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Spaghetti ice-cream
Happy Sunday {{first_name}},
Have you noticed that your feed is repetitive these days? We’ve evolved (whether we like it or not) from social media to interest media, with the algorithms playing it safe by serving you the same topics over and over.
“Oh, you watched a 10-second video from the US Open? Great. Here are 17 posts about tennis.” - Meta’s engine room, probably
At Ghost Mail Weekender, we have no idea what you like. That’s half the point really, as it means that Dominique’s weekly column brings you something very different to what you’re seeing on your other feeds. This time, it’s about spaghetti ice-cream in Germany and how the changes to the internet have made it much harder to be a digital flâneur. Get it here.
For a journey from desserts to deserts, read on for the debate around exactly how the iconic Tutankhamun discovery happened. Finally, this week’s Fast Facts delivers a delightful mix of accidental finds.
Enjoy the rest of your Sunday!
The Finance Ghost (follow on X) | Dominique Olivier (connect on LinkedIn)
The internet can’t serve you spaghetti ice-cream
Once upon a time, getting lost was how you found the good stuff. Then the internet learned to predict exactly where you were going – and how to redirect you.
With our feeds creating a seemingly endless loop of the same content, are we in the twilight era of the digital flâneur?
Nobody actually knows how AI gets used.
AI tool sprawl happened fast, and visibility never caught up. Employees paste contracts into ChatGPT, run code through Copilot, and build workflows in apps security never approved.
Harmonic Security classifies every AI interaction by task, tool, and team, so you can see which use cases drive real productivity, which tools are shelfware, and where sensitive data is headed. Across approved and unapproved apps alike.
No need to guess what 'AI adoption' means inside your company.
The water boy and the boy king
TL;DR: Archaeology's grandest discovery may have hinged on its smallest accident: a water boy, a heavy jar, and a hollow scooped in the sand.
By November 1922, Howard Carter was nearly out of road. For years he had been digging in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings on his benefactor Lord Carnarvon's money, working over a patch of land that most Egyptologists considered exhausted. Lord Carnarvon's patience had thinned (much like Carter’s luck), and they agreed on one final season of digging before calling it.
Carter was chasing a name that had all but vanished: Tutankhamun, a boy king buried in a hurry, then erased by the rulers who followed. That erasure turned out to be a kind of accidental protection. While grander tombs had their treasures looted within a generation, Tutankhamun's slipped out of memory entirely, forgotten and therefore left intact for three thousand years.
Then, on the 4th of November, a single cut step was discovered. It led down to a sealed door, and behind it lay more than five thousand objects, gold upon gold - the only royal burial ever found essentially intact.
The story of how that step was found is often debated and hard to prove, but nonetheless compelling. The stroke of luck belongs not to Carter but to a twelve-year-old Egyptian water boy, Hussein Abdel-Rassoul. His job was hauling water to the labourers in heavy jars. One day (or so the story goes) he set the jars down to rest and scooped out a hollow in the sand to steady them. As he started scooping the sand away, his hands hit stone. He found the cut edge of a step, and ran for Carter.
It's a lovely story, which is why we want to believe it so badly. Carter's own account credits his workmen, not a named child. The vivid details including the boy and his water jars were mostly added decades later, traced back to Hussein himself in old age, and they shift with each retelling. Sometimes he digs a hollow, sometimes a jar simply shatters and the spilled water does the uncovering.
If Hussein’s story is true, then there’s something wonderfully serendipitous about it. The last season, the written-off valley, three thousand years of waiting - and in the end it may have turned on a boy setting down his water jars in one randomly chosen spot. The grandest find in archaeology, hanging on the smallest of accidents.
Dominique’s Fast Facts - “The things you find when you aren’t looking”
In 1940, four teenagers near Montignac in southwest France followed a dog down a hole left by an uprooted tree and dropped into a chamber whose walls were covered in 17,000-year-old cave paintings. This became the Lascaux cave, one of the greatest finds in the history of art.
In 1947, a young Bedouin shepherd searching for a stray goat in the cliffs above the Dead Sea threw a stone into a cave to flush the animal out and heard pottery shatter instead. Inside were clay jars holding the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest surviving collection of major biblical manuscripts ever discovered.
In 1989, a man at a flea market in Adamstown, Pennsylvania paid $4 for a dreary painting he wanted only for its gilt frame. When he took the canvas out, a folded document slipped from behind it. The document turned out to be one of just 24 surviving 1776 broadside printings of the Declaration of Independence. He later sold it at Sotheby's for $2.42 million.
In 1963, a man in the Turkish town of Derinkuyu took a sledgehammer to a wall during a home renovation and found a tunnel behind it. The tunnel led to more tunnels, and eventually to a vast underground city carved from soft volcanic rock, once capable of sheltering some 20,000 people along with their livestock, wine presses and chapels. It had sat beneath the town, largely forgotten, for centuries.
In 1903, French chemist Édouard Bénédictus knocked a glass flask off his bench, but instead of shattering across the floor, it cracked and held its shape. The flask had held a cellulose nitrate solution that left an invisible film inside it. That accident became the basis for laminated safety glass, which is now used on every car windshield in the world.