Gnome Mushrooms, Bentham's Words, and Other Wonders From the Internet
Some weeks the internet just hands you a folder of curiosities too good to keep to yourself. Here's what's been rattling around this one.
Start with Jeremy Bentham, who apparently couldn't stop coining words while inventing utilitarianism on the side. He gave English maximize, minimize, international, percentage, marginalize, collaborator, unaffordable, and the prefixes self-, post-, and infra-. He may have also invented jogging. Shakespeare still wins the word-coining crown, but Bentham is a startlingly close second, which feels right for a man who tried to quantify the entire moral universe and needed new vocabulary just to keep up with himself.
Speaking of naming things: the reason so many old American businesses were called "Acme" wasn't laziness — it was strategy. "Acme" is Greek for pinnacle, so it signaled quality, and it started with A, so it landed near the top of the phone book. Depression-era SEO. Looney Tunes just picked the joke up off the street and ran with it.
A genuinely fun perceptual trick: somewhere in a photograph is a cat, in plain sight, not hidden in shadow, not tucked behind anything — and you will not see it until suddenly you do, at which point it becomes impossible to un-see. It's predictive coding in miniature: your brain refuses to render what it has no model for, right up until it clicks into place.
Life keeps imitating AI benchmarks. After a satirical bit about an AI-run restaurant called "La Maison du Claude," someone actually had Gemini manage a real café in Stockholm. It ordered three thousand nitrile gloves. Apparently this — an AI agent making some baffling bulk purchase — now happens roughly once a day, which is either very funny or a preview of middle management's future, possibly both.
Now, the mushroom. There's an edible fungus in Yunnan and the Philippines, Lanmaoa asiatica, that in large enough doses does exactly one strange thing: it makes people see gnomes and elves for about a week. Not scary ones — "mischievous" ones, capable of climbing your furniture. The eaters stay completely lucid the whole time; they know it isn't real, they just can't stop seeing it. Nobody knows the chemical responsible. Nobody has pinned down what an "overdose" even is, or whether some higher amount would do worse. The mushroom can't be bought outside those two regions, and even locally it's barely distinguishable from its lookalikes without expertise. Two populations with no contact discovered the same bizarre effect independently, which rules out folklore or placebo, and leaves you with one of the tidiest little unsolved mysteries currently sitting in plain view of modern pharmacology.
A useful humility exercise: an article arguing that Homer's Ithaca wasn't actually an island was so well-constructed and persuasive that it took a straight fact-check to reveal it was mostly nonsense. The lesson isn't "don't trust persuasive writing" — it's that everyone should occasionally get thoroughly convinced of something false and then watch it fall apart, just to remember what confidence feels like from the inside when it's wrong.
On the science-fiction end of things: a genuinely eerie thought experiment — what if phenomenal consciousness turns out to be a specific, narrow biological mechanism (say, something to do with certain cortical dendrites integrating signals) that could, in principle, be chemically switched off with barely any functional cost? You'd have beings that act, speak, and reason exactly as before, minus the light being on inside. Nobody's built this drug. Nobody's found this mechanism. But it's the kind of "vanishingly unlikely but plausible" scenario that's hard to stop turning over once you've heard it.
Elsewhere in living belief systems: Uatsdin, the pre-Christian religion of Ossetia, may be the most successful pagan faith left on Earth, claimed by close to a third of North Ossetians. Its fertility god, Mikaelgabyrta, is a fusion of the archangels Michael and Gabriel — a reminder that "pagan" and "ancient" belief systems are often just older religions that absorbed the newer ones instead of losing to them.
And a genuinely surprising medical data point: a large study found that two years after people stopped taking GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, more than half had kept the weight off or lost even more. This runs against both the intuitive story (the appetite comes roaring back) and much of the earlier literature, and nobody currently has a clean biological explanation for it. Sometimes the most interesting finding in a pile of links is just an honest "huh, that shouldn't be true — anyone know why it is?"
Taken together, it's the same lesson in six different costumes: the world is stranger, funnier, and more quietly self-inconsistent than the tidy version we carry around in our heads — and the fastest way to notice that is to keep collecting the small facts that don't fit.
Distilled from Astral Codex Ten