¶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.

¶Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have successfully freed up power on Voyager 2, extending how long the spacecraft can continue to do science.  

¶Nicknamed the “Big Bang,” the effort involved simultaneously turning off certain powered devices and substituting them with lower-power alternatives while ensuring the spacecraft remains warm enough to operate.  

¶After almost a half-century since launch, the spacecraft power margins have grown razor thin, requiring the team to conserve energy by shutting off non-essential devices and systems.  

¶The savings should provide power to keep its three instruments operating for at least an extra year. 

¶Meanwhile, NASA’s out there continuing to do amazing things. The Voyager mission is the little space mission that could, still traveling through interstellar space more than forty-five years after the twin Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft were launched.

¶I made a beeline for Arlington Row, the achingly beautiful line of cottages that are one of Bibury’s most striking features. Sadly, the occupants of all those cars were already there. Despite hanging around for an hour, I was unable to get a pedestrian-free shot of Arlington Row. In the end, I settled for the least-busy shots I could find.

¶We made a day trip to Bibury during a trip to London last year. It was nuts. So nuts that I remember feeling guilty as we left town. Earlier, as we walked around town, my feelings had gone from wonder (it truly is beautiful) to disappointment as I realized, like the author here did, that I was not going to get a tourist-free photograph of Arlington Row. Then guilt arrived as we walked back to our coach. We watched other tourists walk every which way, largely ignoring sidewalks and even fences around yards. We stayed on designated paths, of course, but many people didn’t and that was a direct result of the number of tourists that had arrived that day. The sidewalks couldn’t contain them, which is a problem, and bigger sidewalks are not the solution.

¶As far back as Plato’s irascible character Meno, would-be teachers have been confronting the problem that students must want to learn before learning is possible. For many decades, higher education has relied on a workaround to this problem – tying access to good jobs to success in school. In some cases, a desire for money and prestige leads to real, if incidental, learning. But large language models have broken this arrangement by making it possible for students to skip straight to an effortless A without doing any meaningful learning. Technology has exposed the limits of our mercenary approach to education.

¶Over the course of last semester, I became convinced there is a way out of this moribund strategy: We teachers must remain students – and model what we want to see. We need to recover the passion that drove us to our books, to the lab. We need to embody love of learning for its own sake against the pervasive message that higher education should be vocational, and we need to clarify the basic questions that make our subjects worth studying.

¶(emphasis added)

¶I find this quite encouraging and exciting to think about. AI has had, and will continue to have, enormous impacts on education. We’ve heard plenty about the negative side of that equation - students using AI to cheat, the “effortless A”, schools having to use AI to detect cheating by AI, etc. But positive impacts of AI on education are real and this article helped me realize that some of the positive impacts are still on the horizon and truly might be enormous in scope.

¶I never really thought about it until reading this opinion piece, but it’s true that a lot of our education system is mercenary in nature, at least in the United States. It’s designed to support each student’s efforts to build skills that will help them in their chosen field of work. What happens if that purpose of education is diminished or disappears entirely? Could the oft-spoken but rarely embodied “lifetime love of learning” actually became a focus of education at all levels? Imagine the absolute explosion in human knowledge and sharing of knowledge that could come from that.

¶I’m going to be thinking about this one for a bit.

¶He made the admission to Slate while he was pushing back against another story, published in Knox News, that claimed he was shutting down because he was retiring and moving south.

¶“The girl that reported that did not know what she was talking about,” Hays reportedly said. “I’m not retiring....”

¶He theorized that the reporter “didn’t want to say we were closing for lack of business, but that’s why we’re closing.”

¶This story is interesting to me on multiple levels.

¶First, it’s somewhat personal. We’ve driven by this store many times over the last several years on our trips between Toledo and St. Pete Beach. It’s a spectacle, complete with billboards, old cars with signs in the windows, and various attention grabbers out front (think car wash and appliance store streetside advertising). I don’t think we’ve ever seen more than a few cars in the lot that seemed to belong to customers, though. Apparently our drive-by’s have not coincided with some of the more active days recounted in the article.

¶Second, both the owner and an employee apparently recognize that Trump’s “dwindling” popularity is at least partly to blame for the slowdown in business. And the shop is in Tennessee, which is a heart of Trump Train country. Maybe, just maybe, some Trump supporters are waking up. Maybe, just maybe, Trump’s record low approval rating is actually accurate…in Tennessee.

¶And third, the owner of the store made a very interesting comment about the local reporting on the closure. According to the report from the Independent, local outlet the Knoxville News Sentinel claimed “he was shutting down because he was retiring and moving south.” Not true, according to the store owner. “I’m not retiring, not moving [to Florida].” Why, then, did the local report state that “the closure was in part due to the owner…purchasing a condo in Naples with plans to relocate”?

¶The Independent asked the owner this very question, who offered a theory: “the [local] reporter didn’t want to say we were closing for lack of business, but that’s why we’re closing….”.

¶Local reporting on the closure, it seems, is incomplete at best. At least some was true.

¶For several years, model developers competed primarily on benchmarks, context windows, coding performance, and reasoning capabilities. Enterprise buyers are increasingly asking a simpler question: how much useful work does each dollar of inference buy? That favors efficient models and gives Chinese developers an opening even when they do not lead every benchmark. It also pressures frontier labs carrying enormous computing, staffing, and data-center expenses. If model intelligence becomes increasingly interchangeable for routine workloads, margins could compress much faster than many AI business models assume. For startups, however, lower inference costs could unlock applications that previously failed basic unit-economics tests.

¶The eventuality of cost considerations may be arriving for AI models. And if competition begins to turn on price, will edge development continue at a breakneck pace? We’ll see.

¶On a practical level, I’m hopeful that competition on price will bring some clarity on the question of “how much AI do I get per dollar?”. It’s still largely impossible to tell, at least for me.

¶The Massachusetts Council (Maine was part of Massachusetts until 1820) ordered that the Declaration would be read aloud and then delivered to each town clerk. The clerks were then instructed to record it in the town’s official records book.

¶“The Wells Town Record Book contains both the Declaration and those original instructions, which is an incredible connection to one of the most significant moments in American history! The record has been preserved in the Town Clerk’s archives 250 years after it was originally written as an incredible piece of Wells’ history,” the town wrote in a Facebook post.

¶This is incredible to think about. I wonder what thoughts were running through the mind of this particular Town Clerk as they wrote the text of the Declaration into the records. It likely took awhile, writing it by hand, so they surely had plenty of time to think about the words and their meaning. Did they take it seriously? Did they appreciate the significance of it, or dismiss it as crazy talk? Or did they just want to finish the work and head home for the day?

¶Previously, people saw aging as a linear accumulation of damage to molecules such as proteins and DNA. But we found that aging is not a linear process. It’s more like a developmental process, in which there are distinct stages that involve coordinated changes in specific cell types across different organs. Our claim is that aging is not so much molecular damage as a remodeling of the entire cell society.

¶We tend to view aging as a breakdown of sorts, things not working as well as they did earlier in life. And that’s true on a macro level. Knees and other joints aren’t as accommodating, muscles are weaker, balance fades. On a cellular level, though, aging appears to be more of a step-wise movement through stages of an ongoing process that is hard-wired into our DNA. It reminds me a bit of cell death by apoptosis. Cell death by apoptosis is not the result of a breakdown (or direct trauma), but rather the result of an orderly, even programmed, process. This work seems to extend that from single cells to “cell societies”.

¶Can we alter or even stop the process? If so, at which stage, and what consequences would that bring? Interesting questions to think about.

¶According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Apple is reaching out to publishers to enter multi-year deals that would supply journalistic content for use with Siri AI. The details of the deals haven’t been shared, but it seems Apple is seeking a pay-as-you-go model with a possible nine-figure budget for payments.

¶The model differs from Apple’s previous partnerships with publications and AI training, which involved bulk payments for training datasets. Instead, Apple appears to be planning to pay as content is used, similar to Apple News.

¶That would mean if a user asks for information regarding a news story or report that is a part of this partnership, the partner would get paid for delivering that content. The user would also benefit from being provided human-written content unaltered from an original source, at least, if it is presented that way.

¶(Emphasis added)

¶This is interesting to me from both a financial aspect and a content one. Financially, maybe it will provide a reliable revenue stream for news outlets, particularly if it is successful and eventually adopted by others. And, no lawsuits required!

¶On the content side, I’m wondering if this would allow users to ask Siri to present human written content on a particular news item from multiple sources. Something like “hey Siri, give me a direct report of this particular event from a leading liberal outlet and a leading conservative outlet without generating any additional summary information; include accurate quotes from each, along with links to the sources.”

¶Human-written content, accurately pulled from multiple sources reflecting multiple viewpoints, without an AI-generated summary, and with links to all sources used.

¶Presenting news this way would greatly reduce the friction associated with consuming news from multiple angles. Some people (most?) will likely prefer to continue living in their selected silo, but, over time, this could fundamentally alter the way in which people consume news.