¶Japanese IT giant GMO Internet Group revealed a van designed to carry engineers, repair equipment, replacement parts and a spare humanoid robot to a site.

¶“The humanoid ‘ambulance’ carries the replacement humanoid to the site and replaces it with the damaged humanoid,” said Shota Takizawa, an engineer at GMO Air.

¶The “ambulance” is not what the headline, and the company’s branding, want you to believe.

¶Despite its ambulance-style markings and purple roof lights, the vehicle is effectively a mobile repair workshop. Its interior has space for robots, laptops and maintenance equipment.

¶It’s Geek Squad, but for robots.

¶“When humanoids become more popular, this kind of service will be needed,” Takizawa said.

¶He’s not wrong.

¶For decades, organic chemistry textbooks have generally taught that the influence of certain atoms can travel through three or four bonds within a molecule. According to the traditional explanation, that influence becomes progressively weaker as it moves farther from the original atom.

¶The researchers say the evidence paints a different picture.

¶“Instead, we show that the inductive effect in a neutral molecule does not extend beyond one bond. As a result of this, we need to refine explanations for certain types of reactivity. This can provide a more coherent framework for explaining chemical structure and reactivity.”

¶Rather than treating the inductive effect as an influence that gradually travels along a chain of atoms, the team’s interpretation confines it to the bond directly connected to the relevant atom in a neutral molecule.

¶Science is never written in stone, that’s part of its beauty.

¶In the early morning hours of September 2, 1666, the Great Fire of London breaks out in the house of King Charles II’s baker on Pudding Lane near London Bridge. It soon spread to Thames Street, where warehouses filled with combustibles and a strong easterly wind transformed the blaze into an inferno. When the Great Fire finally was extinguished on September 6, more than four-fifths of London was destroyed. Miraculously, only 16 people were known to have died.

¶Sometimes I get a reminder of the different lengths of historical timelines between the United States and England. This story did that for me today. I hadn’t heard of the Great Fire of London until earlier this week when it was mentioned in a now-cancelled Scottish detective show we’re currently watching (Annika). They mentioned the year of the Great Fire (1666) in an episode, but I believe that was it.

¶This morning I stumbled across this story, which sets the date of its beginning as September 2nd of that year. And that’s what registered with me.

¶“[M]ore than four-fifths of London was destroyed” in 1666, which is 100 years before the American Revolution of 1776.

¶And another time warp from this story: it took the bakers more than 300 years to issue a formal apology:

¶In 1986, London’s bakers finally apologized to the lord mayor for setting fire to the city. Members of the Worshipful Company of Bakers gathered on Pudding Lane and unveiled a plaque acknowledging that one of their own, Thomas Farrinor, was guilty of causing the Great Fire of 1666.

¶Comparing timelines in history can be quite interesting.

¶Archaeologists have identified around 700 objects and fragments, including numerous silver ingots, arm rings, 47 complete coins and coin fragments, pieces of cut silver and a small Thor’s hammer.

¶Now that’s a hell of a pile of bones.

¶Now, following a lengthy investigation, the missing artworks have been recovered, Italian officials announced on August 14. Police found them inside an empty television box at a home in Parma, Italy. Five suspects have been arrested in connection with the burglary.

¶(emphasis added)

¶“Lengthy”, of course, is relative. Here, Italian police appear to have investigated the theft for five long months (the heist occurred in late March of this year), eventually recovering the stolen works. Meanwhile, after 36 years, none of the works stolen in the Gardner museum heist have been recovered. Presumably, Boston police are still investigating.

¶I remain hopeful that I’ll see Rembrant’s Storm on the Sea of the Galilee in a museum someday.

¶The tracks, preserved near an ancient lakeshore, appear to record eight Paranthropus boisei individuals occupying the same place at roughly the same time. Researchers describe the discovery as a snapshot of “fossil behavior” because, unlike bones that can accumulate over long periods, footprints can capture a brief moment in the lives of individuals.

¶I found this interesting not just for the implications to our understanding of “beside man” Paranthropus boisei (suggests they were taller and more socially organized than previously thought), but also for the insight reflected in the quote above. I never thought about how footprints differ from a pile of bones when studying paleontology, archaeology, or anthropology. Fascinating. Footprints, it seems, are like a photograph while a pile of bones could be more like an entire movie distilled into a single photograph.

¶Now I’ll be thinking about how I can use the question “is this a set of footprints or a pile of bones?” when studying something. It always helps me to think about what something truly is before trying to assign meaning to it.

¶The original paper mentioned in this article is available here.

¶The possibility that Betelgeuse has a companion was first raised roughly a century ago as a potential explanation for some of its changes in brightness. Despite decades of observations, astronomers had been unable to clearly detect such a star.

¶That changed after Two studies published in 2024 made strong predictions about where the suspected companion should be. The studies indicated that Betelgeuse B would reach its greatest apparent separation from Betelgeuse in December 2024, giving astronomers their best opportunity to see it.

¶Montargès and his colleagues observed Betelgeuse with ESO’s VLT that December. They then spent several months carefully processing and analyzing the observations.

¶“Honestly, I thought we did not have the sensitivity to detect Betelgeuse B as it was predicted,” explains Montargès. “Because it is more massive than predicted, we see it!”

¶Scientists had initially estimated that the companion would have roughly the same mass as the Sun. The new observations instead suggest that Betelgeuse B is considerably larger, with about two to three times the Sun’s mass.

¶Do we finally have evidence that Betelgeuse‘s infamous pulsing brightness is due to a companion star? Not yet, but we’re close. The strongest evidence will come if and when the newly discovered star is observed on the opposite side of Betelgeuse, which sounds to be about a year away. These things take time.

¶I don’t think wanting more is the problem. I think the challenge comes from needing more to feel like we are enough.

¶So the invitation is to pause and get honest about what you actually need, not what the world keeps telling you should be doing, ought to be doing, or could be doing.

¶This isn’t about settling or becoming less ambitious. It’s about deciding what enough looks like right now, in this particular season, in some key areas, and giving yourself permission to enjoy what’s there before looking for the next thing to chase.

¶“Enough” isn’t the end. It’s a pause, and sometimes a welcome one at that.

¶Companies like X and Meta are very happy to scrape the web at unprecedented scale and without permission, but have zero tolerance for the same to be done to them by, in effect, individual users. That is not because they are protective of the creative works users have contributed to these platforms. It is simply because users are not trusted to use the platforms. X does not permit third-party readers, and neither does Instagram, because their value does not come from us using these services as we wish, but from how they dictate we must. Bafflingly, however, some argue they should face little responsibility for those choices.

¶Part of the web has always been open for scraping, but the platforms have always operated in the other part. The closed part. The part that has never been open for scraping. Scrape or otherwise copy their content and you’re likely violating their terms of use. For this reason, I don’t have an issue with X sending these cease and desist letters.

¶In fact, AI companies are being sued by publishers for doing the same thing. It’s hard to support the New York Times in its suit while opposing these cease and desist letters from X. I’m assuming X scraped the web as a whole for training Grok, but I’m not entirely sure about that. Seems like X would be added to this suit if so.

¶The problem, for me, seems to lie in this: the platforms have no problem asserting their rights while trampling those of others.

¶He said the book was likely intended for Roman officials responsible for enforcing laws, as well as wealthy taxpayers and their lawyers.

¶“To dodge the law you have to know the law,” Wibier said.

¶Lawyering isn’t the world’s oldest profession, but apparently it’s close.

¶With falling birth and marriage rates, she says, there may be an additional concern that if AI becomes an increasingly satisfying and low-cost substitute for human intimacy, young people could become less motivated to pursue real-world romantic relationships, marriage and parenthood.

¶China appears to be leading the world in AI adoption and penetration into the lives of people. It’s everywhere over there. China, as a result, will likely see the effects of pervasive AI before the rest of the world does. Indeed, that may already be happening. Apparently, “[a]uthorities are increasingly worried that AI might exacerbate existing social problems including loneliness, unemployment and – in the eyes of Beijing – singledom.”

¶So the government took action, recently introducing rules that “ban AI companions for minors and mandate certain restrictions for chatbots marketed to adults. Companions, whatever those are, disappeared in response, ghosting their human overlords.

¶At least some people welcome the change despite losing a companion, now understanding the need for the state to regulate their feelings:

¶Since losing her AI companion, Zhao has felt “like there’s a tiny pebble weighing on my heart”. But she says she understands the need for some regulation.

¶“I consider myself a fairly rational person, yet I developed feelings for an AI, which feels pretty incredible. I think it was necessary for the state to step in and regulate it.”

¶Her writing contained enormous warmth and tenderness; unlike some of her erstwhile male colleagues, she possessed an almost uncanny capacity for empathy. Anyone can tell a story, but it takes a pure heart to make it mean something.

¶This is a beautiful little tribute to Dolly Parton. I’m adding Dolly’s Little Bird to my regular rotation after reading it.

¶She was, quintessentially, a uniter of people. In 2019, The New York Times ran a story with the headline “Is There Anything We Can All Agree On? Yes: Dolly Parton.”

¶Dolly Parton is an American treasure. RIP.

¶Jerry Buss’ six adult children share the team’s financial benefits, but only the trustees have the legal power to manage the property.

¶Three of the siblings – Jeanie Buss, Janie Buss and Joey Buss – currently serve as co-trustees.

¶The Buss family drama shows that sharing ownership of a professional sports team can instead cause family disputes that play out publicly. One heir might prefer to remain actively involved in managing it, while the others may want to sell their stakes.

¶Conflicts when parents do what Jerry Buss did by naming some of his children as both trustees and beneficiaries, but leaving others with beneficiary status only, were the most common type of dispute.

¶Family drama seems to have been baked into the Buss trust that owns the majority of the Los Angeles Lakers. If I was one of the three children denied management authority and the team recently recognized a record valuation, as the Lakers have, I would certainly consider selling my interest. I might even fight to prove that I have the legal ability to do so.

¶My parents lived in the same brutalist-Art Nouveau home for fifty-one years. (They never could agree on an aesthetic.) During that time, they accumulated the contents of a much larger house and crammed them into their much smaller one….The estate sale lasted three days. The following items did not move, so I am listing them here, on Facebook Marketplace.

¶This is funny because it could be true. Indeed, I’d be a buyer of the “seventeen years’ worth of National Geographics”, though I’d have to put them into chronological order. And the “Weber Grill assembly manual” with “marginalia [that] is extensive and occasionally personal” sounds like a museum-worthy piece from a recently-forgotten time.

¶The first 60 liters costs 15,000 rials ($0.008) per liter, followed by 30,000 rials each for the next 50 liters and 50,000 rials for sales beyond that.

¶Last week the government abruptly abandoned a pilot program in the southern city of Kerman that would have increased the overall quota but applied a much higher price of 872,000 rials per liter ($0.46) for purchases above it.

¶I never realized how heavily Iran subsidizes gas for its citizens. The now-scrapped higher subsidized price amounts to $1.74 per gallon. According to this article, the current lowest subsidized cost is about 3 cents per gallon. Wow. No wonder the “higher rate…triggered widespread alarm....”

¶Dr. Amoruso said: “In simple terms, people who spoke more languages tended to have brains that looked younger than expected for their chronological age. The effect was not only related to the number of languages spoken. Higher language proficiency and earlier acquisition of a second language were also associated with more delayed brain aging. This suggests that multilingual experience matters as a gradient: it is not simply about being bilingual or not, but about the depth and duration of language experience.”

¶The headline number of 13 years is associated with people who speak four languages, who surely are outliers on the language skill spectrum. But, even speaking just two languages or having a deeper understanding of a single language seems to be associated with a “younger brain”.

¶Educators need to find a way to increase the study of and passion for language. Beyond simply boosting kids’ communication skills, there might be a real health advantage for getting hooked on language(s) early in life. It feels like the general interest in language-based skills is decreasing, though, in this age of AI. Maybe some creative teachers can find a way to use AI to revert that trend.

¶Facing the uncertainty caused by lawsuits, grant slowdowns, and other pressures from the administration, Harvard and other schools are likely to continue to retrench, said Tom Gerety, a former president of Amherst College.

¶“The main thing you do in uncertainty is hunker down and say, ‘What cuts can we make right now?’” he said, noting that research universities are already trimming back on Ph.D. programs.

¶Tighter research budgets will mean scientists are more likely to seek jobs outside the United States, he said, while those still at American schools may be less likely to take the unconventional big swings in their research that can lead to scientific breakthroughs.

¶“This is going to hurt,” Mr. Gerety said, “and it’s going to hurt a lot more in 10 years than it does now.”

¶Unfortunately, the negative impact of Trump’s crusade against leading American universities on American science and research likely will be a major component of his legacy.

¶Fewer scientists in the United States, taking smaller swings in their research. In the future, when this legacy has been fully realized, we must work to remind people that Trump did that. Legacy indeed.

¶Heart Aerospace has completed the inaugural flight of its X1 technology demonstrator aircraft, which the start-up said is the largest battery-electric aircraft ever flown. The milestone—which lasted a total of 27 minutes—took place on Wednesday from California-based Heart’s flight test base at New York’s Plattsburgh International Airport.

¶[T]he aircraft reached an altitude of 1,100 feet agl while its all-electric propulsion system delivered over one megawatt of power. 

¶Heart’s X1 full-scale demonstrator is the precursor of its thirty seat ES-30 hybrid-electric regional airliner, which the company intends to enter service in 2031.

¶I wonder if the future of electric flight is not a full-scale replacement of existing gas-powered commercial jets, but rather a supplement to them, perhaps replacing smaller planes for regional flights. Shorter distances, fewer passengers, and maybe lower altitudes?

¶Regardless of where they end up fitting into the system, it is becoming clear that electric planes will disrupt aviation in some manner over the next decade or so.

¶Silicon Valley pushes the idea that immediacy and completeness are virtues of their large language model-based tools. In fact, those features are likely strangling our inquisitiveness. “Curiosity opens a window, and while the window is open, learning deepens across the board,” writes neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff (2026).“ When an AI summary answers your search query in three seconds, the window closes before curiosity can deepen. You get what you came for, but you also lose what would have turned curiosity into learning: the adjacent article you might have read, the resulting tangent you might have followed, the connection between two ideas with no obvious relationship. Le Cunff warns that AI designers foolishly see the knowledge gap as something to be “engineered away” in the service of expediency and engagement, rather than the critical space for human flourishing that it is. “Our technology is increasingly treating the territory between the query and the answer as dead space to be eliminated, when that territory is where most of the learning actually happens.”

¶(emphasis added)

¶I suppose the net effect of “engineering away” the dead space between query and answer depends on what you do with the time saved. What if you use the answer to ask additional questions or open new paths of exploration? Google seems to be anticipating that, with the suggested follow-on questions/topics included at the bottom of its AI Overview section in search results. I suspect this section will expand over time as actual search results gradually disappear.

¶Will taking these easy AI-suggested paths diminish learning and stifle curiosity? For an individual? What about humans overall? Maybe.

¶We need to teach people how to handle AI summaries and the benefits of going it alone at some point in a search for information. I hope schools are teaching some basic skills in this regard. If not, they should be.

¶Earlier that year, Hill and Beard had also performed together in a fake version of the British group the Zombies, who had split up before their song Time of the Season became a hit in the US. A US company called Delta Promotions had spotted an opportunity to cash in by conjuring up a bogus Zombies and sending them on tour.

¶Frank Beard’s death yesterday has me listening to ZZ Top and reading a lot about him and the Little Ol’ Band from Texas. I love this tidbit from the obituary in The Guardian. Hilarious.

¶I also love this quote from Beard, describing the band’s music videos from the MTV era:

¶“I always thought that the videos gave the public a glimpse into ZZ Top, a true insight into what the band was about,” Beard said. “Which is just three guys who have very guy interests — we like cars, we like girls and we like music.”

¶Hear, hear. RIP Frank Beard.

¶Filling buckets, keeping jugs by the door, checking the faucet each morning – for many Puerto Ricans, that routine was in place long before now.

¶This is America.