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Est. 2026 · Vol. I · The Daily Grievance
Grump News
"The worst thing that happened to me today that you NEED to know about. And some other news stuff."
❖ The Gripe ❖
A Personal Affront, Reported Faithfully
Scientists in British Columbia have described two new species of sea spider from the Salish Sea, and one of them cannot keep itself clean. It is called Tanystylum kiixin, pronounced kee-hin, after the sound of waves crashing at the base of a village site. Researchers kept finding it covered in dirt and debris, with tiny parasites living on its body. Its egg-carrying limbs, the ones a related species uses to groom, are smaller and less flexible, so it cannot do the job. The researcher who led the work at the University of British Columbia calls the result an ecosystem within an ecosystem within an ecosystem. The other new species has red eyes and grooms itself with comb-like spines. I assume it does this in front of the first one. There is a spot in the middle of my back I have not reached since 2011.
❖ The Damage Report ❖
Today's News, Ranked By How Much It Ruined My Mood
🔥 Most Enraging
An independent commission ruled on Friday that Manchester City broke the Premier League's financial rules, upholding all but one of the 115 charges against the club. The charges were brought in February 2023, and the case goes back to leaked documents published in 2018. No punishment has been decided yet. The possibilities run from a reprimand and fines to a points deduction or expulsion from the league. The club says the process is still ongoing, and it is expected to appeal. I have been waiting since spring for my landlord to rule on the bathroom fan.
😩 Most Exhausting
The Large Hadron Collider is a ring 27 kilometers around, and CERN has started dismantling sections of it. Crews began on September 7 on both sides of the ATLAS and CMS experiments, removing 28 superconducting magnets that were installed between 2005 and 2007. The replacements have magnetic fields about forty percent stronger and are part of an upgrade meant to let the experiments record far more collisions. The first new magnet is not expected in the tunnel until early 2029. One project leader called it a handover from one generation of innovation to the next. I have been waiting on a part for the dryer since June and nobody has called it a milestone.
😤 Unreasonably Annoying
A firefighter in St. Pete Beach, Florida, identified as Kelso, has a Guinness World Record as the shortest woman in the job, at four feet five inches. She spent her twenties in the corporate world before firefighter friends talked her into joining the local department, and she has been at it for five years. One of her colleagues looked the record up one day and realized she could go for it. She says her height does not get in the way, and the crew calls her spider monkey because she fits into attics and other tight spaces. Her advice is not to let other people define your limits. A jar of pickles has been defining mine since Tuesday.
🤷 Somehow Also Happening
A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 7 a.m. Pacific time on Saturday, on a classified Space Force mission called USSF-385. SpaceX said its customer asked that it not show the rocket's payload or second stage. The mission is believed to be the third in a series carrying Starshield satellites, which are government versions of Starlink. The booster, on its tenth flight, landed on a drone ship in the Pacific named Of Course I Still Love You. Larry also refuses to show anyone what he buried by the fence.
❖ And Some Other Stuff ❖
Briefly, And With Limited Enthusiasm
▸ Fungi could help turn Moon and Mars dirt into something crops grow in — Researchers from the United States and Brazil have reviewed how helpful fungi might turn the loose rock covering the Moon and Mars, called regolith, into workable farm soil. Two groups stand out: fungi that partner with plant roots and help them pull in nutrients, and a genus called Trichoderma, which helps plants cope with stress. It is a review of what might work, not a harvest. The authors say much more testing is needed, including on real lunar and Martian regolith. I have killed a basil plant on a sunny windowsill.
▸ Phil Knight is giving the University of Oregon a billion dollars for an engineering college — The Nike co-founder and his wife, Penny, are giving the University of Oregon one billion dollars. It lets the school go ahead with long-standing plans for an entirely new college of engineering. It is believed to be the largest single donation to an American public university in history. His foundation had already given the university a billion dollars in combined gifts over the decades, and the school's president had recently planned sixty five million dollars in budget cuts. I gave my old school twenty five dollars once and they still send me a calendar.
▸ A long-shot kind of quantum computer showed it can run any calculation — Most quantum computers lean on expensive error correction to work. One alternative stores information in exotic particles called non-Abelian anyons and could skip much of that, but moving the particles around each other was not enough to run every kind of calculation. A team from the University of Chicago, Harvard, Stony Brook and the company Quantinuum added a second step, bringing the particles together and measuring the result. On a 54-qubit machine, they showed the combination can do any quantum computation you might want. I understood all of this once, briefly, while typing it.
Thanks for subscribing to my grievances.
— The Grump · (and Larry)
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