The conservative broadcaster/provocateur Charlie Kirk—murdered this week during a visit to a Utah college—had tweeted some life advice this summer: "When things are moving very fast and people are losing their minds, it’s important to stay grounded. Turn off your phone, read scripture, spend time with friends, and remember internet fury is not real life. It’s going to be ok."

Kirk was not himself always a great role model for staying grounded, thoughtful, or caring to others. He was better known for "look at me" stunts like offering completely unsolicited commentary upon Taylor Swift's engagement , calling the singer a "cat lady" and telling her to "engage in reality more," to "reject feminism," and to "submit to your husband" because "you're not in charge."

But his advice itself isn't all bad. Social media so often feeds most hungrily upon our darker emotions; constant reinforcement of anger, fear, frustration, and even jealously (FOMO, anyone?) cannot possibly be good for us to marinate in so often. Maintaining a connection to the physical world and the physical presence of others can be immensely stabilizing—sometimes even helpfully "boring"—after we become too addicted to the rush of emotions caused by one more Internet outrage.

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Here's some good news for a Friday afternoon: For 2025 through August, global electric vehicle sales have grown by 25 percent compared to the same eight months in 2024, according to the analysts at Rho Motion. That amounts to 12.5 million EVs, although the data combines both battery EVs and plug-in hybrid EVs for the total.

However, that's for global sales. In fact, EV adoption is moving even faster in Europe, which has grown by 31 percent so far this year (Rho says that BEV sales grew by 31 percent but PHEV sales by just 30 percent)—a total of 2.6 million plug-in vehicles. In some European countries, the increase has been even more impressive: up by 45 percent in Germany, 41 percent in Italy, and by 100 percent in Spain.

But despite a number of interesting new EVs from Renault and the various Stellantis-owned French automakers, EV sales in France are down by 6 percent so far, year on year.

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California's legislature this week approved a bill to let renters opt out of bulk-billing arrangements that force them to pay for Internet service from a specific provider.

The bill says that by January 1, a landlord must "allow the tenant to opt out of paying for any subscription from a third-party Internet service provider, such as through a bulk-billing arrangement, to provide service for wired Internet, cellular, or satellite service that is offered in connection with the tenancy." If a landlord fails to do so, the tenant "may deduct the cost of the subscription to the third-party Internet service provider from the rent," and the landlord would be prohibited from retaliating.

The bill passed the state Senate in a 30–7 vote on Wednesday but needs Gov. Gavin Newsom's signature to become law. It was approved by the state Assembly in a 75–0 vote in April.

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There's nothing quite like a deep dive into the shallow, vomitous puddles of children's splash pads. Even toeing the edge is enough to have one longing for the unsettling warmth of a kiddie pool. But the brave souls at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have done it, wading into 25 years' worth of records on gastrointestinal outbreaks linked to the wellsprings of fecal pathogens. And they unsurprisingly found enough retch-inducing results to make any modern-day John Snows want to start removing some water handles.

Between 1997 and 2022, splash pads across the country were linked to at least 60 outbreaks, with the largest sickening over 2,000 water frolickers in one go. In all, the outbreaks led to at least 10,611 illnesses, 152 hospitalizations, and 99 emergency department visits. People, mostly children, were sickened with pathogens including Cryptosporidium , Camplyobacter jejuni, Giardia duodenalis, Salmonella, Shigella, and norovirus, according to the analysis, published Tuesday in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report . The tallies of outbreaks and illnesses are likely undercounts, given reporting delays and missed connections.

Though previous outbreak-based studies have provided bursts of data, the new analysis is the first to provide a comprehensive catalog of all the documented outbreaks since splash pads erupted in the 1990s. Together, they provide a clear, stomach-churning explanation of how the outbreaks keep happening. Basically, small children go into the watery playgrounds while they're sick and spread their germs.

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An app outage that locked numerous rental car customers out of their vehicles is a reminder of the perils of completely relying on apps for basic functionality—especially when those apps have seemingly limited support resources.

Zipcar is a car-sharing service that lets customers pay a membership fee to rent vehicles. Users use the Zipcar app to locate cars, unlock and lock them, share images of the vehicle (for proof that you didn't damage it), and report concerns. One typically goes through the entire Zipcar rental process without interacting with a human. Avoiding car rental lines and customer service representatives seems efficient until the app utterly fails you.

As reported by 404 Media today, Zipcar experienced an outage on Friday that prevented the app from functioning properly for numerous users. Without the app support, people could not unlock cars to start rentals, open cars that didn't come with keys, lock cars, and/or return cars before their rental period expired.

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Turnover at the top of the company isn't stopping Intel from launching new products: Today the company is announcing the first of its next-generation B-series Intel Arc GPUs, the Arc B580 and Arc B570.

Both are decidedly midrange graphics cards that will compete with the likes of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD's RX 7600 series, but Intel is pricing them competitively: $249 for a B580 with 12GB of RAM and $219 for a B570 with 10GB of RAM. The B580 launches on December 13, while the B570 won't be available until January 16.

The two cards are Intel's first dedicated GPUs based on its next-generation "Battlemage" architecture, a successor to the "Alchemist" architecture used in the A-series cards. Intel's Core Ultra 200 laptop processors were its first products to ship with Battlemage, though they used an integrated version with fewer of Intel's Xe cores and no dedicated memory. Both B-series GPUs use silicon manufactured on a 5 nm TSMC process, an upgrade from the 6 nm process used for the A-series; as of this writing, no integrated or dedicated Arc GPUs have been manufactured by one of Intel's factories.

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"A clean desk is a sign of a sick mind" is a phrase sometimes attributed to Oscar Levant , but I give it to Egon Spengler . I also live that phrase.

My desk is not clean, but I know why everything is on it. It is inefficient if you are not me and are trying to find things or make sense of it. If you know where to look, like I do, however, every piece is doing a particular job.

If you're like me, or know someone like me, you know desk space is at a premium—not to keep it tidy and empty, but to fill it with even more junk. With this in mind, I have compiled some of the items I either own and cherish, or have saved to various online carts and considered many times. These gadgets keep devices powered, items labeled, the office space conveniently automated, and cables always within arm's reach. With all the space and mental stress these gadgets can and do save me, I have so much more room for, say, reading about Oscar Levant and putting empty seltzer cans everywhere.

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On April 15, 2019, the world watched in transfixed horror as a fire ravaged the famed Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, collapsing the spire and melting the lead roof. After years of painstaking restoration costing around $740 million, the cathedral reopens to the public this weekend. The December issue of National Geographic features an exclusive look inside the restored cathedral, accompanied by striking photographs by Paris-based photographer and visual artist Tomas van Houtryve.

For several hours, it seemed as if the flames would utterly destroy the 800-year-old cathedral. But after a long night of work by more than 400 Paris firefighters, the fire finally began to cool and attention began to shift to what could be salvaged and rebuilt. French President Emmanuel Macron vowed to restore Notre Dame to its former glory and set a five-year deadline. The COVID-19 pandemic caused some delays, but France nearly met that deadline regardless.

Those reconstruction efforts were helped by the fact that, a few years before the fire, scientist Andrew Tallon had used laser scanning to create precisely detailed maps of the interior and exterior of the cathedral—an invaluable aid as Paris rebuilds this landmark structure. French acousticians had also made detailed measurements of Notre Dame's "soundscape" that were instrumental in helping architects factor acoustics into their reconstruction plans. The resulting model even enabled Brian FG Katz, research director of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) at Sorbonne University, to create a virtual reality version of Notre Dame with all the acoustical parameters in place.

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One of the key differences between Apple's Macs and the iPhone and iPad is that the Mac can still boot and run non-Apple operating systems. This is a feature that Apple specifically built for the Mac, one of many features meant to ease the transition from Intel's chips to Apple's own silicon.

The problem, at least at first, was that alternate operating systems like Windows and Linux didn't work natively with Apple's hardware, not least because of missing drivers for basic things like USB ports, GPUs, and power management. Enter the Asahi Linux project, a community-driven effort to make open-source software run on Apple's hardware.

In just a few years, the team has taken Linux on Apple Silicon from "basically bootable" to "plays native Windows games and sounds great doing it." And the team's ultimate goal is to contribute enough code upstream that you no longer need a Linux distribution just for Apple Silicon Macs.

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