Well, it’s Tuesday. Time to clean out the bookmarks we’ve been meaning to read, but never got around to. Pull up a seat, and stay awhile. But be careful where you sit.
TSA Quietly Dropping Shoe Removal Requirement During Airport Screening
Even though the TSA did not formally release a statement, multiple travelers across the U.S. are already reporting on social media that they were not required to take off their shoes. At some major airports, passengers reported that some non-PreCheck lines allowed customers to keep their shoes on while others still required that they take them off.
I flew on a plane for the first time in twenty years last year. The airports had all the charm of a bus station, and none of the efficiency.
Never Work Alone, Even in the Age of AI
The question is whether—with enough automation—one person could handle everything needed to build a sizable business: coming up with a product idea, building it end-to-end, selling it, supporting customers, and more. But there’s another, similarly important question within the first one: Would anyone actually want to do all of that work alone? And would they stay sane if they tried?
I’ve done it several times, and without much automation, too. Man up, Nancy.
Investors snap up growing share of US homes as traditional buyers struggle to afford one
As home sales have slowed, properties are taking longer to sell. That’s led to a sharply higher inventory of homes on the market, benefitting investors and other home shoppers who can afford to bypass current mortgage rates by paying in cash or tapping home equity gains.
Apparently only investors read my Great Moments in Maine Real Estate series.
Musk’s Grok Update Sparks Outcry Over Politically Incorrect AI
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has updated its chatbot Grok to adopt a more openly politically incorrect stance, sparking new controversy. Over the weekend, xAI publicly modified Grok’s system prompts, instructing it to view media-sourced viewpoints as biased and to embrace politically incorrect claims—provided they are well-supported. The new directives also tell Grok not to reference these instructions unless asked directly.
Oh no! Anyway…
The Nothing Phone (3) surprised me – a week in, it’s the best phone I’ve used for creating content
Phone (3)’s 6.67-inch flexible AMOLED display is one of the best I’ve used at this price, and it matters. For anyone working with visual content, whether that’s sketching UI ideas in Figma, finger painting in the best drawing apps for Android like Heavy Paint and ArtRage Vitae, reviewing photos, or editing images on the go, this screen delivers clarity, colour fidelity, and contrast.
There’s a lot of words on that page, but I didn’t notice any about whether you could use this device to make phone calls.
‘Village of one kidney’: India-Bangladesh organ traffickers rob poor donors
“Some people knowingly sell their kidneys due to extreme poverty, but a significant number are deceived,” said Shariful Hasan, associate director of the Migration Programme at BRAC, formerly the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, one of the world’s largest nongovernmental development organisations. “A rich patient in India needs a kidney, a middleman either finds a poor Bangladeshi donor or lures someone in the name of employment, and the cycle continues.”
My local hospital was begging for kidney donations recently. I decided to help them out. They were pretty unreasonable about the whole thing, though, with lots of paperwork, and asking all sorts of impertinent questions like, “Whose kidney is this?”
Oldest wooden tools in East Asia may have come from any of three species
Archaeologists excavating at Gantangqing (an archaeological site on the shore of Lake Fuxian in what’s now southwestern China) unearthed 35 wooden tools from layers of soil dating to around 300,000 years ago. According to Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology archaeologist Jian-Hui Liu and colleagues, all 35 tools seem to have been designed, crafted, and used to harvest plants—specifically, the rhizomes, bulb-like corms, and other underground organs that many plants use to store nutrients.
I’m a woodworker. And I can assure you that it would take me around 300,000 years to find my bevel square.
The giant beaver’s journey to becoming Minnesota’s state fossil has been a long and winding one. The saga dates back to at least 1988, when a group of third graders first proposed making the massive mammal the official state fossil, according to Minnesota Star Tribune columnist Jennifer Brooks. Since then, the proposal has come up again and again. Each time, lawmakers have said no—but that changed this year.
Bones are pretty good, but I’m going to have to see some more damming evidence before I believe in these rodents of unusual size.
Matter replicators, organic transporters, and warp drives are a little hazy on the timeline, but it seems like the holodeck and emergency medical hologram are just about here.
I’m disappointed that “Jumping a hot green chick’s bones” isn’t on the list.
Deafness reversed: Single injection brings hearing back within weeks
A cutting-edge gene therapy has significantly restored hearing in children and adults with congenital deafness, showing dramatic results just one month after a single injection. Researchers used a virus to deliver a healthy copy of the OTOF gene into the inner ear, improving auditory function across all ten participants in the study. The therapy worked best in young children but still benefited adults, with one 7-year-old girl regaining almost full hearing.
This sounds promising, but it’s likely to ruin a lot of perfectly good marriages, too.