Coastal Grandtabber Aesthetic

I live on an island now but when I was a kid I used to come here for summer vacations, and one of my favorite things to do on a calm, foggy morning was pick through the palm-sized shale chips that littered the beach near my grandparents’ cottage and then skim them sidearm out toward the big rock, trying to get them to skip as many times as I could. I’d imagine that there was a World Championship of Stone Skipping, and I was in the final round, with thousands of spectators cheering me on. Well it turns out there is a World Championship of Stone Skipping and of course in 2025 it has a cheating scandal:

In other coastal news: Bay Area fish enormous, rare. Future new Today in Tabs Chesapeake Bay lighthouse headquarters on sale for a very reasonable $450k. Please subscribe and we can make this happen.

Moving slightly further offshore…

Today in Boats: Wired has a long and interesting feature by Bradley Hope about the death of Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch, who was “acquitted of all charges in one of the largest fraud cases in Silicon Valley history” and then barely two months later died when his megayacht Bayesian sank at anchor off Sicily in an apparent freak accident. Hope ends up blaming the boat’s retractable keel for the sinking:

Although according to a poster in Reddit’s r/sailing, “The damn keel is a total red herring,” and the actual blame lies with the boat’s 45 degree downflooding angle, which is extremely low for a sailboat. It appears that, in nautical terms, this was a real whoosh, tip, glug glug kind of situation.

Have you ever seen a container ship and wondered what it would look like if those stacks of shipping containers started falling off? Of course you have, we all have. Everyone who played with blocks as a toddler understands intuitively that this is the whole point of stacking them up like that. Well we’re in luck this week, as “Dozens of cargo containers go tumbling off ship at Port of Long Beach. Investigators seek answers” but Tabs merely seeks as many videos as possible. A week later they’re still pulling containers out of the water. No one was seriously hurt so we are all free to enjoy this with a clear conscience.

And finally today in boats, here’s Jalopnik on the new Big Stuck Boat:

The ship is stuck in the Franklin Strait, named for Arctic exploration’s all-time “this fucking guy” Sir John Franklin, who was truly one of the worst to ever do it. As of Sunday, a salvage team was en route to attempt to re-float the vessel.

Regrettably, A.I.: Kevin Roose is the perfect person to review Eliezer Yudkowsky’s dumb new book. But who will align the A.I. alignment centers? Introducing the Center for the Alignment of A.I. Alignment Centers. A.I. podcasting startup “Inception Point AI already has more than 5,000 shows across its Quiet Please Podcast Network and produces more than 3,000 episodes a week.” RIP humanity, boiled off our drinking water to create thirty five million slopcast episodes hosted by fake gardening expert Nigel Thistledown. Meanwhile 404’s Emanuel Maiberg reports that Vibe Coding Cleanup Engineer has gone from LinkedIn joke to actual job description. And Benji Edwards at Ars Technica reports that “Education report calling for ethical AI use contains over 15 fake sources.”

Hey… What? “Electric Salt Cup… uses electricity to enhance the perception of the salty taste and umami in food.” I think it’s beautiful when two crazy kids finally find love after all of life’s twists and turns. And America’s zaniest clown police force, the F.B.I., decided to burn a bunch of meth in a Montana animal control office’s incinerator, filling the building with meth smoke and forcing the evacuation of 75 animals and 14 workers.

I have a bunch of media tabs but you know what? Let’s save those for later and just enjoy a relatively Horrors-free edition today. Instead here’s some Nepali revolutionary kids aura farming:

Today’s Song: “Bet You Do,” Pixel Grip

I never remember to mention it anymore but I also post on Bluesky @rusty.todayintabs.com. Hack the Planet!