Mildly interesting
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There's a lesson here. I'd never heard this story.
đđż. Frank Mayfield was touring the Tewksbury Institute when, on his way out, he accidentally bumped into an elderly floor maid. To ease the awkwardness, Dr. Mayfield struck up a conversation.
âHow long have you worked here?â he asked.
âIâve worked here almost since the place opened,â she replied.
âWhat can you tell me about the history of this place?â
âI donât think I can tell you much,â she said, âbut I can show you something.â
She led him down to the basement beneath the oldest wing of the building and pointed to a small, rusted cell. âThatâs the cage where they used to keep Annie Sullivan,â she said.
âWhoâs Annie?â
The maid explained that Annie was a young girl brought there because she was considered incorrigibleâwild, uncontrollable, impossible to manage. She bit, screamed, and threw her food. Doctors and nurses couldnât even examine her.
âI was just a few years younger than Annie,â the maid continued. âI used to think, âIâd hate to be locked in a cage like that.â I wanted to help her, but if the doctors couldnât, what could someone like me do?
âOne night I baked some brownies after work. The next day, I set them on the floor outside her cage and said, âAnnie, I baked these just for you. You can take them if you want.â Then I hurried away, afraid sheâd throw them. But she didnât. She took the brownies and ate them. After that, she was a little nicer to me. Sometimes Iâd talk to her, and once I even got her laughing.
âOne of the nurses noticed and told the doctor. They asked if Iâd help them with Annie. So whenever they needed to see her, I went in first to calm her, explain things, and hold her hand. Thatâs how they discovered Annie was nearly blind.â
After a year of slow, difficult progress, the Perkins Institute for the Blind opened. Annie was sent there, where she learned to read, write, and eventually became a teacher herself.
Years later, Annie returned to Tewksbury to visit and to help. The Director remembered a letter he had just received from a desperate father. His daughter was blind, deaf, and thought to be âderanged.â He didnât want to put her in an asylum and asked if anyone might come work with her at home.
That is how Annie Sullivan became the lifelong companion and teacher of Helen Keller.
When Helen Keller later received the Nobel Prize, she was asked who had most influenced her life. She answered, âAnnie Sullivan.â
But Annie replied, âNo, Helen. The woman who influenced us both was a floor maid at Tewksbury who brought a little girl some brownies.â
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I thought it was cool that we figured out how to make free pay phone calls by tapping out the number on the receiver hook.
In the 1960s, a kid playing with a toy whistle from a Capân Crunch cereal made an odd discovery. The whistle produced a 2600-hertz tone, the same sound used by AT&T to control its phone network. That unlocked a loophole in the system, allowing them to hack into AT&T and get free long distance calls.
When pranksters and tech-savvy youth discovered this, they learned they could mimic the signal, tricking the network into granting free international calls. These early experimenters, dubbed âphone phreaks,â laid the groundwork for what would later become modern hacking culture.
The most famous of them, John Draper (nicknamed âCaptain Crunchâ) built electronic devices called âblue boxesâ that reproduced the whistleâs tone with precision. Even a young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were captivated by the trick, selling their own blue boxes at college before founding Apple. What began as childlike curiosity revealed the fragility of the worldâs largest communications system and marked the dawn of digital rebellion.
Added Fact: The 2600 Hz tone became so iconic that a hacker magazine, 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, was later named in its honor.
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FDR always seemed like something of a grandfather figure. I just (re) learned that he was only 63 when he died.
That means when Pearl Harbor happened he was still in his 50s. And he was only 50 when first elected.
Iâm sure I knew that back when that would have sounded much older to me.
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@jon-nyc said in Mildly interesting:
Not saying this is easy, and I donât know Iâd this is what he did. If it were me attempting this, I think I would do it in a tip-toe manner, without letting the heels touch the ground.
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âThe classic example of a hijack is masturbation,â Edward Slingerland tells me. Weâre talking about all the evolutionary quirks that humans tend to exploit â the cases where weâre âbuiltâ for one purpose, but decide to put that structure to other uses. And masturbation is a classic example.
In this weekâs Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with Slingerland about his book Drunk, in which he outlines his âintoxication thesis.â Slingerland argues itâs quite common to think that getting drunk is an evolutionary mistake. Some early Homo sapiens drank too much fermented fruit juice and discovered it was pretty fun. So they told their mates and, altogether, they clinked their frothy ciders and sang bawdy songs about hunting and gathering. But the human brain and body were not built to get drunk. Alcohol is effectively a poison. Our bodies donât like it â or so the argument goes.
The intoxication thesis says this is all wrong. For Slingerland, drinking alcohol and getting drunk are important to human well-being and complex societies. It might not be what evolution âintended,â but itâs certainly given us a reproductive and interspecies advantage.
So, how is getting drunk different from other âevolutionary mistakesâ? And what possible benefits might getting drunk give us? Today, we find out.
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