- Asteroid Apophis will come within 20,000 miles of Earth during its close approach in 2029. Scientists say there’s no chance of the big rock hitting us, which is a relief, given that it’s the size of the Eiffel Tower (if a lot fatter) and could level any city it struck.
- I didn’t know this: A small red dwarf star passed well within a light year of our solar system about 70,000 years ago. It was dim enough that even at its closest approach, it would not have been visible to our naked predecessors’ naked eyes.
- A group of Earth scientists have created a site that will display your current location (or at least where your IP address suggests you are) on a graph going back over 300 million years. About 320,000,000 years ago, Phoenix, Pangaea was on the equator! (Nuts. Missed it.) H/T to Old Guy for the link.
- Google is installing a completely local, 4 GB AI on machines that have Chrome installed, without asking permission nor notifying the user that it’s there. The linked CNet article explains how to find out if you have it, and if so, how to flip the flag that enables it. I found it on one of our machines, and flipped that flag. We’ll see what happens going forward.
- Law professor Glenn Reynolds’ upcoming book (available 5/12) explains that the real danger inherent in AIs is not destruction but…seduction. Seductive AI explains how lonely people have used AI chatbots as friends and in weird ways, lovers, with all kinds of downsides. A piece in the New York Post focusing on the book suggests that people have been driven to suicide by excessive interaction with AI. So maybe there’s some destruction going on after all. I’ll review the book here once I get it.
- I take five grams of creatine monohydrate every day (and 10 on Mondays when I do weight training at the gym) and here’s a solid short summary of what creatine does for us. It’s not all about muscle and energy, but also about the brain. I’m sold!
- People who eat five or more servings of eggs per week are found to have a 27% lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s than those who eat eggs rarely or never. I eat them every morning for breakfast. My brain is my first favorite organ; sorry, Woody.
May, 2026:
Odd Lots
The Whistling Earworm
I was at our Fry’s grocery a few days ago, and while looking for a decent tray of organic radishes (I’m fussy about my radishes) the normally ignorable pop music they play above the low-level grocery store hubbub caught my attention. It was one or maybe two people whistling a repetitive theme. There were vocals between the whistles, but I couldn’t make them out, and was in truth way more interested in the radishes than than the music.
On the (short) drive home, I realized that the damn whistles were still playing, this time strictly in my head. I’m prone to this mental peculiarity, generally called “earworms.” I’ve evolved a mechanism to kill my earworms: I start creating parody lyrics for them. Oddly, this makes them go away. I don’t know why. As many of my long-time readers know, I’m good at parody lyrics. Here’s a sample of what I fired at the whistling earworm:
“I’m just a dope, just a typical mope, and that is all that I’ll ever be.”
That said, I sometimes hear store/restaurant music that appeals to me. Years ago I heard a piece in a restaurant in Colorado Springs that got stuck in my head, mostly for the guitar work. The lyrics were fuzzy and I heard them wrong, so having failed to identify the song on Google by its lyrics, it was years later that I heard it again on the radio of a rental car. It was “Found Out About You” by the Gin Blossoms.
But we now have better weapons: Google search on my phone listens, and you can tap a button to tell it to identify whatever music is playing. It worked beautifully for “Because the Night” by Cascada. Ten seconds and bam! I had the title, the artist, and a link to buying it. “Because the night belongs to muggers, / Because the night belongs to blood…”
Ditto last year, when they were playing an appealing item while I was standing in the line at the UPS Store. Pulled out my phone, and a coupla taps (and a few seconds) later, I had “Shut Up and Dance” by Walk the Moon. I enjoyed it enough that I didn’t try to filk it.
Back to the whistles. Now, I struggled for decades to identify an energetic instrumental for brass that I first heard at a grade school show in 1964 or ‘65. I tried to whistle it into my cell phone, but it didn’t work. (I figured it out by sleuthing, but at least I figured it out.) I’ve since found that Google can only identify recorded music. Whistling doesn’t work…
…unless the recorded music is made of whistling.
It was a perfect experiment: When I got home with the whistling earworm in my head, I pulled up Google on my phone, hit the song button, and whistled the whistle. I was startled when Google snagged it in a few seconds. The song was “The Walker” by Fitz and the Tantrums. Not generally something I like, but it was weird enough that I added it to my collection of $1.29 Amazon tracks.
There’s not a lot of whistling in pop music. I vaguely recall a song or two (Roger Whittaker?) which I’ll whistle for Google to see if whistling is just something that Google assumes is recorded music. One has to wonder if Fitz and his gang whistled it to make it easier for people to identify on Google. Or maybe dumb luck.
I’ll go with dumb luck, heh.
A Flood of “Free Gifts” Spam Scams
Over the past few weeks, I’ve received a serious flood of similar email messages that claim to be from well-known businesses like Harbor Freight, CVS, Kroger, Marriot, Costco, FedEx, Walmart, and even Cheesecake Factory. They often come in pairs, one to each of my two most-used email addresses. They all have a common theme: Something free is waiting for you; click here and claim it! Sometimes it’s customer points that were lost, for FedEx they apologize for losing your package, and offer gifts as recompense.
I’ve gotten as many as 150 of these in a single day. Fewer show up on weekends, and there was a week awhile back when they abruptly stopped coming, only to resume the following week.
I know they’re fake because the From address domain is never the domain of the business proper, but something silly like “goonads.com”. Furthermore, as best I can tell, the From domain is used once and never again. (I get two identical copies of each because two of my emails are on their list.)
The emails are often decorated with graphics copied from the supposed sender’s site to make them look legit. And there is only one URL embedded in any of them, labeled as “Click here to claim your gift” or “Click here to enter your delivery address” etc. No, I haven’t clicked on any of those bogus domains. There are well-known hazards in doing so. I’m posting here mainly to see if this is happening to any of my readers. Researching things like this online shows them going back several years, but mine started maybe 5 or 6 weeks ago.
So. Anybody else getting rained on with scammy free gift offers? Drop a comment below.
