It’s the 25th anniversary of the Islamic jihad that brought down the World Trade Center. The Bureau of Labor Statistics will mark this solemn event by releasing updated CPI statistics. (From state-sponsored PBS: “The consumer price index rose 3.4% last month compared with a year ago, the Labor Department said Friday, the same as in July. But on a monthly basis, inflation quickened, as costs jumped 0.4% from July to August, up from an increase of just 0.1% the previous month.”)
June 2025, the same shower head for a different bathroom, up to $154:
July 29, 2026, $344:
Helpful hint: Do not allow anyone to knock out or pull out the plastic water restrictor because the result is a powerful torrent of shower (5 gpm?).
What can explain this level of Speakflation? The Islamic Republic of Iran is buying up all of the brass for use in the weapons that they continue to make because we haven’t disabled their oil and electricity industries? It can’t be a new union agreement in a U.S. factory because the manufacturer’s site says that the fixture is made in China.
Speaking of the Islamic Republic, ChatGPT says that we’re on track to have one of our own:
Approximately 2.5 million Muslims probably immigrated permanently to the United States between September 11, 2001, and mid-2026; a plausible range is 2–3 million. This does not include their U.S.-born children.
Related:
Wirecutter says that a cheaper and absurdly low-flow (1.75 gpm version) Speakman isn’t so great: “none of the streams provided wide enough coverage to feel satisfying” (presumably they did not make the mistake of removing the restrictor)
Twenty-five years ago at 10:03 am, United Flight 93 was crashed into a field after a struggle between four jihadis (from Lebanon and Saudi Arabia) and a group of passengers and flight attendants that included at least Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett, Jeremy Glick, and CeeCee Lyles.
The last portion of the CVR transcript, which ends with “Allahu Akbar”:
As I noted then, RIP especially to the crew: Lorraine Bay, Jason Dahl, Sandra Bradshaw, Wanda Green, LeRoy Homer Jr., CeeCee Lyles, and Deborah Welsh. Airline crews enable us to live richer lives by assuming a higher level of risk every day than those of us who earn our wages by flying desks.
Many American Muslims have faced a quarter-century of suspicion and hostility since the Sept. 11 attacks … the city’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani. But anti-Muslim prejudice still endures, echoing the Islamophobia that arose in the earliest days after Sept. 11.
“I think that day belongs to everyone who lived it and what came after belongs to a smaller group of us,” said Mr. Awawdeh, 39, who is now the president and chief executive of the New York Immigration Coalition and a confidant of Mr. Mamdani. “That part of the story this country still has not told itself honestly.”
… backlash faced by high-profile Muslims in politics or the arts, and attacks on Islamic religious expression, including the construction of mosques and the wearing of religious clothing like hijabs.
“Muslim America now has a greater cultural footprint, more institutional power and a lot more support from allies, comrades and friends all throughout the country,” Mr. Dandia said. “Now when people think of Muslim America, they have names and faces they can point to.”
How many haters are there?
According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted this year, 43 percent of American adults said Muslims are less patriotic than other Americans, and 42 percent said Muslim Americans are having a negative impact on the country. When asked to explain their views, respondents often cited the Sept. 11 attacks.
In March 2002, 25 percent of American adults said Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence, but that number had risen to 51 percent in the survey conducted this year.
Who are the haters?
Those views have become highly polarized, with Republicans expressing far more negative views of Islam than Democrats, a change from after the attacks when supporters of both parties held similar views.
Let’s close with a fatwa from a scholar of the Quran and the Hadiths…
Yesterday was supposedly when people from El Salvador, “temporarily” in the U.S. for 25.5 years, would begin to head home to the country that, for the past few years, has (1) had a lower murder rate than the U.S., and (2) is too dangerous for humans to occupy, especially Salvadorans such as Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Have any Salvadorans gone home? Or is “temporary” some period of time longer than 25.5 years? Gemini says that people with “temporary” status are actually permanent from any practical perspective:
The termination of TPS [for Hondurans, nearly all of whom are still here] did not grant Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the right to summarily deport people. To be removed from the country, individuals who do not leave voluntarily must be issued a Notice to Appear (NTA) and go through the formal immigration court system.
With immigration courts already facing massive multi-million case backlogs, processing thousands of long-term residents with clean criminal histories and significant family equities in the U.S. takes years, effectively leaving them in a prolonged state of legal limbo within the United States.
So… a Salvadoran might be here on a “temporary” basis and at the same time, under the laws that our elected politicians were wise enough to create, it isn’t possible to deport him or her “summarily”.
Here’s a video from a few months back about what youngsters in El Salvador are up to:
If you think you can't move to El Salvador because of kids' school, here is class of '26 of Escuela Americana in El Salvador and their college choices pic.twitter.com/M3mnlY5Gul
Lamont Newell, a 17-year-old South Los Angeles student, has received 65 college acceptance letters and plans to attend Columbia University to study industrial engineering. The valedictorian with a 4.4. GPA earned a full ride. https://t.co/wXKXCYtfGhpic.twitter.com/lS7Eo7nXYA
Apple has announced the iPhone 18. The part of the phone that motivates me to pay to upgrade is the photography pipeline. It looks as though there are still three lenses on the Pro and Pro Max. Apple press release:
The new 48MP Fusion Main camera with variable aperture is the most advanced camera Apple has ever made, bringing aperture control to iPhone for the first time along with even more creative control. Six laser-cut blades smoothly transition between different apertures, making it incredibly easy to capture the best shot by automatically adjusting for depth of field and lighting. Combined with a new sensor that improves image quality, the result is better low-light photography, crisper detail in the back of group photos, and more unique shots. Variable aperture also provides more control for creative pros by giving them the ability to manually adjust any of the four aperture settings in the Camera app, and an API is available to developers for even more control across the aperture range in their apps.
With a new computational imaging pipeline, the Main camera produces sharper, more detailed shots, and upgraded Photographic Styles with new texture and grain controls let users further dial in their desired appearance and have more creative control over their photos.4 Industry-leading video capabilities also become more versatile, with the ability to apply Cinematic effects after capture to videos shot at up to 60 fps. In Time-lapse mode, users can now record videos in 4K and Dolby Vision HDR. Audio Mix also has new algorithms that deliver higher-quality voices and can now isolate music.
Pro controls is a new customizable experience in the Camera app for iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max that makes it easier than ever for users to access their most used settings and introduces new options for manual control. Users can now adjust settings such as lens aperture, shutter speed, and white balance, or use a histogram to check exposure levels throughout a scene.
From this is it reasonable to infer that the tele and wide lenses/sensors are unchanged?
It looks as though there is an interesting new way to carry what is effectively a camera:
The Pro Max is $1,300, which is $100 more than the 17 Pro Max (256 GB of precious SSD that AI wants to steal from us).
What about the new $2000 folding phone? It has just two lenses on the back. They claim to have some sort of built-in telephoto lens on the main camera, but if that is such a great idea why isn’t it on the Pro Max? I’m skeptical!
The new watch supposedly has some better heart rate tracking features and, channeling Elizabeth Holmes, Apple wants healthy people to get tons of blood tests:
The Health app also includes movement evaluations that measure flexibility, strength, balance, and more using vision-based AI models on iPhone and heart rate data from Apple Watch. Users will be able to schedule and purchase new labs that feature over 50 key biomarkers for $119 directly through the Health app at approximately 2,000 Quest Diagnostics locations in the U.S. The redesigned Health app will arrive later this year, starting in U.S. English.
It looks as though the watch will also measure pulse ox so you can see if you’re dying, if it is time to put on the cannula in an unpressurized airplane, if it was unwise to rush straight to a ski mountain from sea level without sleeping in Denver for a couple of nights, etc.:
Readers: Who is brave enough to try the new folding thing?
After Boston and Brookline, I proceeded to KBHB. Here’s the view of Mount Desert Island out the PC-12 window:
Note that the view out of an open helicopter door is a lot better (the Mount Desert section starts at about 19:30):
Our first planned outing, a boat trip to Southwest Harbor and the Claremont Hotel, was subjected to (life-saving) abortion care due to fog that developed suddenly. We drove there instead to enjoy a typical Maine sunset:
The next couple of days were gloriously sunny.
This was Graham Platner country, but after he was unpersoned the good citizens of Bar Harbor put up their Troy Jackson signs:
Jackson is a progressive Democrat and supports Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, ending arms sales to Israel, expanding worker rights, banning certain purchases by non-Maine firms of starter homes, and an increased lodging tax on out-of-state visitors. He strongly supports abortion rights and LGBTQ rights, after having opposed them in his early career.
(On his campaign site, Jackson says he will “End the genocide in Gaza”, presumably by declaring war on Israel and having the U.S. military go in to destroy the IDF. He also promises to “Tax the billionaires” (let’s all send our property tax bills to MacKenzie Scott Bezos and Melinda Gates!). Jackson is leading Susan Collins in statewide polls.)
Despite the high level of righteousness, I found a beater Toyota on the southwest corner of the island with an “Awesome People Love Trump” sticker:
The sensitive will want to rush away from this kind of hatred to the safe space of the bookstore in Bar Harbor where August was still “Pride Month”:
As in Brookline, Maskachusetts, books about hockey-playing members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community were featured in two separate sections of the store. New Englanders simply can’t get enough on this subject.
I returned home out of Bangor via Delta Air Lines (for which I once worked!).
Progressives in Maine are passionate about river-to-the-sea liberation in the distant mythical land of “Palestine” and also they’re happy to do absolutely nothing to help their homeless neighbors:
(See The #Resistance in Bangor, Maine for a “Free Palestine” rally a year ago in Bangor, which also featured Rainbow Flags and which was therefore a legit “Queers for Palestine” rally.)
I complained about the 20-year-old suspension fork on a hybrid bike at my friend’s house hitting a stop and then I saw this bike with much more serious fork issues on a side street in Bangor:
The Bangor Airport doesn’t seem to realize that “Amelia Earhart Room” might not be the most comfortable place for nervous passengers:
Like the bookstore in Brookline, the airport has signage associating 2SLGBTQQIA+ identity with mental illness:
The terminal bookstore was ready for golden retriever customers:
A view of West Palm Beach:
Would Maine be the perfect place for a Floridian to have a summer home? The pluses are obvious:
cool weather
interesting terrain (only “hilly” by Rocky Mountains standards, but potentially qualifying as “mountainous” for some)
The minuses are severe, though:
plethora of biting insects (hardly any in settled parts of Florida due to spraying)
9.15 percent state income tax rate to which a part-time resident might yet become subject
12 percent estate tax rate to which a temporary resident who dies might become subject (Maine could try to argue that the person had gotten sick and spent more than 6 months in Maine while dying, for example, and thus became a Maine resident)
a powerful lust for taxation of part-time residents (the Democrat nominee for the 2026 governor’s race, currently leading in the polls: “Require Second Homes to Pay Their Fair Share: Hannah will adjust property tax law to allow municipalities to tax second homes owned by non-Maine residents at higher rates, ensuring seasonal and investment properties support the infrastructure and services they rely on and reducing the burden on Mainers.”; this is absurd when you consider that the second home owners don’t send children to public schools and probably seldom get arrested and imprisoned (ergo, how much can they be costing?))
history of sales and excise taxes on aircraft ownership, including pursuing part-time residents from states that are free of aircraft sales tax (such as MA and NH) for Maine tax
It would make more sense to be in New Hampshire, which offers similar climate and terrain, one of the nation’s best GA airports, and has no income tax, no estate tax, and no sales tax for that matter.
One of my theories for why colleges are facing price resistance (example) is that colleges and universities are now, by definition, collections of second-rate humans. The first-rate humans have all been hired by Nvidia or the AI companies. That’s obviously true in engineering and computer nerdism, but the AI companies also want to do great things in medicine, law, literature, art, etc. It is difficult to think of a truly effective human in any academic field who couldn’t be useful at OpenAI or Anthropic and, therefore, since these companies have infinite money and infinite impact, they should be able to hire away anyone that they think they need. Maybe it makes sense to pay between $0 and $6,440/year in tuition for University of Florida (Go Gators!), but how can it make sense to spend $70,000+/year on tuition at a lower-ranked private university, e.g., University of Rochester?
OpenAI said on Tuesday that its newest artificial intelligence technology had solved one of the “Millennium Problems,” a collection of important unanswered math questions meant to push the world’s leading mathematicians to new heights.
The company announced that one of its latest models, which has not yet been released to the public, needed just 88 hours to solve what mathematicians call “the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem.” This problem involves a series of equations that are often used to predict the weather.
The equations describe the movement of water and other fluids. The Navier-Stokes problem, which has no clear practical value, asks whether these equations completely break down in certain situations. OpenAI’s proof claims to have defined just such a situation.
This would imply, at least theoretically, that the laws of physics themselves would break down under certain conditions: that, for example, water could be made to spontaneously explode. But mathematicians and physicists do not believe that this mathematical breakdown could really lead to such an outcome in the physical world.
What does OpenAI get besides bragging rights?
The Navier-Stokes problem was one of seven “Millennium Problems” selected by the Clay Mathematics Institute in the year 2000 as a way of tracking the progress of mathematics in the new millennium. The institute, founded by an American businessman named Landon T. Clay, offered a million dollars for the first correct solution to each problem. Before OpenAI’s announcement, only one of the problems had been solved.
Dr. Evil would be happy (below), but isn’t $1 million what a receptionist hired in 2023 at OpenAI earns every month now as his/her/zir/their stock vests?
Aside from no taxpayers having been injured in order to fund this, the beauty of the biggest news in mathematics in 23 years (since Grigori Perelman’s proof of the Poincaré conjecture in 2002–03?) is that it has absolutely no practical implication. Solving the Navier-Stokes equations hasn’t gotten faster or easier because of these AI/math nerds. The bizarre situation where the equations can’t be used (what ChatGPT proved existed) doesn’t exist in our universe.
Perhaps someone in what’s left of Hollywood could make money off this, nonetheless… how about a movie called “Navier-Stokes” in which a diverse crew of NASA astronauts go through a wormhole into a parallel universe where Navier–Stokes singularities arise naturally in ordinary fluids and don’t have to be forced with 88 hours of GPU crunching? Aliens are discovered who get around by exploiting vortices produced by these singularities. Air turns into plasma without any warning. An enormous sea monster threatens our heroes, but then a massive whirlpool suddenly forms for no reason in the alien sea and the monster is dragged into the abyss. The astronauts themselves are safe within their ship, though, because it turns out that the life-size hollow titanium bust of George Floyd that President AOC mandated be included just outside the ship’s Islamic prayer room resonates to break up singularities that are forming within the cabin air. The crew also discovers that they can be safe on the alien planet surface if they travel together like a Christian saint procession, with the Bust of Floyd held in front of them.
Mathematics has now fully morphed into biology:
Project costs millions $ ✅ Put out paper that nobody has read ✅ Massive paper supplement nobody will read ✅ Advertise with pretty art ✅ Vicious authorship fight ✅ Say you're curing cancer ✅ pic.twitter.com/F68dasVr1o
I was gathered with friends, mostly from Brookline, Maskachusetts, to celebrate the marriage of a widow to a widower. In keeping with the spirit of this joyous occasion, I surveyed everyone on how they would have voted if they’d been on the jury in the Lindsay Clancy case.
All of the women except one young hater (conservative) would have voted to acquit (“not guilty by reason of insanity”, but the insanity was temporary and, therefore, the government would have no reason to detain her further). A Joe Biden Democrat in his mid-60s married to a Mamdani/AOC Democrat also voted to acquit (i.e., liberal male is the functional equivalent of “female”). A Brookline resident whose politics are driven by hatred of and contempt for Republicans and Trump also voted to acquit (“she’s already been punished enough”).
The remaining men all voted to convict Lindsay Clancy of at least some degree of murder. “Someone like that needs to be removed from society,” said a young man. “There has to be a consequence. Jeffrey Dahmer was psychotic, but he was still convicted,” said the boy’s father.
Half of the group were MDs and all had harsh words for the psychiatrists and psychologists who pumped Lindsay Clancy full of various medications (that said, nothing she was on had a known side effect of psychotic violence and it was unclear what she was actually taking from among the pills that she’d been prescribed).
(Based on my skimming of press coverage of the trial, I personally would have voted to convict her of the lowest degree of murder available. Her attempt to kill herself after the murders was certainly evidence of irrationality if not insanity and a first-degree murder is supposed to be rationally planned, I think. Maybe I would have voted differently if I’d heard all of the evidence and been instructed by the judge in the law.)
Based on this survey, I don’t think the Commonwealth will be able to convict Lindsay Clancy unless prosecutors can contrive a means of excluding female Democrats from the jury or, perhaps, reduce the maximum charge to something minor.
Update: I sat next to an 86-year-old lady on JetBlue SFO-FLL. She wasn’t a phone addict like everyone else and, therefore, we had a conversation. When the Lindsay Clancy trial was mentioned on her seatback TV, I asked Rhoda how she would have voted. “You put away a rabid dog so you have to do the same with a rabid person.”
Loosely related, a sad-funny X exchange:
Separately, the gathering of these Brookliners was actually in Silicon Valley. To make everyone from Massachusetts feel at home, the locals were kind enough to engage in outdoor masking (Menlo Park; under-nose Faucism):
(Quite a few indoor maskers, of course, as well, e.g., in retail establishments. There was, unfortunately, a serious dearth of social justice signage. People in Silicon Valley, apparently, care primarily about themselves and their money, unlike the virtuous folks in San Francisco and the East Bay.)
My first stop during the August trip to Maskachusetts was in Brookline, which vies with Cambridge for intellectual elitism and maximum credentialism.
A stroll to the bookstore in Coolidge Corner began with these apparently contradictory scenes. A halal family in what was formerly a Jewish suburb and a haram Rainbow Flag celebrating sexual activities that are punishable by death under Islam.
Brookline Booksmith offers free whistles (“look out for your neighbors”; in case the undocumented are living in the $3 million house next door) and a sacred Rainbow Flag on its front door:
There were no Black people either shopping or working in the store, but there is a well-stocked Black Studies section in case Claudine Gay walks in:
Prof. Dr. Jason Arday, Ph.D.’s final work was featured in “Non Fiction”:
According to just the above two pages, the man came back from not having the ability to use language for his first 12 years and also from (1) a serious head injury, (2) epilepsy, and (3) a brain tumor.
What else do Boston-area intellectual elites like to read? 3 out of the Top 100 titles are about the sex habits of hockey players:
Were there any books regarding people who have unusual sex habits but who don’t play hockey? I’m glad that you asked, but unfortunately several of them implied that 2SLGBTQQIA+ is associated with poor mental health (because of all the haters in Maskachusetts?):
“Nobody is raped in the physics lab in Missoula if for no other reason than nobody Krakauer followed took a physics course to begin with.” (me, in 2015)
Another prominently featured book:
Did you ever wonder “why your rage is hiding and how to let it out”? If so, Women are Angry is the book for you. (You can identify as a woman at least while you’re reading the book.)
Bulletin board on the way out:
Yard sign observed on my way up to Maine… (the residents of Lincoln, who show their support for the undocumented by refusing to relax the 2-acre zoning minimum, want to “De-ICE” Hanscom Field, the local Gulfstream airport and USAF base (no based military airplanes, however; it’s part of the “chair force”))
Happy Labor Day and National Payroll Week (imagine creating a system of taxation so complex that no company could pay its workers without the assistance of a contractor who in turn must rely on at least 1 million lines of software).
What does it cost to hire decent people these days? A similar-vintage (i.e., old!) friend in San Francisco recently started a job at a VC-backed AI/robotics company. It would have been rude to ask how much he is getting paid, so of course I did. “About $400,000 per year in cash,” he replied, “plus $500,000 or $600,000 in lottery tickets.” Apparently, the tax value of the lottery tickets is much lower than $500k and, therefore, the current taxes on what might turn out to be worthless aren’t severe.
If you’re wondering why your health insurance bills are so high… A mid-career radiologist friend was offered $1.3 million to work at a community hospital in New Jersey. She turned it down because she doesn’t agree with the progressive politics of the state, a disagreement that would be exacerbated by New Jersey’s high taxes (10.75% for state income, ranked #49 for tax environment by the Tax Foundation; the most recent ranking for tax burden, the percentage of peasant income taxed away by the governing elites, has New Jersey taking 13.2% vs. 15.9% in New York and 7-9% in the most efficient states, such as New Hampshire, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida). As a legacy American (white/Christian) she probably wouldn’t enjoy being represented by her replacement Adam Hamawy, an Egyptian immigrant to the U.S. with an “association with a terrorist Muslim cleric” (Politico) and “an opponent of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system and a supporter of a complete arms embargo and the right of return for Palestinian refugees” (Forward).
How soon before all of America’s smart people post “Gone to the Klondike” signs on their doors and can’t be hired because they’re doing AI startups?
Anyone else want to contribute some data on real-world recruiting and pay right now? I feel that the BLS data aren’t the full picture. Median pay for a software developer was supposedly around $131,000 in 2024, but does that include people who can’t program and who work 2 hours/week while being paid for 40 at a state government agency or contractor? I’m more interested in a survey of what it costs to hire someone who is capable and productive.
