2026-05-01

etc

• Transponders to be installed on New York area airport ground vehicles

• How an Oil Refinery Works

  Besides cracking, a refinery might employ a variety of other processes to modify the chemical structure of various molecules. Catalytic reforming takes the naphtha fraction (the part of the crude oil with a boiling point between ~122°F and ~400°F) and exposes it to heat and pressure in the presence of a catalyst to produce a new mixture of chemicals called reformate that is used to make gasoline. Isomerization processes take various molecules, such as butane, and modify their physical arrangement to produce isomers – molecules with identical chemical formulas but different structural arrangements. Hydrotreating reacts various crude oil fractions with hydrogen in the presence of a catalyst to remove impurities and improve their quality. (Hydrotreating can be done on its own, but it’s also often combined with other processes. Hydrocracking combines hydrotreating with catalytic cracking, and residue hydroconversion combines hydrotreating with thermal cracking.)

Horseshit

• Could the moon ever be blockaded? Experts predict cislunar space could be the next Strait of Hormuz.

• Australia Kangaroo Coin, the World's Largest Gold Coin

• Why Neolithic Europeans Stopped Building Megalithic Tombs 5k Years Ago

• Electrical current might be the key to a better cup of coffee

• Queen Camilla Unites Winnie-the-Pooh with a Long-Lost Friend

• "Really big pig" seen wandering loose in North Carolina

  "To put it lightly: he is a REALLY big pig. We're talking 'absolute unit' status," the post said. "He's currently living his best life on the lam, but we'd like to get him somewhere safe before he decides to move into someone's backyard permanent-like." The sheriff's office said residents should report any sightings of the pig and not attempt to capture it themselves. The pig's owner has not yet been identified.

• Anyone Want a 145,000-Pound Dinosaur? The World's Largest T. Rex Needs a New Home.

  Tyra is facing a problem no dinosaur has ever faced in their collective many millions of years on Earth: her lease is set to expire. In 2029, the current terms suggest that the structure could be dismantled. Local officials understand that it is a bit of a logistical nightmare to just up and move a giant dinosaur monolith, but so far, no one has come up with a viable solution for moving such a behemoth.

• Redshift – Rehearsing for humanity's future on Mars

• Rich People Didn't Used to Look Like This

• The Simpsons reference that refutes one of history's greatest mathematicians

• Meta will beam sunlight from space to power AI data centers

• I Mean, Why Shouldn't We All Smoke Cigarettes Again?

• Room 641A: The Whistleblower Who Uncovered the NSA’s ‘Big Brother Machine’

• The Enhanced Games, Where Athletes Compete on Steroids, HGH, Adderall

• US track star Abby Steiner sues Puma alleging 'defective' shoes destroyed career

• Discomfort with modern technology shapes Gen Z's desire to live in the past

• We have figured out a new way to send messages into the past

• Universal patterns emerge across 22 languages, mapping how vocabularies evolve

celebrity gossip

• Banksy confirms he's behind statue in central London

Obit

• J. Craig Venter, Scientist Who Decoded the Human Genome, Dies at 79

Musk

• On the stand, Elon Musk can't escape his own tweets

  • Elon Musk's worst enemy in court is Elon Musk

  • Musk Says He 'Was a Fool' to Provide OpenAI's Early Funding

  • Musk casts himself as AI's good guy in testimony vs. OpenAI

  • Elon Musk said OpenAI betrayed him after Microsoft deal

  • Brockman was planning to oust OpenAI co-founder Musk while publicly thanking him for the privilege of working alongside him.

  • Elon Musk says his xAI startup's models were partially trained on OpenAI's tech

  • Elon Musk Seemingly Admits xAI Has Used OpenAI's Models to Train Its Own

  • Elon Musk confirms xAI used OpenAI's models to train Grok

  • In Musk vs. Altman case, judge warns lawyers that AI itself is not on trial

• Tesla Semi: first truck rolls off high-volume production line

Electric / Self Driving cars

• How U.S. Electric Vehicle Industrial Policy Created A New ‘Rust Belt.’

• Emergency First Responders Say Waymos Are Getting Worse

• Illegal cars on Market Street surge after Mayor Lurie welcomes Waymo

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• Humanoid Robots Will Work as Baggage Handlers at Tokyo Airport

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Some schools consider eliminating homework

• Will you heed my warnings now?

  Years ago, somewhere on this blog, I mused that, if I were ever invited to join NAS, I hoped I’d follow the wisdom of Richard Feynman, who famously resigned his NAS membership, comparing it to an honor society back at his high school that spent most of its time debating who should be a member of the honor society. Feynman was also annoyed at having to pay dues. But now that I’m actually faced with the choice, it’s like, dude! At my advanced age of 44, I’ve encountered so many people who dislike me or even sneer at me, and so many clubs that won’t have me as a member, that I feel mostly gratitude and warmth toward a fine club like NAS that will have me as a member. Anyway, I’ll certainly try it out to see what it’s like—even Feynman did that!

  • The honors offered by those who are without honor are not gifts.

• In Backlash Against Tech in Schools, Parents Are Winning Rollbacks

• How Silicon Valley's Brightest Parents Broke Their Own School

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Apple scales out 6G ambitions with engineer job listings

• Why are the Artemis II photos on Flickr?

  NASA’s images should only be on a service where they can be stored in full resolution, for the long term, dedicated to the public domain — which the other social media apps of today can’t do

• Meanwhile Apple's Vision Pro VR headset is mostly dead.

• Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

• AI Has Made Memory Chips One of the World’s Most Profitable Products

• Anti-DDoS Firm Heaped Attacks on Brazilian ISPs

  A Brazilian tech firm that specializes in protecting networks from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks has been enabling a botnet responsible for an extended campaign of massive DDoS attacks against other network operators in Brazil, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The firm’s chief executive says the malicious activity resulted from a security breach and was likely the work of a competitor trying to tarnish his company’s public image.

  • Causing a problem so you can sell the "solution" has a long history in tech and Leftist politics. The next step is to legally require the solution service so they can be relieved of the costs of causing the problem, and become a parasitic institution helping keep the politicians rich.

• Verified by Spotify badge lets you know this artist isn't AI

• City Learns Flock Accessed Cameras in Children's Gym Room as a Sales Pitch Demo

• Official SAP NPM packages compromised to steal credentials

• All these smart glasses and nothing to do

• Samsung warns memory shortage to deepen next year as 2027 orders come in

• The most severe Linux threat to surface in years catches the world flat-footed

  The critical flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-31431 and the name CopyFail, is a local privilege escalation, a vulnerability class that allows unprivileged users to elevate themselves to administrators.

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• GCC 16 has been released

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• I have a sign for this one

  • NASA chief hints at campaign to make Pluto a planet again

• Blue Origin certainly has ambitious launch targets for New Glenn

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Anthropic could raise a new $50B round at a valuation of $900B

• A.I. Bots Told Scientists How to Make Biological Weapons

• Gen Z is outsourcing hard conversations to AI. Why it matters

• Google to sell TPU chips to 'select' customers in latest shot at Nvidia

• The A.I. Fear Keeping Silicon Valley Up at Night

• White House Opposes Anthropic's Plan to Expand Access to Mythos Model

  • White House workshops plan to bring back Anthropic

• GM Adds Google Gemini for Drivers to Rev Up with AI Assistant

• OpenAI Codex prompt includes explicit directive: "never talk about goblins"

  • Where the goblins came from

  • OpenAI tells ChatGPT models to stop talking about goblins

• Meta's multi-billion-dollar Graviton deal

• AI optimism surges in Asia, unlike in the U.S.

• OpenAI, Sam Altman Hit with Slate of Lawsuits over Mass Shooting Canadian School

• OpenAI has largely abandoned its plan to spend half a trillion dollars of other people's money on its Stargate project, leaving it to other people to spend half a trillion dollars of other peoples money on its Stargate project.

• 'The job description is changing': mathematician Terence Tao on the rise of AI

• Democratic Governance of AI Is the Real Solution

• Is tech's AI spending working?

• The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

• Anthropic could raise a new $50B round at a valuation of $900B

• AI Hallucinations Put South Africa on the Spot

• KKR Preparing New AI Firm Worth $10B Led by Ex-Amazon Web Chief

• In real-world test, AI model did better than ER doctors at diagnosing patients

• Big Tech will spend nearly $700B on AI this year

• Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Half of 'long shot' Polymarket bets on military action are successful

• No new trial for Sam Bankman-Fried

• U.S. Senators Vote to Ban Themselves from Trading on Prediction Markets

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Amazon chips no longer just a side dish, they're a $20B biz

• Amazon Q1 revenue tops estimates as AWS hits 15-quarter growth high

• Oil markets are still in La-La land

• Meta shares slide as plan to spend billions more on AI spooks investors

  • Meta shares slide as it hikes AI spending forecast, youth social media backlash

  • Meta bumped 2026 capex forecast up to $145B for AI boom investors flinched

  • Meta stock drops on quarterly results 'internet disruptions' user numbers down

  • Meta's Reality Labs lost over $4B in first quarter

• Oil Hits $120 per Barrel

• Fed's key inflation gauge hits 3.5% as Iran war pushes up gas prices

  • Didn't they spend the Biden (and Obama!) years assuring us gas and energy prices aren't "real" economic data, didn't count as inflation, and should be higher anyway?

• US Economy Grows 2%, Boosted by Surging AI Investment

• Apple's iPhone revenue jumps to $57B despite chip shortages

  • Apple beats on Q2 earnings, thanks to China and iPhone sales

• OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma dissolves after judge approves criminal sentence

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• House approves reauthorization of warrantless spy powers

• U.S. Debt Tops 100% of GDP

  • US National Debt Surpasses GDP

• House GOP concedes in DHS funding fight, reopening TSA but blocking ICE funds

• Wait, Did the FBI Secretly Dig Up Civil War Gold? New Documents Shed Light on What Really Happened.

  In December 2025, the Justice Department released its final tranche—most consequentially, an extensive operations plan, titled “Operation Union Gold.” There are no smoking guns there. But the treasure hunters homed in on a section titled “Coordinating Instructions,” which notes that the treasure, if discovered, would be moved to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. The Mint would provide armored trucks for said transport. “When valuables are first discovered at the site,” the document states, an agent whose name was redacted would contact the Mint’s chief of police “and request armored transport vehicle.” The agent in question, the document adds, “previously requested that a vehicle be ready to depart Phila. within 30 minutes of receiving said notification.” This revelation deepens the intrigue around the mysterious excavation, raising new questions about what the FBI did and casting fresh doubt on its version of events.

  If anything, the absence of any remarkable disclosures makes the obfuscation even more puzzling. “One of the things that’s never made sense to me,” Weismann says, “is that if the FBI truly found nothing…they would have just opened their files and said, ‘Have at it, you’ll see.’” There was also what the FBI didn’t do, she points out. “The record clearly suggests that the FBI thought there was gold as well, and yet they never followed up with Enviroscan,” Weismann points out. “They never tried to figure out what was wrong with those analyses…There’s just so many things that happened that legitimately raise suspicions.”

• US Senators introduce bipartisan bill to ban Chinese vehicles and auto parts

Democrats

• The Case for Returning the Koh-I-Noor Diamond Has a New Backer: Mamdani

Left Angst

• USDA rejects women picked for soybean board, appoints men instead

• Rise of the Blood Populist

  First, Americans cannot seem to agree on a definition of political violence. Second, people are too busy blaming their perceived political foes to see the larger problem for what it is. And, third, the big one, nobody knows how to make it stop.

• The Perversion of the Voting Rights Act

  Voters Can Be Disenfranchised Now. Just say it’s because they’re Democrats.

  • Supreme Court Limits Voting Rights Act

  The Supreme Court significantly narrowed a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in a 6-3 ruling Wednesday, further eroding the impact of the landmark civil rights-era law. For decades, Section 2 — a provision that broadly outlawed discrimination in voting on the basis of race — has been interpreted to allow, and sometimes demand, the use of race-conscious data in redistricting, to protect the voting power of minorities. But the court’s new opinion, which split the justices along ideological lines, throws into question exactly how states can utilize race in their mapmaking process. The case involves a challenge to two majority-Black districts in Louisiana. Liberal groups had feared the court would fully gut the law, allowing red states to redraw maps nationwide and effectively lock in GOP control of Congress. Republicans, meanwhile, believe that considering race in drawing congressional districts is discriminatory and unconstitutional. Now, the gray area left by the court’s ruling adds further uncertainty to redistricting, which has become a pivotal tool for both parties this cycle.

  • US Supreme Court Guts Key Provision of Voting Rights Act

  • Louisiana congressional primaries suspended after Supreme Court ruling

• Why the US keeps getting richer while Britain stagnates

• For the first time in history, more Americans are moving to EU than vice versa

• Debunking the Data That Claims to Show Most Political Violence Comes From the Right

  The data set doesn’t include either of the previous two assassination attempts on President Trump’s life, as far as I can tell; a search for the time frame and the names of the would-be assassins turns up zero hits. Nor does it include the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The data set is based on prosecutions, which might explain the absence of Thomas Crooks, who died at Butler. But what explains the absence of Trump’s other would-be assassin, Ryan Wesley Routh, or Tyler Robinson, who killed Charlie Kirk? I couldn’t find Elias Rodriguez on the list either, who shot and killed two people outside the Jewish Museum in D.C. in May of 2025 to protest the war in Gaza. It’s pretty easy to say that the violence is coming overwhelmingly from the Right if you overwhelmingly edit out any political violence from the Left. The Prosecution Project also counts every time and every person who blocked access to an abortion clinic. You may not agree with blocking access to an abortion clinic, but a tally of political violence that counts those instances and not Charlie Kirk’s assassination is deeply, deeply flawed. Moreover, even when acknowledging that left-wing political violence is on the rise, CSIS admits it went out of its way to absolve the Left of even more violence. In a recent report, it excluded pro-Palestinian terrorism from the Left, reclassifying it as “ethnonationalist incidents rather than left-wing ones,” despite the Palestinian cause becoming the most important litmus test for belonging on the Left these days.

• Migrant Deaths Hit Record High Under Trump 2.0

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Chick-fil-A employee accused of stealing $80,000 with mac & cheese scheme

  • Former Chick-fil-A employee charged in $80K refund scheme using Mac and cheese

• Alaska woman sues troopers, TV network exploiting role as confidential informant

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US orders chip equipment companies to halt some shipments to China #2 chipmaker

• Google exits drone swarm program – employees revolted over ethical fears

• CIA Ran MK-Ultra Experiments on Prisoners of War in Custody, Declassified Docs

World

• China pushes EU capitals to scrap 'Made in Europe' law or face retaliation

• Met Police's Palantir deployment has its own officers watching their backs

• Germany's military shuns Palantir – cyber chief

• I took an algorithm to court in Sweden. The algorithm won

• Europe has a fuel problem: It doesn't know how much it has

• Tourist dies after being bitten at snake show while on vacation in Egypt

• Global Telecom Exploitation by Covert Surveillance Actors

• Repatriated Scammers Are a Security Risk, Says Kenyan Government

  Most Western news coverage of the global scamdemic focuses on (unreliable) estimates of the total amount of money stolen and anecdotal stories about victims losing their life savings. Less attention is paid to the other victims: inhabitants of poor countries lured into leaving their homes by tantalizing job offers only to discover they have become slaves that work in a scam compound. There is a noticeable lack of interest in reporting the number of people affected, the number of slaves who have been tortured, and the number who were killed.

• Indonesia urges social media platforms to disclose number of U16 accounts closed

• Japan Is Building Cardboard Suicide Drones

• Italy asks EU to investigate Google AI search tools over publisher concerns

• Belgium seeks nationalization of nuclear power plants

• French prosecutors link 15-year-old to mega-breach at state's document agency

Iran / Houthi

• Iran defies Trump's blockade as oil prices soar

• Iran war drives up circuit board prices, according to report

• Iran war disrupts the circuit board supply chain, raises costs for tech firms

• The UAE doubles down on Israel and America

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine Bets on Battlefield AI

China

• Convicted former Harvard scientist rebuilds brain computer lab in China

• Chinese firm revives the drive-in cinema with film-projecting headlights

  • Chinese EVs Can Now Project Movies from Their Headlights

• Taiwan activates backup communications for island after undersea cable breaks

• China Suspends Autonomous Driving Permits After Baidu Outage

• Beijing bans drone sales even as rest of world buys Chinese drones

Health / Medicine

• FDA alleges 'manipulated' data supported approval of Amgen's autoimmune drug

• One of the most common knee surgeries does not help and may be harmful

  • Knee surgery for cartilage damage does not benefit patients, study suggests

• Weight-Loss Drugs May Reduce Buildup of Alzheimer's Proteins

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Inventions for battery reuse and recycling increase more than 7-fold in last 10y

• Revealed: British ad firm's billion-dollar greenwash of US oil industry

• Renewables and batteries drive down fossil fuel use despite record demand

• Orangutan Filmed Using a Human-Made Bridge

• Florida possums with GPS collars used to track pythons in Everglades

• The invisible force making food less nutritious

• Could Eating Your Fruits and Veggies Give You Lung Cancer?

• Birds Are More Afraid of Women Than of Men

  • Urban birds are more scared of women than men – but scientists don't know why

• Snowball Earth may hide a far stranger climate cycle than anyone expected