I took the train from Milan to Zurich once, then spent a few days in Zurich. The train goes through the Alps and it's just spectacular. Zurich was beautiful. We spent one day walking through the city and the other day walking a path in the mountains overlooking the city. We went to a place that specialized in fondue. It was probably pretty touristy, but it was fun and tasty. That's where I discovered that I liked riesling when it wasn't overly sweet. I don't recall what hotel where we stayed, but I had a meal there that was absurdly memorable for no good reason. It was just a simply prepared white fish filet, maybe flounder, potatoes, a green salad without too many ingredients, and a glass of dry white wine, but every bite of it was perfectly prepared. I can't explain it.

Saw a picture of the real Pete this morning. He is wearing a red majorette-like uniform with knee high white boots. Of course I can not find that now.

It says a lot about the vastness of the Roman Empire that we are still doing this work. After two thousand years (give or take), and after centuries of archaeologists working on ancient Rome, we didn't already have a sense of their roads and how the network of them was structured?

Automobiles

https://m. Link to video

Canada invited to become first 'associate member' of the EU European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced on Wednesday that Canada has been invited to become the first “associate member” of the EU. She announced the move during her 2026 State of the Union address in Strasbourg, to an audience including not only MEPs but also Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who attended her speech in the midst of a trade war with the US. Since late August, the Canadians have been pushing hard for the Europeans to build a closer relationship with them, though full EU membership is not an option as Canada is not a European state. During her speech before the MEPs on Wednesday, von der Leyen invited the country to become “the first associate member of the European Union". “We share one ocean, one set of values, one way of seeing the world. And we will now build our shared future as well,” she added. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/09/16/canada-to-become-first-associate-member-of-the-eu

Apparently, that's real news. So there might not be a United Kingdom. Also, there's news the EU has invited Canada to become an associate member of the EU, and it looks like Canada will accept.

Ok, demolish the building. Burn it to the ground. See what that does. Ok, it's an open book test. The answer is nothing.

The last day of summer is near. I'm glad.

I have followed this guy, William Green, on Youtube for many years. His channel is called "My Green Pets". Link to video

5.0 Since I've never used Uber and the default starting score is 5.0

And I ended up letting a house go back to the bank, thereby trashing my credit for 7 years. No matter, I wasn’t in a position to buy anything anyway.

Moonbat posted this link next door. Long but readable. The first few paragraphs: Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy. Two reports have come out about this incident, one from OpenAI itself, and another one from METR and Redwood Research. The METR/Redwood investigation’s scope was limited to how the second civilization of AIs pwned Hugging Face (but it didn’t look at how the third civilization pwned OpenAI itself, which seems like an even more concerning incident). These two reports are 38 and 91 pages long respectively, and it’s kinda hard to parse the storyline. I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface

https://www.ft.com/content/96f911e8-eb7d-4d50-aada-7e751d42d83b?syn-25a6b1a6=1 2026 Last night of proms Yuja Wang performed Barber's piano concerto, then a jazz suite. Her playing (and dress) dazzles, I watched it through despite not liking the Barber much, nor the jazz. How, who, to follow her? ... very entertaining tenor singing a fab Scottish medley.

We wanted a little bubbly fountain for our pampered cats, so Quirt ordered one. It wasn't expensive. It didn't need to do anything but pump water up to their cute little lips. When I went to set it up, I had to download an app just to turn it on. It doesn't even have an on switch. There is no reason for it to require an app, other than to send me notifications that I should buy a filter. I think I could theoretically operate it remotely, but why? If it stops, it's because it's out of water. I can't fix that remotely.

Oy vey.

Consistent