Peter's Quasi-Daily Blah-g

The problem: You don’t read physical books through to completion. The solution? According to the two developers behind it, it is a bookmark that helps you pick up where you left off. The AI-powered Mark does not yet exist but is suddenly available for pre-order with one objective: to help you remember what you just read.

Mark is a bookmark you place into a book when you are finished reading to mark your spot. Once you close the book, the gadget does the hefty lifting. It sends a summary of the pages you just read to your smartphone and then concocts a generalized summary based on information already associated with that title. The idea is that when you come back to it later, your brain will catch up with the breadcrumbs left behind.

For $130, Mark hopes to address those who feel like their attention is constantly “fragmented” and the books they’re reading remain “underutilized.” Specifically, this product is for “Americans who prefer physical books to e-readers and tablets,” or at least that’s what it claims in its manifesto.

“Just like Strava keeps you motivated in fitness, Mark keeps you inspired in reading,” says the Mark Twitter/X account. This refers to the social media element of the bookmark, which lets your friends know you’ve made a dent in your reading once you’ve shut the book. Mark will measure your reading pace and summarize key themes as you progress. A “Mark Wrapped” feature even keeps track of what you read, similar to services like Goodreads.

As I’ve repeatedly mentioned, I’m a millennial, which means I’m of the generation that got through school essays with the help of CliffsNotes. Eventually, they were replaced by Wikipedia summaries. I don’t see Mark offering groundbreaking technology, especially since I’m not sure how it does what it purports to do. While I appreciate the idea of being caught up on what I was reading before I abandoned the story, this whole practice is taking the onus off of the reader to keep track of what they’re reading.

I get the premise of being an inconsistent reader. I switched to audiobooks because they were easier to pick up and catch on with the plot, even if it was weeks before I could get to it. But $130 to pick up reading where you last left is a grotesque amount for something that doesn’t perform other functions. It is much cheaper to buy a packet of sticky notes and stay engaged with your reading instead of relying on the computer to do the heavy lifting.

You can sign up for the waitlist if you’re morbidly curious about Mark. I did because I wanted to know what the heck was going on here.

Last year, an employee at Citigroup accidentally initiated a fund transfer to a customer’s account that would have made them the wealthiest person in the history of human existence. The incident, which took place last April, credited a client’s account with a whopping $81 trillion instead of the intended amount (a mere $280), the Financial Times first reported.

Citigroup itself only has a market capitalization of about $150 billion, and the entire U.S. GDP is only worth about $27 trillion. The GDP of the European Union is some $17 trillion. The GDP of China is close to $18 trillion. So, to be clear, the transfer amount would have been more money than most of the economies of the developed world combined. It’s not clear where the bank planned to get the money, and, unfortunately, the customer in question did not get to keep the funds (not that they ever existed).

It’s also unclear whether the person who initiated the transfer got to keep their job. In communications with the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Citi referred to the incident as a “near miss” which, you know, is probably an understatement. No funds ever left the bank, the FT reports.

Actually, “near misses” seem to happen quite a lot and are a formal category of screwup in the banking industry. The said category applies to incidents that do not qualify for regulatory scrutiny, according to FT reporting:

A total of 10 near misses — incidents when a bank processes the wrong amount but is ultimately able to recover the funds — of $1bn or greater occurred at Citi last year, according to an internal report seen by the FT. The figure was down slightly from 13 the previous year. Citi declined to comment on this broader set of events. Near misses do not need to be reported to regulators, meaning there is no comprehensive public data on how often these incidents occur across the sector. Several former regulators and bank risk managers said near misses of greater than $1bn were unusual across the US bank industry.

Ultimately, automated systems at the bank were responsible for halting the impossibly massive transfer, while two human employees initially missed the gargantuan outflow of money.  A third employee finally caught wind that something was amiss approximately 90 minutes after the transfer was initiated, the FT writes. “Despite the fact that a payment of this size could not actually have been executed, our detective controls promptly identified the inputting error between two Citi ledger accounts and we reversed the entry,” the company told the New York Times.

The Times notes that Citi has made some massive fuckups before. Some two years ago, an accounting error for a trade inspired a huge selloff of stocks in Europe that ultimately obliterated some $322 billion in value. For having caused such significant economic chaos, Citigroup was fined $79 million.

Gizmodo reached out to Citigroup for comment and will update this story if it responds.

An asteroid discovered late last year is continuing to stir public interest as its odds of striking planet Earth less than eight years from now continue to increase.

Two weeks ago, when Ars first wrote about the asteroid, designated 2024 YR4, NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies estimated a 1.9 percent chance of an impact with Earth in 2032. NASA’s most recent estimate has the likelihood of a strike increasing to 3.2 percent. Now that’s not particularly high, but it’s also not zero.

Naturally the prospect of a large ball of rock tens of meters across striking the planet is a little worrisome. This is large enough to cause localized devastation near its impact site, likely on the order of the Tunguska event of 1908, which leveled some 500 square miles (1,295 square kilometers) of forest in remote Siberia.

To understand why the odds from NASA are changing and whether we should be concerned about 2024 YR4, Ars connected with Robin George Andrews, author of the recently published book How to Kill an Asteroid. Good timing with the publication date, eh?

Ars: Why are the impact odds increasing?

Robin George Andrews: The asteroid’s orbit is not known to a great deal of precision right now, as we only have a limited number of telescopic observations of it. However, even as the rock zips farther away from Earth, certain telescopes are still managing to spy it and extend our knowledge of the asteroid’s orbital arc around the sun. The odds have fluctuated in both directions over the last few weeks, but overall, they have risen; that’s because the amount of uncertainty astronomers have as to its true orbit has shrunk, but Earth has yet to completely fall out of that zone of uncertainty. As a proportion of the remaining uncertainty, Earth is taking up more space, so for now, its odds are rising.

Think of it like a beam of light coming out of the front of that asteroid. That beam of light shrinks as we get to know its orbit better, but if Earth is yet to fall out of that beam, it takes up proportionally more space. So, for a while, the asteroid’s impact odds rise. It’s very likely that, with sufficient observations, Earth will fall out of that shrinking beam of light eventually, and the impact odds will suddenly fall to zero. The alternative, of course, is that they’ll rise close to 100 percent.

What are we learning about the asteroid’s destructive potential?

The damage it could cause would be localized to a roughly city-sized area, so if it hits the middle of the ocean or a vast desert, nothing would happen. But it could trash a city, or completely destroy much of one, with a direct hit.

The key factor here (if you had to pick one) is the asteroid’s mass. Each time the asteroid gets twice as long (presuming it’s roughly spherical), it brings with it 8 times more kinetic energy. So if the asteroid is on the smaller end of the estimated size range—40 meters—then it will be as if a small nuclear bomb exploded in the sky. At that size, unless it’s very iron-rich, it wouldn’t survive its atmospheric plunge, so it would explode in mid-air. There would be modest-to-severe structural damage right below the blast, and minor to moderate structural damage over tens of miles. A 90-meter asteroid would, whether it makes it to the ground or not, be more than 10 times more energetic; a large nuclear weapon blast, then. A large city would be severely damaged, and the area below the blast would be annihilated.