¶I read this interview with the CEO of United Airlines, Scott Kirby, to learn a bit more about the airline. I didn’t expect to find a gem regarding the use of AI, but I did.

¶How are you personally using A.I.?

¶The way that most people use A.I. is ridiculous.

¶Say more.

¶Using A.I. to summarize is like reading a summary of the CliffsNotes. I want to read a book because the interesting stuff is in the spaces in between. I want to find the things that nobody else has figured out.

¶(emphasis added)

¶This is exactly how I feel about reading, and exactly how I feel about asking AI to summarize things for me. I don’t want to skip the reading part.

¶“Algorithms lack the spark of the human, whereas ‘authentic culture and art preserve this spark,’” the Pope added, quoting his first encyclical letter, “Magnifica Humanitas,” which was published in May. The letter cautions against the encroachment of AI on humanity, asserting that true progress cannot be measured by performance or technological speed, but through human empathy and connection.

¶AI will force us to contemplate what it means to be human. I believe art, in all its forms, is central to the human identity and will flourish as a result. I’m with the Pope on this one.

¶Thanks to the well-preserved fossil, researchers created an updated evolutionary tree of microraptors. Analyses revealed 194 anatomical adaptations that arose in the group—about 30 percent of which also popped up in bird evolution. They include things like a certain forearm bone being longer than an upper arm bone and the fusion of specific wrist and hand bones. However, the researchers found that the overlapping features evolved in different orders in the two groups, hinting that they did not come from a common ancestor. Rather, they may have both developed flight independently because of similar environmental pressures, a phenomenon called convergent evolution.

¶The world has been pressuring its inhabitants to take flight for quite some time.

¶Potential applications include concrete pavements, highway parapet walls, and sewer pipelines. These structures could continue serving their traditional engineering functions while also capturing some carbon dioxide from their surroundings.

¶There’s likely a lot of research to be done, but this sounds promising.

¶In 2024, Joël Lapointe was preparing for a trip to the remote Côte-Nord region when a circular feature near Lake Marsal caught his attention on online satellite imagery. He wondered whether the depression could have been formed by an impact and reached out to specialists in Europe and North America.

¶Lapointe’s inquiry helped prompt a group of French researchers to identify the lake area as the center of a potential 11th known impact structure in Quebec at a 2024 meeting of the Meteoritical Society. The possibility eventually drew the attention of Gordon Osinski, a planetary geologist at Western University who also directs the Impact Earth database.

¶Osinski was skeptical at first, but the possibility was intriguing enough that he organized an expedition to the isolated location in October 2025.

¶Researchers discovered shatter cones in numerous rock outcrops. These distinctive structures form under the intense pressures produced during an impact and provided compelling evidence that the feature was not volcanic after all.

¶I’ll never look at Google Maps the same way again. Citizen science FTW.

¶The absence of an updated tax gap estimate is part of a pattern across the Trump administration, which has either stopped collecting or sought to change the measurement of federal data that scientists and other researchers have long relied on for a rigorous, unvarnished understanding of the country. The Pentagon declined to provide information to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office about the cost of the war in Iran, and last year the president fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces the monthly job numbers, baselessly calling the labor market data “rigged.”

¶It seems like a stretch to lump the missing tax gap estimate into a bucket with “federal data that scientists and other researchers have long relied on”, considering this apparent inconsistency in the article:

¶The I.R.S. has long published an estimate of the tax gap, the amount of tax owed under existing law that goes uncollected each year. The agency began releasing an estimate of the tax gap annually during the Biden administration....

¶So which is it—“long published” or “began releasing…during the Biden administration…”?

¶The author seems to have introduced this smudge on his work to support the assertion that the Trump administration has “stopped collecting or sought to change the measurement of federal data....” There are certainly plenty of well-known, long-standing federal data that Trump has killed or wounded that the author could have pointed to for support.

¶And, regardless, the main point is made: the I.R.S. isn’t telling us how much tax owed is unpaid. Is it more or less than the “roughly $700 billion” from the estimate released in October 2024, which is apparently the last one the agency has provided.

¶I’ll assume it’s more until I see and believe otherwise.

¶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.