I am the one percent

🔥 Most Enraging

Sam Altman suggests turning the school run into an AI podcast about your children

The head of OpenAI posted on Friday that parents could connect up the family calendars, tell the software what their children are interested in, and have it produce a podcast for the drive to school every morning, covering one child's soccer game and another child's birthday. A man who makes cartoons replied asking what if you just talked to your children. That reply has been shared about nine thousand times. The original has been shared about three hundred times. The internet occasionally gets one right.

😩 Most Exhausting

Warming has sped up to about a third of a degree a decade

Researchers went through the five main global temperature records, stripped out El Nino and volcanoes and the solar cycle, and found the underlying warming now runs at about a third of a degree per decade. It used to be a bit under two tenths. They did not work out the cause, only that the change is real. One of them says that at this rate the one and a half degree limit from the Paris agreement goes before 2030. That is four years away. I have shoes older than that.

😤 Unreasonably Annoying

Scientists think they know why statins make your legs ache

Researchers at McMaster in Canada found that statins interfere with how muscle cells make energy, which sets off an immune reaction inside the muscle itself, and that reaction is what does the damage. In the lab they calmed the immune reaction down, the aching largely stopped, and the cholesterol benefit carried on regardless. So the aching and the cholesterol benefit run on separate tracks, and always did. I have been apologizing to a pharmacist about my legs for eleven years.

🤷 Somehow Also Happening

Sperm whales blow bubbles so they do not float up while asleep

A sperm whale's head is full of oil and wax and air, which means it floats, which is a problem when the whale wants to nap underwater. Researchers watching whales off Norway worked out that they let bubbles out of the blowhole to stay down, about eleven puffs for a nap near the surface and only three or four for one taken after a deep dive. They sleep ten or fifteen minutes at a time, nose up. The whale has a system. I have a chair.

▸ Leaving the water in nearly doubled a battery's charge — Everyone making this kind of sodium battery dries the material out first, because water in a battery is supposed to be a mistake. A researcher at Surrey left the water in, and the cell held nearly twice the charge and kept working past four hundred cycles. He said the result was completely unexpected. Run in seawater, the same cell started pulling the salt out as it went, which nobody had asked for. The improvement was hiding in the one ingredient everyone else had been removing.

▸ A nine dollar key physically locks the apps you cannot stop opening — Somebody has made a small key that you tap against your phone to unlock the apps you have asked it to block, and the entire point is that you can leave the key in another room. Sixty minutes of access per tap, then everything locks again. The companion app keeps count of how often you go and fetch it, and passes comment. We have built a machine so good at holding our attention that the cure is an object kept upstairs.

▸ Curiosity found a field of honeycomb cracks stretching across a Martian valley — The rover came into a valley on Mars and found the ground cracked into little polygons an inch or two across, running off in every direction, the biggest field of them it has met in fourteen years of driving. They may be dried mud, or ground heated and cooled until it split. The mission team said the sea of polygons took their breath away. Fourteen years of looking at rocks, and a pattern in the dirt can still stop them dead.

Fine. A seaplane went down in Puget Sound on Thursday evening with eleven people aboard, caught fire, and had sunk by the time the first boats reached it. Everyone aboard got clear of it, and the Coast Guard pulled all eleven out of the water alive. Some of them are badly hurt and one is in critical condition, so this is not a tidy story. But one of the officers said the pilot had probably done a good enough job setting it down to give everybody a chance, which is close to the highest thing you can say about a person's work. Eleven people went out of a burning aircraft and into cold water, and eleven people were pulled back out. I would like that noted.