¶The government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase equipment needed to train pilots to fly the 747-8 plane so quickly, on top of the approximately $400 million cost of the upgrades that the administration has publicly acknowledged. The Pentagon has tried to mask the total price tag — including from Congress — by taking the funds from a classified budget for nuclear modernization.

¶If only there was a way to assign a dollar figure to Trump’s ego. Then there’s the opportunity cost of foregoing “nuclear modernization”, whatever that is.

¶The latest mission looks to pin down whether her plane is on the same island.

¶“The evidence supporting the Nikumaroro Hypothesis remains compelling, and the only way to answer this question is to go to Nikumaroro, inspect the Taraia Object firsthand and follow the evidence wherever it leads,” Pettigrew said in a news release by Purdue University.

¶In archival satellite images, the mysterious image first appears in 2015, a year after a massive tropical storm shifted the sands. Ric Gillespie, an aviation accident investigator who has been writing about Earhart for decades, told Costello on TODAY in 2025 that the image captured by satellite is a downed coconut tree, not the famous plane.

¶This is pretty exciting and will be interesting to watch. I didn’t know about the Taraia Object (or Nikumaroro for that matter) until I watched Today’s reporting of this story this morning. Plane fuselage or coconut tree? We’ll see.

¶If the Taraia Object is indeed a plane, it stinks that the human remains found on the island in 1940 are long gone. Hopefully, in that case, enough survived to identify it as her plane.

¶Working together is the only way out of the shit we’re living in, in every aspect of life. Working together. Say it again and again until you do it. Underneath the mess, the beauty of the web is there still to build on, but only if we momentarily suspend our search for great wealth, and instead seek our humanity. Working together is the way.#

¶This post from Dave Winer goes a long way to explaining why I still cobble on web stuff, including this site. It reminds me of my “we had the web and it was glorious” post from a couple years ago.

¶We had the web and it was glorious. Anyone with some basic technical skills, or the desire to learn them, could buy a domain and start publishing content on that domain in a matter of hours, if not minutes. But they took it from us. Not in the traditional sense, mind you, because technically we still have it. We can still publish content at will. No, their taking is little more devious. They built their silos and made it even easier for people to publish content…in the silos. And they let people do this for no money (not for free, mind you). And then they junkified all the great content with ads and algorithms and infinite scrolling and piss-poor organization that makes it damn near impossible to find your old content and that of others.

¶I continue to build the publishing system for this site because it’s fun, and I continue to publish content here because it’s fun. I feel like a modern day HAM Radio operator at times, though, practicing an old technology for…fun. Maybe that’s the ultimate fate of the web, a relatively small group of people building on old technologies for fun. The silos don’t need to come down, we just need the basic technology to survive and remain accessible so that those who want to cobble can.

¶Cultural activities can strengthen social connections, encourage healthier lifestyle habits, and support better mental health, all of which may contribute to slower physiological aging.

¶An interesting correlation. Increasing cultural activities may not cause a slowing of physiological aging, but a sudden or gradual decrease in participation in such activities may signal a shift in a person’s physiological aging.

¶When those backup tariffs expire this week, the administration will step in again with new tariffs, ones the courts have consistently said that presidents have the authority to impose. Those could generate nearly $ 1 trillion over the next 10 years.

¶Over that period, our increasingly untenable national debt is likely to put even more fiscal pressure on future presidents. Regardless of who wins in 2028, the desire to avoid the wrath of the bond market may be at a high.

¶Mr. Trump’s successor will have options. The next president could keep some tariffs while rebalancing where the revenue comes from – and they should.

¶Trump monetized the American consumer and the revenue stream is currently being hardened. I’d probably be fine with that if I had confidence that the money would be used for things like paying down the national debt, avoiding the Social Security insolvency currently predicted for 2032, and investing in science, research, and development.

¶Pardon my skepticism, but, for various reasons, I have doubts.

¶This almost feels like a The Graduate “Plastics” moment, but with three words: photonic integrated circuits.

¶If the technology is commercialized, a single programmable optical chip could perform several tasks, including controlling signal speed and switching between different functions.

¶In that sense, the chip could operate in a way similar to a software-defined system, with its behavior adjusted according to changing needs.

¶This flexibility could help data centers and AI servers process information more efficiently while reducing energy consumption.

¶I think there’s a great future in photonic integrated circuits. Think about it. Will you think about it?

¶Wildfires are burning in the Ontario area of Canada as well as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota, which U.S. officials have closed as they fight to put out the blazes.

¶I thought all of the smoke was from the wildfires in Canada. Not true, apparently. Turns out, Minnesota is battling fires, too.

¶How will the Republicans calling for wild-fire-punishment tariffs on Canada account for this?

¶Morons.

¶To assist with that capability, Google Research plans to use the company’s AI models to compare operational FireSat data with historical images in order to accurately identify very small fires and to inform predictive modeling of wildfires. Google celebrated the launch of the first operational FireSat satellites by describing the event as “another tangible step forward in putting practical AI to work for climate resilience.”

¶Maybe AI is going to save us after all.

¶The group have been banned from leaving the country and engaging in artistic activities for two years.

¶The charges against them included offending public decency and the publication of “vulgar and immoral content” online.

¶Lest we forget whom we’re dealing with.

¶The Senate passed a measure Wednesday that would block the government from dismantling the system, with lawmakers in both parties warning that the action would be illegal and would threaten the safety of coastal communities. The Trump administration had also tried to cut the program’s funds the last two years, but Congress restored the money both times.

¶Nice to see a hint that Congress is getting its sea legs back as far as standing up to Trump on the issue of funding scientific and environmental research.

¶If you didn’t know the scene, I think this would look perfectly plausible.

¶This article is about the technology of AI-assisted photography, but I couldn’t help thinking of the impacts of the technology as I read it.

¶I’m not against AI in photography. Indeed, I think all of the features described here are interesting and will prove to be quite useful. But, reviewing the before and after photos in this article reminds me that you cannot accept a photograph as reality.

¶This isn’t new, of course. Media has been manipulating photographs to convey a narrative for quite some time. Probably quite a long time.

¶But new AI tools take the opportunity to manipulate to a new level. Surely we’ll see actual manipulations rise to a new level, too. This isn’t a problem, in my opinion, for creative photography. I think photographers should disclose the use of such tools in some manner, but I’m also ok if they don’t when the photograph is being used for purely creative purposes.

¶Photojournalism is the thing. The before and after photos in the linked article show that angles can now be easily altered, and content can be made from whole cloth, even for “a pretty big ask of the reframing tool as it essentially has to invent much of her arm.” Spolier: her arm in the manipulated photo looks…real.

¶Photojournalists will no doubt respond accordingly by selling trust alongside their imagery. Consumers should respond, too, by rewarding outlets that truly earn their trust and ignoring those that lack or destroy it. I’m still thinking about that equation, wondering if I worry more about the producer or consumer side of it.

¶It’s an elementary math problem and a Ph.D.-level political problem.

¶I’d add generational problem to the mix. My generation, GenX, and the generations behind us need to step up and take the reins on Social Security and so many other issues. Generations before us have done nothing but kick the can down the road. We can’t contribute to that ongoing failure.

¶Carlsten previously led Amazon Web Services’ quantum computing center and worked at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Most recently, she was CEO at DCAI, an AI infrastructure company that recently partnered with Nvidia and is home to a supercomputer known as Gefion.

¶Shoes to AI has to be one of the more interesting pivots I’ve seen. I sort of didn’t take it seriously when it was initially announced a few months ago. This looks like an impressive hire, though. Maybe the bird is indeed a smart one.

¶Respondents were asked if they agreed that, “Corruption is responsible for policies that benefit billionaires and big corporations at the expense of the American people.” Eighty three percent of Republicans agreed, as did 90% of independents and 95% of Democrats.

¶I wonder if there would be agreement on the need to change references to “billionaires and big corporations” to include trillionaires.

¶Japan’s Fair Trade Commission said this week that it had raided the offices of six leading ice cream manufacturers on suspicion that they were operating a cartel. The authorities said the companies had colluded to raise prices beyond an increase in the costs of raw materials, and that their actions had harmed customers.

¶Apparently cartels aren’t just for drugs anymore.