Month: August 2024

Enlarge / A young Maurice Sendak’s illustration of two possible outcomes of atomic power for the 1947 pop-sci book Atomics for the Millions. (credit: McGraw Hill/Public domain)

Beloved American children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak probably needs no introduction. His 1963 book, Where the Wild Things Are, is an all-time classic in the picture genre that has delighted generations of kids. It has sold over 19 million copies worldwide, won countless awards, and inspired a children's opera and a critically acclaimed 2009 feature film adaptation, as well as being spoofed on an episode of The Simpsons.

But one might be surprised to learn (as we were) that a teenage Sendak published his first professional illustrations in a 1947 popular science book about nuclear physics, co-authored by his high school physics teacher: Atomics for the Millions. Science historian Ryan Dahn came across a copy in the Niels Bohr Library & Archives at the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland, and wrote a short online article about the book for Physics Today, complete with scans of Sendak's most striking illustrations.

Born in Brooklyn to Polish-Jewish parents, Sendak acknowledged that his childhood had been a sad one, overshadowed by losing many extended family members during the Holocaust. That, combined with health issues that confined him to his bed, compelled the young Sendak to find solace in books. When Sendak was 12, he watched Walt Disney's Fantasia, which inspired him to become an illustrator.

Enlarge / A building at Apple Park, the company's Cupertino, California, HQ. (credit: Apple)

Apple has announced a major change on its leadership team: Longtime Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri will step down from his role on January 1, 2025.

Maestri has, by all appearances, had a resoundingly successful run since he took on the CFO role a decade ago in 2014. In his tenure, Apple had its strongest fiscal decade ever, as the company's net income more than doubled.

Apple stock is worth nine times what it was when he stepped into the job. Certainly, that can't be attributed exclusively to the company's CFO, but it appears Maestri navigated both the popularity of the iPhone and the company's shift to services (which make five times more money than they did earlier in his time as CFO) well.

Enlarge / A building at Apple Park, the company's Cupertino, California, HQ. (credit: Apple)

Apple has announced a major change on its leadership team: Longtime Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri will step down from his role on January 1, 2025.

Maestri has, by all appearances, had a resoundingly successful run since he took on the CFO role a decade ago in 2014. In his tenure, Apple had its strongest fiscal decade ever, as the company's net income more than doubled.

Apple stock is worth nine times what it was when he stepped into the job. Certainly, that can't be attributed exclusively to the company's CFO, but it appears Maestri navigated both the popularity of the iPhone and the company's shift to services (which make five times more money than they did earlier in his time as CFO) well.

Enlarge / AT&T's stand at Mobile World Congress on February 27, 2023, in Barcelona, Spain. (credit: Getty Images | Joan Cros Garcia-Corbis)

AT&T agreed to pay a $950,000 fine for an August 2023 outage in four states in which the carrier failed to deliver 911 calls and did not make timely notifications of the outage to eight 911 call centers. "As part of the settlement, AT&T will implement a three-year compliance plan designed to ensure future compliance with the FCC's 911 and outage notification rules," the Federal Communications Commission said in a press release yesterday.

The 2023 outage lasted 1 hour and 14 minutes, affecting users in Illinois, Kansas, Texas, and Wisconsin. It resulted in over 400 failed 911 calls.

"The 911 outage occurred during testing of portions of AT&T's 911 network," the FCC said. "During the testing, an AT&T contractor's technician inadvertently disabled a portion of the network, and AT&T's system did not automatically adjust to accommodate the disabled portion of the network, resulting in the outage. The testing was not associated with any planned maintenance activities and, thus, did not undergo the stringent technical review that would have otherwise been conducted."

Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

After years of bickering with the Biden administration about vaccine misinformation, Mark Zuckerberg has now accused the White House of "repeatedly" pressuring Facebook for months "to censor certain COVID-19 content" in 2021 that Facebook supposedly would not have taken down without pressure.

In a letter to the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee on Monday, the Meta CEO claimed that senior officials from the Biden administration "expressed a lot of frustration" when Facebook pushed back on certain content removal requests. According to Zuckerberg, the Biden administration didn't just want misinformation taken down, but also "humor and satire."

"Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take the content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19 related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure," Zuckerberg wrote, taking accountability for his platform's actions.