My bank’s new login page really needs to be a case study in a course on UI design.

Three or four seconds after the page seems fully loaded, with inputs for customer ID and password, an ad for one of the bank’s products will sometimes [not always] pop up at the bottom of the page. When this happens, if you are partway through typing your customer ID, that input *loses focus* and turns a warning shade of red because it has too few characters. You need to click it again to resume typing.

I've been conditioned by this punishment to wait a few seconds before I start typing my ID, but the ad doesn’t always appear, and the timing is variable, so ... honestly, did no human ever try using this before rolling it out on their customers?

America wakes to find that every candidate on every ballot is named John Malkovich.

Bacteria should have shared the 2025 chemistry Nobel Prize for metal-organic frameworks!

It’s been known for a while that there are “cable bacteria” that extrude conductive filaments up to 1 cm long, which penetrate sediments on the sea floor and allow them to draw electrons from buried sulphides to power their metabolism.

But it turns out the filaments made by Candidatus Electrothrix gigas are based on MOFs “strikingly similar to those used by chemists”. This was not a case of deliberate biomimicry; these MOFs were created in labs before they were discovered in nature.

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/bacteria-discovered-to-be-synthesising-metal-organic-frameworks-with-extraordinary-conductivity/4024399.article

[You can register/subscribe at the Chemistry World site if you wish, but if you just close the box they still let you read this article.]

Today I bought a pack of assorted washers of various sizes, which were described with dimensions like “28mm × 32mm”, which was simultaneously (A) perfectly comprehensible [inner diameter × outer diameter], (B) hilariously weird, and (C) an unforgivable transgression against the sacred dictates of mathematics and geometry.

I have a new story, “Osculation Point”, in the anthology VASTER THAN EMPIRES

https://www.amazon.com/Vaster-than-Empires-Speculative-Ephemeral/dp/0262054876

Also, “Spare Parts For the Mind” (originally in Asimov’s SF) is reprinted in THINK WEIRDER Volume 2:

https://thinkweirder.com

Now that we’ve abolished leap seconds, and won’t tweak standard time to match the rotation of the Earth until the discrepancy reaches 1 hour, we should establish a generation-spanning secret society that shuffles objects around to make Earth’s spin conform to atomic time instead.

Head of climate action residents’ group: "We cannot dig up coal, ship it overseas, watch it drive climate change, and then pretend the consequences have nothing to do with us and won't be felt by us."

3/5 judges in Australia’s High Court just agreed.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-07/mount-pleasant-coal-mine-high-court-ruling/107233650

I don’t know what cheesy LLM these scammers are using, but the glitches can be hilarious.

[Though I have written a novel called “Morphotrophic”, “Morphological Regency” sounds like a token midway between that and the average of all titles on Smashwords.]

2002: I buy a prepaid SIM card, giving my name as “Greg Egan” on the account application. Asked for ID, I show my passport, which gives my first name as “Gregory” and includes my middle name.

Human checking this (who, being a human, understands how humans use their informal and full legal names): Everything is fine, enjoy your new mobile phone!

2026: Telco’s automated message to me: We must verify your identity. Please supply the details of a suitable ID document.

Me: Supplies the details on my passport.

Verification algorithm: Details do not match your account.

So I am now looking forward to hours of time wasted on getting through to a human in the telco who knows exactly the right solution to this “problem”.

And I know that people with non-Anglophone names face this kind of needless idiocy a hundred times more often.

Automating paperwork and bureaucracy is great, but 3 decades into the process, why are we still so crap at handling even the simplest, most obvious pitfalls?

[LLMs won’t fix this, they’ll just change the failure modes.]

“About 2:00pm on Saturday, mine workers found the object burning near a remote access road and alerted emergency services.

Police said it may be "a composite-overwrapped pressure vessel or rocket tank", from a space vessel.”

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-19/wa-space-debris-reentry-investigation/105909612