Off earth. Over some reset emails.

🔥 Most Enraging

NASA's Swift telescope is back, but time is running out

A twenty two year old NASA telescope was about to fall out of orbit, so a private company built a rescue spacecraft in nine months and sent it up to grab the telescope and boost it higher. The rescue ship started spinning uncontrollably and burned through its fuel just trying to stop, never getting anywhere near the telescope it was sent to save. NASA turned two of the telescope's three instruments back on anyway, since it is still up there for now. Thirty million dollars, and the mission's own achievement was fixing a problem it created. I have also spent money solving a crisis I personally caused and called it a wash.

😩 Most Exhausting

Bear, three cubs rescued from large cistern at California park

A mother bear and her three cubs got trapped overnight in a water tank at a California park, and she stood up and leaned against the wall for hours to keep her head above the water while the cubs waited it out with her. Runners on a trail heard the whimpering and called it in. Firefighters drained the tank and got the cubs out. She stood in rising water all night rather than let go of her kids. My dog Larry once refused to cross a two inch puddle and made me carry him the rest of the walk.

😤 Unreasonably Annoying

Goodbye CPAP? New sleep apnea pill cuts breathing events by 44%

A new pill for sleep apnea cut nightly breathing interruptions by forty four percent in a six month trial, compared to eighteen percent for the placebo, in people who had already tried and quit the standard mask machine. Over 40 percent improved enough to be reclassified into a milder category. About a fifth of people on the drug quit anyway, from side effects like dry mouth and nausea. A pill nearly outperforming a machine strapped to your face all night. I gave up on a wellness routine after four days because a tea tasted bad.

🤷 Somehow Also Happening

Mindfulness may lower blood pressure in just 8 weeks

Researchers combed through eighteen separate studies on mindfulness and gratitude programs and found the ones that actually lowered blood pressure and inflammation all shared one thing, daily practice paired with a weekly check in, for eight to twelve weeks straight. A twelve week version delivered mostly through a phone app produced the biggest drop in blood pressure of anything tested. Consistency, it turns out, beats every single supplement I have ever purchased and abandoned by day six. I have never once maintained anything daily except my complaining.

▸ S.C. man amasses collection of over 2,000 pairs of socks — A retired firefighter and paramedic in South Carolina is chasing the world record for the largest sock collection, currently sitting past two thousand pairs after his wife pointed out how many he already owned and his grandkids suggested he make it official. The current record holder has just over fifteen hundred. He is donating the extras to local shelters once Guinness confirms the count. Two thousand pairs of socks, acquired mostly as gifts, now on the verge of an official record. I own maybe six pairs and have lost track of four of them.

▸ Nearly 2,000 people down shots of Malort to set world record — Nearly two thousand people gathered at a Chicago bar to simultaneously drink shots of Malort, a notoriously foul local liquor one attendee compared to a mixture of vomit and sweat, and the state's own governor stepped behind the bar to help pour. It was billed honestly as a bad decision for a good cause and raised money for a local charity. A city comptroller running for mayor said the appeal is the shared suffering. Nearly two thousand adults, willingly, on purpose, for charity and a headache. I complain about coffee being slightly too hot.

▸ Microsoft 365 outage drags on — Microsoft's outage across Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and several other services dragged into a second day, caused by a misconfigured authentication setting rolling out badly across its own infrastructure. The company kept describing its own telemetry as positive while people still could not search their email. Two days of positive telemetry and a still broken inbox. I have described my own week as going fine using the same technique.

Fine. A woman in the Bronx lost her apartment and everything in it to a fire in June, and a stranger on Long Island saw her interviewed about it on the local news and decided to help. His bank would not wire money to someone he had never met, so he tracked down the reporter and sent three thousand dollars through her instead. Eight weeks later she has a new apartment and finished the college degree she was working toward the whole time. A stranger routed around his own bank for someone he saw for four minutes on television. I am told this is just who he is. I am not crying. I get worked up over people who go out of their way for nothing in return, and I have stopped apologizing for it.