You could feel the tension—passengers staring at their watches, refreshing airline apps, sighing loudly, and shifting uncomfortably in their seats.
After we had all boarded and settled into the growing frustration of the unknown, the pilot stepped out of the cockpit, walked into the cabin, stood where we could all see him, and addressed the entire plane face-to-face.
“I want to start with an apology,” he said.
Just one sentence—seven words, to be precise—is all it took to make a huge difference in the overall experience for everyone on board. Nothing about the delay was his fault. Pilots don’t schedule thunderstorms or control air traffic flow. He hadn’t caused the delay, and he certainly wasn’t to blame for the chain reaction it was causing in all of our carefully planned travel itineraries. But he still began with an apology.
In that moment, the mood on the plane shifted. The pilot didn’t magically make the delay go away, and it didn’t guarantee that everyone would make their connection, but it did something almost as powerful—it made everyone feel seen. It made everyone on the plane feel like someone understood how frustrating the situation was and cared enough to acknowledge it. //
What the captain did at that moment offers three lessons every leader should remember:
He came to us
He started with empathy
He made it clear he was on our side
Charles "Wes" Tyson and his three co-inventors at Exxon Research & Engineering Co. (ER&E), called the Four Horsemen, were part of the team responsible for developing fluid catalytic cracking, the process that produces over half the world's gasoline. They developed the process in 1942, and the first commercial fluid cat cracking facility went on-line on May 25, 1942.
In the 1930s, ER&E was looking for a way to increase the yield of high-octane gasoline from crude oil. Researchers discovered that a finely powdered catalyst behaved like a fluid when mixed with oil in the form of vapor. During the cracking process, a catalyst will split hydrocarbon molecule chains into smaller pieces. These smaller, or cracked, molecules then go through a distillation process to retrieve the usable product. During the cracking process, the catalyst becomes covered with carbon; the carbon is then burned off and the catalyst can be re-used.
ZKLP system allows apps to confirm user presence in a region without exposing exactly where
Computer scientists from universities in Germany, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom have proposed a way to provide verifiable claims about location data without surrendering privacy.
The technique, referred to as Zero-Knowledge Location Privacy (ZKLP), aims to provide access to unverified location data in a way that preserves privacy without sacrificing accuracy and utility for applications that might rely on such data. It's described in a paper [PDF] presented this week at the 2025 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
By the 1990s, federal thinking had changed. That's because without wolves atop the food chain, park wildlife drifted out of balance.
Coyotes were all over the place, killing everything in sight, even if it wasn’t diseased and slow. They sharply reduced the beaver population, whose dams made the ponds that caused delicious vegetation and aspen to flourish, which sheltered and fed abundant wildlife and held stream banks in place, especially during spring floods.
Without the threat of wolves culling their weak members, elk had taken over some valleys, consuming trees and plants that other species needed. //
For acclimation, the Canadian creatures were kept first in a large fenced area with minimal human interaction, though some mornings the four-legged prisoners found road-kill strewn around.
After a few months, the team of biologists and naturalists left the gates open.
Strangely, nothing happened for days.
Then, the humans grasped the wolves’ message: The wily animals didn’t trust human gates. So, the men cut a hole in the fence. And just like that, the wolves were sprinting into their new lives in a new territory. //
Ten years after No. 7 and friends arrived from Canada, the park had nearly 150 wolves. They’d become top of the food chain. The coyote population dwindled, as did other sick or weak wildlife. Elk changed their grazing locations and let lowlands recover. Sometimes, lucky tourists would create minor traffic jams as they stopped to watch the wolves at a distance, lounging in the sun or loping into the shade.
Fluoride is the anion of the naturally occurring element fluorine. An anion is a negatively charged atom. As ground water flows over rocks it picks up fluoride ions leached from the compound calcium fluoride, and fluorosilicate compounds in those rocks. These fluoride ions are to what is commonly referred as being “naturally occurring” fluoride.
The most commonly utilized substance to fluoridate water systems is hydrofluorosilic acid (HFA). Once introduced into drinking water, due to the pH of that water (~7), the HFA is immediately and completely hydrolyzed (dissociated). The products of this hydrolysis are fluoride ions identical to those “naturally occurring” fluoride ions which have always existed in water, and trace contaminants in barely detectable amounts far below EPA mandated maximum allowable levels of safety. //
Some consumers have questioned whether fluoride from natural groundwater sources, such as calcium fluoride, is better than fluorides added “artificially,” such as FSA or sodium fluoride. Two recent scientific studies, listed below, demonstrate that the same fluoride ion is present in naturally occurring fluoride or in fluoride drinking water additives and that no intermediates or other products were observed at pH levels as low as 3.5. In addition, the metabolism of fluoride does not differ depending on the chemical compound used or whether the fluoride is present naturally or added to the water supply.
Precious scientific papers once belonging to wartime codebreaking genius Alan Turing – rescued from an attic clear-out where they faced destruction – are set to fetch a fortune at auction next month.
The incredible archive, tipped to rake in tens of thousands, includes a rare signed copy of Turing's 1939 PhD dissertation, Systems Of Logic Based On Ordinals [PDF]. Experts reckon this manuscript alone could go for between £40,000 and £60,000 (c $54-$81,000).
Also among the finds is Turing's legendary 1937 paper, On Computable Numbers [PDF] – dubbed the first-ever "programming manual" and introducing the world-changing concept of a universal computing machine.
The papers, originally gifted by Turing's mother Ethel to his mathematician pal Norman Routledge, vanished from public view and were stashed forgotten in a family loft after his death.
The original leak site that never sold out, never surrendered //
Obituary John Young, the co-founder of the legendary internet archive Cryptome, died at the age of 89 on March 28. The Register talked to friends and peers who gave tribute to a bright, pugnacious man who was devoted to the public's right to know.
Before WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, BayFiles, or Transparency Toolkit, there was Cryptome - an open internet archive that inspired them all, helped ignite the first digital crypto war, and even gave Julian Assange his start before falling out with him on principle. //
The feds launched an investigation into Zimmermann and PGP under the Arms Export Control Act. That investigation was dropped and the source code was eventually published in print, but it inspired Young to launch Cryptome in 1996. His goal: publish documents about encryption and other matters that the government didn't necessarily want people to know, so that people could make up their own minds.
the extent of the cover-up in the Biden-Harris White House and even how far back Biden family cover-ups of health issues goes, which is much further than previously known.
For instance, after Biden's son, Beau, was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in the summer of 2013, the Biden family decided to keep it a secret, with the then-vice president "instructing his team to mislead the media about [Beau's] whereabouts." This included when Beau Biden, who was in his second term as Delaware Attorney General, would fly to other states to get treatments while using a different name. Physicians at the time also reportedly issued fraudulent "clean bill of health" reports about Beau Biden to the public. //
My biggest concern with all of this has to do with the state of the media in America today. And let me explain what I mean by that. I watched bits and pieces of the White House Correspondents' Association dinner this year, and I listened to speaker after speaker, all Washington reporters, all defend "freedom of the press." And I kept thinking, they wouldn't have to defend it if they didn't work so hard to undermine it every day.
The American people saw what I saw, what you saw, for years with respect to President Biden. And I'm sorry President Biden is sick, but we all saw the same thing for years. We saw a president who couldn't finish a sentence without taking a nap. We saw a president - an elderly man - who talked like he was from outer space. He walked like he was underwater; you could bake a Thanksgiving turkey in the time it took him to walk across the stage.
90 percent of the American media not only never reported that, but when [some] Democrats and many Republicans raised the issue, they pushed back. And this is just one more example of so many members of our media squandering the trust of the American people. There are other examples - the Steele Dossier, the Hunter Biden laptop. I mean, I could go on and on and on. But that, to me, is what makes me want to stick my head in an oven.
Today, the media's happy after Mr. Tapper's book's coming out, the media's happy to report it. But none of them have taken responsibility for not reporting what was so obvious to the American people. Hypocrisy never takes a vacation around here, I can tell you. //
Now, many in people in the media now are reporting on Mr. Tapper's book. But I haven't heard a single - other than Mr. Thompson - a single member of the Washington press corps stand up and say "boy, we blew that."
And that's what I mean by squandering the American people's trust. Why did they do that? I don't think they were in love with President Biden. I think they thought that anything that hurt President Biden would help the Republicans and would help President Trump, and it's this persistence in practicing advocacy journalism that is destroying freedom of the press and the First Amendment in America today.
There's either no self-awareness among many members of the media, or they're lying. Because it's so obvious. I'm not asking them to take my side on everything, I'm just asking them to be curious, to report what they see.
Beszel serves as the perfect middle ground between Uptime Kuma and a Grafana + Prometheus setup for my servers. Although it takes a couple of extra commands to deploy Beszel, the app can pull a lot more system metrics than Uptime Kuma. On top of that, it can generate detailed graphics using CPU usage, memory consumption, network bandwidth, system temps, and other historical data, which is far beyond Uptime Kuma’s capabilities. Meanwhile, Beszel is a lot easier to set up than the Grafana and Prometheus combo, as you don’t have to tinker with tons of configuration files and API tokens just to get the monitoring server up and running. //
Beszel does things differently, as it’s compatible with Linux, macOS, and Windows, with the developer planning a potential FreeBSD release in the future. //
Beszel uses a client + server setup for pulling metrics and monitoring your workstation.
It's like Disney is trying to push the message that love isn't worth sacrificing for, and that women should pursue their own interests instead of fighting for something far more worthy than a degree. Abandon your charges. If your family is broken, leave the responsibility to someone else and go get yours, girl.
Disney really had the opportunity to show its fans it learned from its mistakes after repeated massive failures, including "Snow White," but it would appear that it's still high on woke. //
Gandalf
3 hours ago
'It's like Disney is trying to push.....'
You do not need the first two words .. Disney knows exactly what it's pushing, and it's what all progressives are committed to push for: the destruction of the family. //
7againstthebes
3 hours ago
Seems to me that Disney doesn't understand their own story. That about sums up the malfunction of the left. Failure to understand the moral, the morality, the decency, the necessity of all things of good report.
Everything the left touches they defile.
Istandforfreedom 7againstthebes
2 hours ago
Oh, they understand it perfectly well and the DESPISE it and as a result they are tirelessly working to destroy that message. It reveals a deep level of narcissism - selfishness - that is utterly contrary to love. This would be hatred towards everyone who is not them.
https://x.com/C__Herridge/status/1925901392499093569
The Biden Administration labeled Americans who opposed the COVID-19 vaccination and mask mandates as "Domestic Violent Extremists," or DVEs, according to newly declassified intelligence records obtained by Public @shellenberger @galexybrane and Catherine Herridge Reports. The designation created an 'articulable purpose' for FBI or other government agents to open an 'assessment' of individuals, which is often the first step toward a formal investigation, said a former FBI agent. //
Herridge shared some additional context regarding the reporting, noting that the declassified documents suggest that the Biden administration based its intelligence collection on political goals, thus turning the process of intelligence collection and analysis "on its head."
You can retire. You can pay off your mortgage. But if you stop paying property taxes, the government comes for your land. That’s not just theft—it’s tyranny.
From a pro-liberty perspective, property taxes violate the very foundation of individual liberty and private property rights. If true ownership is the cornerstone of a free society, then no government has the moral authority to charge citizens for the right to live on land they’ve already purchased. //
Notime4U
3 hours ago
Property tax for those who pay, is effectively income tax. Unless the property is income-producing, which is unlikely, the money to pay comes from income. The big problem, to me, is the annual "assessment" which is arbitrary and ALWAYS goes up. In my 14 years on my current property, my tax has doubled, from less than 2K per year to more than 4K. My state has an income tax too. If the real estate market declines, the assessor might lower the valuation, but it takes two years for me to realize the difference, which is minimal. The next year, it goes right back up. This scam should end, but it won't. Government pigs need to keep the trough filled.
These kids are using AI to communicate for them, to generate words that explain complex emotions or situations.
It's not a dead internet; it's an internet that still bustles with human activity, but it's done so through the puppet of AI. No longer are we presenting ourselves to one another, with our quirks, personalities, vulnerabilities, and even weirdness. Our communication with each other is sanitized and predictable. We lose our cultural idiosyncrasies in the face of responses generated by a program that has been trained on all the same data. Human interaction becomes scripted, not genuine.
People often express fear of AI becoming sentient and destroying humanity, a Hollywood outcome that is highly unlikely, but what should scare people more is that the ghost in the machine isn't some algorithm that evolves out of our control... it's us. We're the ghost in the machine.
I predicted a while back that humanity would merge with AI in a way, but my hope is that it wouldn't involve us effectively wearing an AI suit that turns humanity into a synthetic being when it comes to how we face the world. I think it's absolutely terrifying that we could become so homogenous in how we present ourselves to the outside world that you can't really tell one person from the next when at a virtual distance.
This is effectively us handing our humanity over to a machine and telling it to act for us while we withdraw into ourselves and forget how to speak to each other in a raw, unfiltered manner. //
Still, our relationship with AI was always going to be one of assistance, which is fine. I just don't think it's good when we become the machine. We strip ourselves of humanity for convenience, and not having to handle our own emotions in emotional moments. We just become robots, and we become robots to each other.
The Washington Post
@washingtonpost
·
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The killings of two Israeli Embassy staffers amplify confusion felt since the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks about where Jews belong.
washingtonpost.com
For U.S. Jews, D.C. museum killings deepen resolve — and fear
1:40 PM · May 23, 2025 //
It's not as horrible as the tweet. It has interviews/comments with some Jewish people, who say they are worried after the shooting, along with sharing concerns raised by statistics of discrimination against Jewish people going up.
But it also had this:
Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s subsequent attacks on Gaza, followed by divisions around the world over what had caused the conflict and who was at fault...
Um, guys? What caused the conflict was a vicious - some might even say, genocidal - attack on Israel, where Hamas terrorists killed about 1,200 people, raped and terrorized many others, and kidnapped 251 hostages. The attack, naturally, got a response. Hamas was at fault for the attack and for everything that followed; this isn't rocket science. //
anon-ncj5
an hour ago
"Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s subsequent attacks on Gaza, followed by divisions around the world over what had caused the conflict and who was at fault.."
"Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, America's subsequent response, followed by divisions around the world over what had caused the conflict and who was at fault..."
Margot Cleveland
@ProfMJCleveland
·
Follow
🚨🚨🚨BREAKING: Obama appointee Allison Dale Burroughs enters TRO against Trump Administration in Harvard case WITHOUT a Trump attorney even appearing in case. Yes, TROs can be ex parte BUT THIS IS NUTS because . . .
Margot Cleveland
@ProfMJCleveland
Harvard's lawsuit against Trump Administration was predictable, as was its request for a TRO. Will a court blindly issue a TRO, given there is no immediate harm per the letter? Probably. 1/
12:24 PM · May 23, 2025 //
Josh Blackman, constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston and President of the Harlan Institute, wrote Friday:
[We do] …not have time stamps, but the case could not have been on her docket for more than a few hours.
I have a serious question: did Judge Burroughs even read the 72-page complaint and 59-page motion for a TRO? What about all of the pages of exhibits? Did she have any time to reflect upon it or consider countervailing arguments? //
RSB
4 hours ago edited
This is one the administration should openly defy. Not only is there zero legal basis for the TRO and the judge violated multiple TRO rules but SEVP is explicitly not covered under APA (it is just an internal program of INS) and the executive has sole, nonjudiciable authority on issuing and withdrawing visas. They CANNOT be compelled to do so.
1 Hour of the world's most iconic airport KAI TAK filmed 30 years ago!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-pa-AHMZUw
This is the status of our press corps today. They need to come out and refute the words of Donald Trump, at all costs – even if those refutations support inhuman activity, contradict their own reporting, and the cost is their own credibility.
Kennedy asked Wright about the money that went out the door in those 76 days between the time President Trump was elected and the time Joe Biden left office. //
"During that short period of time, 76 days, how much taxpayer money went out the door of the Department of Energy?" Kennedy asked.
"From the loan program office, in loans and commitments, $93 billion. Well over twice as much as in the previous 15 years," Wright replied. //
Wright responded, "I think it's probably pretty clear it wasn't done in many cases...There's lots of funds that have gone out the door and commitments that were made from businesses that provided no business plan, no numbers about their own financial solvency..."
"So you're telling me that the Department of Energy, in the 76-day period, before their boss was gonna leave office, gave or loaned money to entities that had no business plan?" Kennedy inquired.
"Correct," Wright said.
Kennedy continued, asking Wright if he was going back and checking over these applications. Wright said, "Yes," and "My blood pressure is rising right now" over what they had found. He said some of the people who applied "should be ashamed."
Kennedy, who always has a quip for everything, observed, "It's rare that I'm speechless." He asked again if this money was "shoveled out the door" by the Biden team in this period. "It is correct and distasteful," Wright confirmed. "Confidence undermining."
"My God!" Kennedy exclaimed. Kennedy said Wright should take whatever time he needed to go through all these projects, "penny by penny." "They were spending money at the Department of Energy like it was ditchwater! Their budget went from $60 billion to $160 billion since fiscal year 2021. It just sounds to me like there were a lot of people coming to the Department of Energy who had all four feet and their snout in the trough. I hope you'll turn down the boondoggles and refer the thieves to the Department of Justice."
"We will indeed," Wright promised.
Stealing from the taxpayers is one thing, but stealing the franchise is worse. Why? Well, here's why, and I'm going to tell you: The franchise, more than anything else, belongs to the citizens and only to the citizens. The ballot box is one of three boxes in which our right to hold the government to account depends, in addition to the soap box - and you all know the third. The vote is us exercising our self-determination as a people, as a nation, as a country, at every level of government.
And only citizens should have that determination, that privilege, and responsibility to have a say in our government. From the very beginning, this American experiment, this constitutional republic, has been established by the people and for the people - the people being Americans.
Lina Maria Orovio-Hernandez is not an American. She's in the country illegally. She came here illegally, she defrauded the American people for thousands and thousands of dollars in benefits, she stole someone's identity to do so, and worst of all, she stole a portion of the self-determination of the American people by voting illegally.
This is a person that shouldn't be repatriated - not until she has had a trial and, if convicted, a long and comprehensive acquaintance with the American penal system.
The tax code encourages airlines to charge separately for checked bags, and Southwest Airlines was easily leaving $75 million in tax savings on the table each year by refusing to do so. //
The airline’s CEO Bob Jordan has essentially capitulated to activist investor Elliott in order to save his job, but at the expense of the airline’s culture and product differentiation. These changes won’t make Southwest Airlines better. Southwest had problems – Elliott and everyone else in the world observing them were not wrong – but there are no solutions to bring Southwest back to its earlier growth days because the model has simply run its course.
They have maxed out the ability to grow with a single fleet type, distributing tickets through their own channels, going it alone with a simplified product. So any future will be a lower growth, lower stock multiple, less valuable one. But that doesn’t have to mean doubling down on the race to the bottom, which is why it’s sad to see today’s change. //
Ultimately what this underscores is that there is no returning to the differentiated airline business model that gave Southwest significantly higher earnings multiples, catapulting their stock beyond peers, and generating decades of consistent profits.
Nobody had solutions, so they gave up and did what everyone else does which is what company executives do to protect their jobs. They stopped sticking their necks out, because they might get chopped off. Southwest is now just like everyone else, but a bit less (they don’t even plan to sell blocked middle seats, let alone first class; they have less valuable miles; they don’t have lounges; their wifi lags the industry). A moment of silence for this once great company. //
In the meantime, as checked bag fees roll out to tickets purchased May 28 onward, over the next few months we’ll begin to see everyone trying to carry all their bags on board. That’ll mean more gate checking of bags, which has meant Southwest needed to retrofit gate equipment. This will slow down boarding and delay flights. Good luck out there to Southwest customers!