Off on the wrong foot

The average turbulence score on America’s bumpiest flight. The eddy dissipation rate (EDR) is basically a nerdy way to measure how violently the air’s shaking you around. Albuquerque to Denver nails it, turning a short hop over the Rockies into a midair mechanical bull ride. Expect seat belt signs, coffee spills and a nervous chuckle from the flight attendant.

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Your TV’s USB ports can charge your phone, tablet and other mobile gadgets. If a pop-up asks to access the device, just ignore it. It’ll keep charging anyway. Genius.

That’s how long the average Character.AI user chats with a bot every day. More time than most people spend talking to their actual friends. But hey, Sherlock Holmes never zones out mid-convo to scroll Instagram, right? Turns out, you can put a price on friendship (paywall link): $10 a month, to be exact.

That’s how much market value Do Kwon vaporized in his crypto collapse. He hyped TerraUSD as a stablecoin, then secretly used a trading firm to fake its stability. He could face up to 25 years, but the feds will settle for 12. That’s about one year for every $3.3 billion in lost value.

That’s how much Paramount paid for the rights to the UFC. That’s more than the GDP of Fiji. Seven years, 43 events a year and zero pay-per-view fees, just all-you-can-binge brawling for your $12.99 Paramount+ subscription. ESPN’s old $500M-a-year deal looks like pocket change.

How much Perplexity just offered Google to buy Chrome. Just for comparison’s sake: Perplexity is worth $18 billion, and Google is worth $2.5 trillion. Chrome isn’t exactly on the clearance aisle, especially not for couch cushion change (paywall link) from a competitor. Either way, looks like a bad deal. I got Chrome for free! 

Dinosaur tracks were uncovered in Travis County, Texas, after July’s horrific floods. A volunteer helping clear debris found 15 three-clawed footprints in a crisscross pattern, each 18 to 20 inches long. So what was it? Experts think they belonged to a meat-eating dino like the 35-foot Acrocanthosaurus. Imagine that thing chasing you.

Biggest crypto theft ever. In 2020, a hacker cracked one of the world’s largest Bitcoin mining pools using a laughably weak 32-bit security system you could brute-force with a gaming PC. They drained 127,000 Bitcoins (worth $3.5B then, $14.5B now) from over 5,000 wallets and then just left the stash untouched for five years.