Alan ₿

How did the elephants know? Two days after a South African conservationist named Lawrence Anthony passed of a heart attack in 2012, two herds of wild elephants walked for twelve hours through the bush to reach his house at the Thula Thula reserve in eastern South Africa. Twenty-one animals in total, who had not been to the house in over a year, arriving on their own without anyone calling them or leading them. Lawrence was the man who’d saved them. Years earlier the herd had been marked for shooting after escaping multiple enclosures and rampaging through populated land. He took them in when no one else would, camped near them for weeks, talked to them, sang to them, slowly earning the trust of the matriarch, Nana. They had lived peacefully on his reserve ever since. They stood at his property for two days, making low rumbling calls, restless, ears flaring. Then they turned and walked back into the bush. The next year, on the anniversary of his passing, they came back. And the year after that. And the year after that. Nobody can fully explain it. Elephants communicate over long distances using infrasound, low-frequency rumbles that travel for miles below the range of human hearing. They have the largest brain of any land animal, with a memory and a capacity for grief that researchers are still trying to measure. They mourn their own dead, sometimes returning to bones years later and gently touching them. Whether what happened at Thula Thula was a herd somehow sensing the loss of a man they’d bonded with, or a coincidence reframed by grief, is something even the people who were there have stopped trying to settle. Lawrence’s wife Françoise, who was at the house when the herd arrived, has said the simplest thing about it. “Some things in this world cannot be explained by reason. Cannot be seen.”

How did the elephants know? Two days after a South African conservationist named Lawrence Anthony passed of a heart attack in 2012, two herds of wild elephants walked for twelve hours through the bush to reach his house at the Thula Thula reserve in eastern South Africa. Twenty-one animals in total, who had not been to the house in over a year, arriving on their own without anyone calling them or leading them. Lawrence was the man who’d saved them. Years earlier the herd had been marked for shooting after escaping multiple enclosures and rampaging through populated land. He took them in when no one else would, camped near them for weeks, talked to them, sang to them, slowly earning the trust of the matriarch, Nana. They had lived peacefully on his reserve ever since. They stood at his property for two days, making low rumbling calls, restless, ears flaring. Then they turned and walked back into the bush. The next year, on the anniversary of his passing, they came back. And the year after that. And the year after that. Nobody can fully explain it. Elephants communicate over long distances using infrasound, low-frequency rumbles that travel for miles below the range of human hearing. They have the largest brain of any land animal, with a memory and a capacity for grief that researchers are still trying to measure. They mourn their own dead, sometimes returning to bones years later and gently touching them. Whether what happened at Thula Thula was a herd somehow sensing the loss of a man they’d bonded with, or a coincidence reframed by grief, is something even the people who were there have stopped trying to settle. Lawrence’s wife Françoise, who was at the house when the herd arrived, has said the simplest thing about it. “Some things in this world cannot be explained by reason. Cannot be seen.”

bitcoin is not crypto

“Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.” — G. K. Chesterton, quoted in The Way of Bitcoin (The Raft)

What historical fact sounds fake but is true?

What historical fact sounds fake but is true?

“A man who chases two rabbits catches neither.” — Ancient proverb (origin unknown), quoted in The Way of Bitcoin (Bitcoin Maximalism)

Ord io is shutting down on June 1. Three years ago, we launched our idea for "an Ordinals explorer with upvotes". We had no idea what was about to happen. Since then, Ord io has grown into a platform used by over a million people to explore inscriptions on Bitcoin. It brought us so much joy to ship features like Satributes for discovering the rare sats behind inscriptions and Block Vision for monitoring real-time Runes minting activity. Even simple filters and sorting options took on a life of their own. "Sort by largest inscription" quickly turned into a leaderboard where inscribers competed to create the biggest "four megger". And even the things that annoyed us at the time are funny to look back on now, like when the Bitcoin Puppets community would "raid" other collections so hard that we had to remove the downvote feature. To help preserve some of the Bitcoin culture that happened on Ord io, we'll be uploading the full history of upvotes, replies, and public address profiles to GitHub. That way, if someone wants to build their own Ordinals explorer with this context in the future, they can. Thank you to every single artist, collector, dev, and degen who joined us for this ride 🧡