knows being judgmental is bad. No question there. But wait - how about being opinionated?

Having a strong opinion is enormously attention-grabbing. Aren’t we all drawn towards folk who have the confidence to speak their mind without any hesitation, ambiguity, obfuscation or equivocation (and who use much shorter words than any of those)? Isn’t that the essence of a sound-bite that travels far: punchy, succinct and so very damn sure of itself?

However this fad for performative certainty began - and I’d start by looking at the influence of Dale ‘Extroverts Always Win Big!’ Carnegie, for all the reasons that laid out in her book Quiet - it seems this is still a model of expression that gets most of the attention, helped along by the character-limits of social media platforms. If you’re just someone who prefers to expand arguments and ask a lot of questions, well, you’re not going to look anywhere near as interesting. 

Don’t get me wrong - asking questions can be an absolute minefield. Just ask this Irish rugby-player:

But on the whole, questions are a virtue (if a privilege). They feed your curiosity, that inner impulse-drive that eventually should carry you to a place of greater wisdom - but having already “made your mind up” starves curiosity dead. Why would you re-break what’s already been fixed? Your energy-thrifty and constantly overwhelmed mind hasn’t the heart or the time for it. Job done, life short, move along please, lalala not listening. 

Here’s organizational psychologist on why this is so problematic, from his book Think Again:

“A few years ago, I argued in my book Originals that if we want to fight groupthink, it helps to have “strong opinions, weakly held.” Since then I’ve changed my mind - I now believe that it’s a mistake.

If we hold an opinion weakly, expressing it strongly can backfire. Communicating it with some uncertainty signals confident humility, invites curiosity, and leads to a more nuanced discussion. Research shows that in courtrooms, expert witnesses and deliberating jurors are more credible and more persuasive when they express moderate confidence, rather than high or low confidence. And these principles aren’t limited to debates - they apply in a wide range of situations where we’re advocating for our beliefs or even for ourselves.”

(But what about the Flat Earthers and the Anti-5G tinfoil-hat-wearers and the like? Aren’t they also “asking questions” by rejecting the scientific consensus? Well, no - they’re not presenting themselves as uncertain. It’s definitely all a conspiracy, and they’re using questions to try to catch out those evil, corrupt scientists. Their actual opinions are like diamond zircon.)

So here’s a suggestion that would prove deeply unpopular if I put it on social media, so I’m going to share it with you instead:

We don’t have to have an opinion on everything.

My personal stake in this is that I’ve arrived at the advanced age of 52 years old being uncertain about almost everything, sometimes radically so.

There are certainly things I want to believe are true: that the scientific method (Kahneman’s “System 2 thinking”) is more reliable for thinking about stuff, that there’s an essential decency in most of us (even when we’re acting our most idiotic), that kindness can create understanding across seemingly unbridgeable divides in the way Mónica Guzmán demonstrates here, that The Expanse will eventually come back for a seventh season, that humanity will always muddle through, that the best way to pronounce “scone” is of course “scone”, and so on.

I have a deep interest in learning the facts and apprehending breaking news about these things - and maybe, over time, new evidence will show me I’m on the right track? I hope so.

But other stuff? I really don’t have a clue, and I’ll tell you as much if you ask me. I therefore don’t have an opinion on them. Sorry!

I’m not giving you a list of what those things are. Let’s just say you’d be amazed I’ve survived into my fifties.

But one of them - is driving. I’ve never learned to drive, to the utter incredulity of every American and Canadian I’ve ever talked to about this. How is this possible, Mike? How did you achieve this? Oh, you know, I just gritted my teeth & read sci-fi novels and played videogames until I was rendered unemployable in any normal way, then I became a writer! Easy-peasy. Anyone could do it!

But as an alternative to many other far more sensible and useful areas of personal knowledge that I could have expanded over the last 40 years, here are some things I’ve learned about my mother’s Reliant Robin since the time she destroyed my mid-teens with it.

Firstly, my greatest fear of them was what happened when they ran you over. It’s never happened, but I’ve always assumed that if a car was going to run me over, I could throw myself to the ground and lay very flat and straight indeed so that the car passed overhead and both sets of tires passed on either side of me. (I think I got this idea from the truck scene in Raiders Of The Lost Ark.)

However, the Reliant Robin has a single front wheel that’s right in the damn middle. No escape, and a muddy tyre-track right up your face. That’s not a dignified way to go.

However, after meeting an owner of a Robin a few decades back and asking him to very, very carefully run over one of my steel-toecapped boots, I’m now pretty sure I would do the car more damage if it ran into me than vice-versa. They have a certain structural bounciness to them…well, I’m not going to test it properly, but I no longer wake up in a cold sweat.

Secondly, they’re a lot harder to tip over than most people think. This myth is mostly down to the following sequence from Top Gear:

Jeremy Clarkson, the morally bankrupt wretch, has since admitted that the TV show’s engineers tinkered with the car so he could deliberately roll it on every steep turn, while also confessing how unfair he thinks this is:

“It makes me sad, if I’m honest, because rolling a Reliant Robin on purpose is a bit like putting a tortoise on its back. It’s an act of wanton cruelty. When you see it lying there with its three little wheels whizzing round helplessly, you are compelled to rush over and put it the right way up.”

Thirdly, you can legally drive them on a British B1 Driving License (“light vehicles and quadricycles”), which in the 1980s cost significantly less to purchase. Adding on the dirt-cheap price of the cars themselves (probably because when Only Fools And Horses started airing everyone suddenly wanted rid of them), and it’s clear my mum had herself a bargain. Not a fashionable one, certainly, but an admirably thrifty one.

(Maybe I ate a few extra meals because of that car. Eeee. Times were hard, but we got by.)

Does any of this change my opinion of Reliant Robins? Not much. Various muscles around my eyes still twitch if I see one out in the wild. If I saw someone’s kid being driven to school in one here in Scotland, I’d probably cause a scene (“GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN, ANGUS, SHE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR YOU”). That damage is clearly done. I’ll never be that naive & hopeful kid again.

But anything that you haven’t formed an opinion on yet - have you thought of, you know, just not doing so? Not deciding? Just sitting with it, to allow you to keep thinking about it?

To quote one of my favourite writers on Substack:

“The discourse demands that you pick a side. That you choose your weapon and decide. I haven’t made my mind up and I won’t make a choice solely out of deference to other people’s values.”

I think that’s a very fine - and very curious - way to live.

This is a free edition of Everything Is Amazing, a science newsletter in search of things that will hopefully make both of us go “WOW!”

Do you feel your spirits lift a little when you learn something fascinating about the world that you never knew you didn’t know? Does it make the day a little more bearable? That’s what I’m trying to do. I want you to feel that, just a bit, just for a moment - because learning about these things as an enthusiastic amateur fills me with a lot of hope about the world we live in. (What else is this cool out there? How can I learn more about it? Who else can I talk to?)

There’s also a paid version of this newsletter, where I’m trying to deliver the maximum amount of these “woah!” moments that I can dig up - and, by upgrading and joining EiA’s 700+ paid supporters, you’d be directly funding this project, helping me reach more people and keeping the lights on (which would be a relief, because this is now my full-time gig).

Want in?

Let me see what this thing can do!

Images: Timon Studler; Car And Classic Auctions; Niels de Wit/Wikimedia.

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[IMPORTANT NOTE: This is going to be a long one, with a lot of images, so it’ll probably get chopped off at the bottom by your email provider. Click on the title above to open the Web version & read it all!]

To start this edition, here’s your haunting idea of the day, courtesy of a recent piece by Abigail Beall at New Scientist…

A rogue planet is one that's escaped the gravitational clutches of its home star (or other body with a similar mass, like a brown dwarf), drifting through the empty voids between the stars, profoundly cold and alone in utter darkness. Recent modelling predicts there could be a lot of them, even to the point they’re outnumbering stars up to 20 times - meaning our own galaxy could be filled with trillions of them.

If your first thought is this…

…then I think we’d get along just fine, if you and I ever met at the pub.

With that in mind - couldn't rogue planets also be regarded as unguided, world-sized ‘spaceships’?

Not entirely daft idea, it seems!

"Simulations have even suggested that some rogue planets might have what it takes to be habitable, either in liquid oceans beneath their icy outer crusts or on the surface if they can sustain a thick hydrogen atmosphere to trap enough heat to sustain life."

And last week, the newly-online Euclid Space Telescope has revealed its first images, each featuring a staggering level of detail. One contains 300,000 (!) never-before-seen objects, some of which are rogue planets that were previously impossible to see by other means.

Added to the recent news that dozens of observed stars seem to be emitting much more energy than they should be, paving the way for extremely fevered speculation about the presence of advanced alien civilizations directly harvesting the energy of stars - well, there’s bucketloads of fuel for your imagination. Crack on, science-fiction writers.

Secondly, you may have been taught at school about Florence Nightingale, pioneering nurse, easer of soldierly suffering, the founder of modern medicine and the ‘lady with a lamp’ during the Crimean War (1853-’56).

But did you know the rest of it?

(How easily the rich complexities of a woman's professional legacy can get smudged away by the history books.)

Okay!

Today, following on from our (repeat) journey along our planet’s longest mountain-chain last week, we’re returning to the poorly-mapped ocean floors covering over two-thirds of our planet - because I don’t want to worry anyone, but it seems there’s something unexpectedly huge under the North Pole.

To set the scene, let’s chase solid land as northwards as it goes.

In the middle of 2021, a group of researchers announced they might have found the world’s most northerly island, off the top of Greenland.

Perhaps that sounds that sounds a bit non-committal? Yes, commendably so! As good scientists always work with hypotheses and theories, they try to remain open to the possibility (however remote) of being proven dead wrong - so it’s a source of ongoing frustration for researchers when their circumspect language is mangled into emphatic certainty, as when the BBC ran this story with the headline “Greenland Island Is World’s Northernmost Island - Scientists.”

(As the text of the article itself made clear, those scientists actually weren’t saying that, because they didn’t have the evidence for it yet. Contrast this with Smithsonian Magazine’s “Scientists Discover What May Be The World’s Northernmost Island.” Much better job of it.)

The unofficial name for this 30 x 60 metre something-or-other is Qeqertaq Avannarleq, which is Greenlandic for “the northernmost island.” From the air, it looks like - and I apologise, but there’s no avoiding it - a huge dollop of s***.

(Call me unromantic, but - imagine you’re out for a walk across a field one bitterly cold winter’s morning, snow and ice crunching deliciously underfoot, and suddenly the way is blocked by a cowpat so substantial you’re wondering if the cow even survived it. That’s what I see here.)

The researchers ended up there by accident - they were planning to take samples from another candidate for the Earth’s most northernmost piece of land, Oodaaq, discover in 1978 and sitting around 780 metres away. In the words of expedition leader Morten Rasch of the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management:

“When I posted photos and the island’s coordinates on social media, a number of American island hunters went crazy and said that it couldn’t be true."

“Island hunters” (nothing to do with the reality TV show) are hobbyists and/or enthusiasts chasing the thrill of being the first to discover new land - so I guess it’s only natural these folk realllly wanted Qeqertaq Avannarleq to be crowned the island at the top of the world.

Yet the research team’s caution was warranted. After continuing to investigate the maybe-island - a complicated job, as the sea around it is permanently covered with a layer of ice up to 3 metres thick - in 2023, they found evidence of water flowing underneath, and no sign that Qeqertaq Avannarleq was physically connected to the sea bed by anything except ice.

However headache-inducingly imprecise the general definition of an island is (like the human invention we call a continent, it’s riddled with infuriating inconsistencies), what we generally seem to agree upon is that naturally occurring islands are made of land, and “land” isn’t the same thing as “ice”. As a rule, if an island is completely surrounded by water or ice, including underneath it, it’s not an island.

Well, except for floating islands! They’re completely different, because, because…uh…?

ANYWAY. LET’S MOVE ON, SHALL WE.

The researchers now agree that Qeqertaq Avannarleq isn’t an island - it’s just an unusually befouled iceberg. At some point, the immense pressure of the surrounding sea ice pressed a particularly big chunk up against a lovely pile of filth (gravel, soil, mud and other detritus, perhaps depositing by landslides) and then that mucky ice slowly tumbled & bobbed its way to the surface.

Not a new thing for this region - these dirty faux-islets appear and disappear all the time - but this time, the hype had clearly got a little too far ahead of the science.

It’s a nice example of how some very human aspects of island research - the urge to be the first to a discovery, the compulsion to find the most extreme examples of them - can turn the whole thing into A Grand Adventure, with all the emotion-driven complications that can lead to.

(Sometimes this can help grab attention to important research - yet if you’re a professional scientist, you’ll already be aware that grant application hacking by turning it into ‘a good story’ is an ongoing problem that can make a mockery of the whole process.)

But here’s something amazing that turned out to be very real - with dramatic consequences for the future of the Arctic as a whole.

This splendidly-adorned chap is Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-1765): Russian polymath, scientist, writer - very much the Isaac Newton of his part of the world.

Amongst other things, he discovered the law of conservation of mass in chemical reactions, he was the first to announce that Venus has an atmosphere, and he founded some of the key principles of modern geology. There's a town named after him in the Petrodvortsovy district of Saint Petersburg, a lunar crater with his name, a Martian crater with his name (that’s just greedy) and even an asteroid too…

And at some point, as legend has it, he predicted there was something MASSIVE under the Arctic ice.

In 1948, a Soviet high-altitude expedition of scientists, pitching a camp on the Arctic ice sea, detected unusually shallow waters stretching northwards of Russia's New Siberian Islands.

Here's a glorious relief map from the October 1971 edition of National Geographic Magazine (in exactly the same style as the ones modelled from Tharp & Heezen’s data, as I previously mentioned here):

It clearly shows what the Soviet scientists found (with the vertical height exaggerated for clarity). Across the whole of the Arctic Sea basin, flanked by mid-oceanic and volcanic ridges on either side, is a whoppingly huge belt of continental crust.

How huge?

It's more than 1,800 kilometres (1,100 miles) long, and between 3.3km to 3.7km above the surrounding sea floor, for its whole length, getting to within 400 metres of the surface at its highest point.

Imagine a ridge of mountains as high as the Dolomites, with sides almost as steep, stretching from London (UK) to Belgrade (Serbia) or Detroit to Houston - with a flattened top that's between 60 and 200km wide.

On dry land, this would be an absolutely incredible landmark - a standing tidal-wave of rock, dividing whatever continent it ran across. Millions of tourists would come to see it every year. You might have walked along it yourself, or dreamed of owning a little cottage in sight of it.

It's now called the Lomonosov Ridge, in honour of the man who guessed its existence 200 years earlier.

Now the three countries that border on it - Canada, Denmark (via Greenland) and Russia - are determined to lay claim to it.

Here is a map (via the Barents Observer) created by Canada as part of one of its claims to the United Nations:

(If you're wondering what the massive, wholly unlabelled continent at the top is, it's called "Russia". Talk about making a statement. 😬)

Each country is claiming it's an extension of their continental shelf, as Martha Henriques explains at BBC Future here:

“As coastal nations, Russia, Denmark and Canada of course already have sovereign rights over the seafloor close to their own shores. Coastal countries can establish an Exclusive Economic Zone that stretches up to 200 nautical miles (370km) from shore, which gives them rights to activities like fishing, building infrastructure and extracting natural resources, under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. That law also permits a country to extend its rights over the seabed further – if there are seafloor features that they can prove are an extension of their continental shelves.

For such a seafloor feature to count in a country’s favour, there has to be evidence that it is a piece of submerged land – and not an oceanic ridge that has always been underwater and has little to do with the country’s land mass.

What [geologist Christian] Knudsen’s findings boil down to is evidence that the Lomonosov Ridge is indeed submerged land, and not formed from seafloor spreading, like the mid-Atlantic ridge that runs like a seam from Iceland down towards Antarctica.”

For decades now, its scientists have been working hard to establish the facts, to take to the United Nations to bolster their formal claims.

Extraordinarily, these claims have now become palaeogeological. It's becoming not about where the ridge is today, but where it was, up to millions of years ago.

Imagine laying claim to a place based on its ancient geological history! How messy could THAT get?

(Considering my nearest Scottish island Arran started its geological journey near the South Pole around 540 million years ago, as I previously wrote about here, would that mean Australia or New Zealand could lay claim to it? Or the United States, which Arran’s ancient motherland Laurentia turned into? It quickly gets absurd.)

All this didn't stop Russia sending out an icebreaker & two mini-subs in 2007 to plant a rust-proof titanium flag on the seabed, 4,200m (14,000ft) deep:

Sergei Balyasnikov of the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Institute issued a statement: “It's a very important move for Russia to demonstrate its potential in the Arctic... It's like putting a flag on the Moon.”

Other countries? Less than impressed.

"This isn't the 15th Century," said Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay. "You can't go around the world and just plant flags and say 'We're claiming this territory'."

Quite.

But of course a worrisome question hangs over all this. Is it going to be yet another flashpoint for future global conflicts, considering how all that inaccessible (protective?) polar ice is already melting?

It's true that new seaways will open up, and the Lomonosov Ridge may contain mineral resources - including millions of barrels of oil - which every country would be more than happy to get their hands on (if they exist, which is far from certain).

But this is still, & will be for a long time, one of the harshest & therefore most expensive places for humans and their machines to linger on our planet. Expedition costs currently run upwards of $250k every day. International cooperation is still vital for research to get underway in environmental conditions this arduous.

And of course Russia's geopolitical focus is - shall we say - elsewhere right now.

All this means time. Time for the science, and time for all the right voices to be invited into the room, as Henriques notes:

“As climate change has escalated interest in the central Arctic, the Inuit Circumpolar Council has called for states to engage with Inuit and other indigenous groups and respect their rights. While the central Arctic seafloor might seem to have little to do with climate change (especially if any hydrocarbons there aren’t extracted), being seen to be an environmental “steward” or “protector” in the Arctic is something that Canada, Denmark and even Russia are pushing for.

Indigenous communities are increasingly acknowledged as a crucial part of sustainability, in the Arctic and elsewhere. “Though it’s far into the future, we still have to be mindful of the interconnected nature of the whole ocean and the coastal seas, as well as the potential threats for Inuit and other Arctic indigenous peoples, and the Arctic states,” says Dorough [Dalee Sambo Dorough, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council]. 

It’s likely to be decades before there is an answer from the UN commission on the science that underpins all three countries’ claims. And it’s possible that the US still may submit a claim in the future, shifting the picture again. Norway, which claimed a more modest extended continental shelf excluding the pole, and with only a sliver of overlap with Denmark, has already had its recommendations from the UN.”

For now, the Arctic sea floor remains the site of one of the hidden wonders of the world, with much to reveal to the scientists of the future.

Let’s hope it remains that place of mystery and of wonder - and of nations remembering their most productive way forward is when they work together.

Images: Annie Spratt; gcaptain; Stefano Bazzoli; CIA World Fact Book/Wikimedia; Alexander Haffeman; GEBCO.

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I’m late with my next part of our season-long look at the science of islands - because I read far too much. This is an occasional hazard of this newsletter being written by an idiot (hi there) - I end up learning so much fascinating stuff that I make the rookie mistake of trying to squeeze it into one edition, turning that whole newsletter into an impenetrable brick of super-condensed, over-excited blather.

The solution, as always, is to space things out until the story can breathe again - and in this case, turning it into a two-parter (a bit like last time’s romp along the world’s longest mountain range). The first part will be with you shortly.

In the meantime, here are two quick updates about two very excellent things.

This is the latest book by writer, adventurer & filmmaker Brendan Leonard, who writes at Semi-Rad.

Brendan has an enviable gift for writing books that look at first glance like they’re about a particular outdoorsy thing - in this case, endurance sports and ultrarunning - but then some special magic emerges from the way he writes and you suddenly realise he’s actually talking about some part of everyday life you’ve always struggled to understand & have wrestled with for much of your life, and then you find he has somehow provided you (with immense grace and empathy) with a more comfortable way to sit with it and know yourself a little better.

How he does this, I have no idea - which is bloody irritating to me as a writer because it means I haven’t been able to steal it. It’s a specifically Brendan-Leonardy thing. Some people are just selfish like that.

Ultra-Something is no different in this way it’ll get under your skin. Florence Williams, author of The Nature Fix, had this to say about it:

“Winning despite the fact that he’s (never) winning, Brendan Leonard is refreshingly irreverent, emotionally honest, searingly wise, and, always, highly motivated by pizza. This book may not turn you into a nature-loving ultra runner, but it will certainly help you understand how doing very hard things can make us better humans.”

And for the next 24 hours, if you grab a copy of Ultra-Something in any format and let Brendan know, he’ll send you a free ebook copy of his previous book, Have Fun Out There or Not.

The details are here.

Secondly, here’s something I’ve been eagerly awaiting for years.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you may remember a terrific social reading app called Threadable that some of us were using to read things together.

(In essence, it’s like we’re all scribbling our questions & interpretations in the margins of the same book we’re all reading, but without any mess and with all the linky cleverness of a modern online service brought to fruition.)

It was really great - but alas, the version we were using was only available to some iOS and Mac users, which limited the number of us that could get involved.

But since then, the team at Threadable have been hard at work making & launching their brand-new Web version - and I’m delighted to say that it looks gorgeous, runs so beautifully and is available right now.

If you want to join my reading circle and take a look at the texts we were previously studying, click this link.

It’s such a great service for curious readers, and I hope you poke around the new interface and check out what else is happening over there - including fellow Substack writer ‘s reading circle on The Commons and Belonging in Science Fiction.

(You’ll also see that I’ve renamed my circle after the Big Amazing Read that I announced a few weeks back - and next week, I’ll have some more details on how we’ll be using Threadable for part of it.)

Hope to see you over there!

- Mike