Thursday afternoon. I have reached the point in the week where I am forwarding things rather than answering them, and tomorrow’s calendar has one item on it I have already privately decided to move.

Instead, here’s three things worth knowing, none of which will help you at work.

The most-viewed photograph in history was taken by a bloke driving to his girlfriend’s house.

• Charles O’Rear, January 1996, pulled over on a Sonoma highway because the grass looked good.
• One frame. Medium format, Fujifilm Velvia. He never edited it.
• It sat in a stock library. Bill Gates bought the stock library.
• In 2000 Microsoft went looking for a wallpaper. It shipped on a billion machines.
• No courier would insure the original film, so he flew it to Seattle himself.
• The man who shot the “Autumn” wallpaper was paid $45.

Atlas Obscura →

The largest diamond heist ever pulled was undone by a salami sandwich.

• February 2003. Heat sensors, seismic sensors, radar, a magnetic field, private security.
• They blinded the heat sensors with hairspray and a sheet of polystyrene.
• The magnetic contacts they unscrewed days early and taped shut.
• 123 of 160 boxes emptied. North of $100 million. None of it ever recovered.
• Then they dumped the rubbish in a wood. A landowner found it and rang the police.
• Half-eaten salami sandwich, ringleader’s DNA. Arrested five days after the job.

Wikipedia →

The 1904 Olympic marathon was decided by rat poison and a lift.

• The first man over the line had done eleven miles of it in a car, waving as he passed.
• The President’s daughter crowned him before anyone worked it out.
• The actual winner was fed strychnine and egg white, with a brandy chaser, by his own handlers.
• He hallucinated that the finish was twenty miles away, and was carried across it.
• Slowest Olympic marathon ever run. By half an hour.
• One runner was chased a mile off course by wild dogs and still came ninth.
• Eighteen of the thirty-two never finished. The first anti-doping rule followed in 1908.

Smithsonian →

The longer one

The most private minute ever recorded

In 1977 NASA bolted a gold-plated copper record to the side of two spacecraft. Greetings in 55 languages, whale song, Bach, 115 photographs. If anything ever found it, it would get some account of what this place had been like.

Ann Druyan was 27 and running the creative side of the project. Her idea was to record a person’s brainwaves, on the theory that in a billion years someone might have worked out how to read them. She asked Carl Sagan whether that was plausible. He said a billion years is a long time, so they may as well try.

She volunteered herself, and wrote out a script to think through: the history of the planet, the evolution of life, what civilisations do to each other.

Then, on the first of June, she and Sagan had a phone call and agreed to get married. The session was already booked. Two days later she lay down at Bellevue Hospital in New York, was wired to an EEG and an ECG, and worked through her list for an hour. Somewhere in there she thought about him.

That hour was compressed to about a minute. Played back, it sounds like firecrackers. They married in 1981 and stayed married until he died in 1996. The recording is now roughly 25 billion kilometres away and has not stopped.

The most private minute in human history is also the furthest-travelled.

Course materials

That’s it. Go home.

Professional Development  ·  sent Thursdays, when it stops mattering
Issue 02