🎬 160 trillion liters

Good morning. 160 trillion liters. That’s the staggering amount of rain that fell following the passing of Hurricane Helene (and another storm that preceded it) through the US Gulf Coast this past week, according to calculations by meteorological scientists.

It’s nearly impossible to wrap your head around the concept of 160 trillion liters of water, so here are some helpful comparisons. It would;

• Fill a football stadium 51,000 times.

• Fill more than 60 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.

• Be the equivalent of 619 days of constant water flow over the Niagara Falls.

Another set of scientists ran the calculations and said 160 trillion liters was, if anything, an undercount.

— Edna Akanni, Tayo Davies

THE BIG IDEA
Everyone is getting back in touch with buttons

Apple is the latest company attempting to free us from the touch screens that have bedeviled consumers for years, even though Apple was the one that took us prisoner in the first place.

When customers unbox the new iPhone 16, they will find it has two additional buttons. Remember, this was the device originally released in 2007 with a touch screen that drove the Blackberry into virtual extinction and transformed the world into one with in-your-face interfaces. Apple’s re-embrace of physical controls is the latest sign that companies are listening to complaints about touch screens that have increasingly pushed customers’ buttons, the Wall Street Journal reports.

A changing reality. Tesla inspired touch screens that now adorn car dashboards for everything from radio dials to windshield wiper controls as companies looked to rein in costs. But Kia, BMW, and Volkswagen have responded to negative feedback about screens by adding buttons and knobs back in new vehicles.

It’s also about safety. The influential European New Car Assessment Program said earlier this year that vehicles must have physical controls for certain features beginning in January 2026 to achieve a five-star safety rating. A 2017 study by the AAA Foundation showed that drivers can take more than 40 seconds to complete a task using a touchscreen. BMW Group boss, Oliver Zipse holds that touchscreen technology will be extinct in cars within a decade.

Not just the iPhone: Apple returned physical keys across the top of its MacBook Pro in 2021. And e-book readers Kobo, Nook, and Boox include buttons for turning pages.- EA.

TRENDING

SHOWER THOUGHTS

SNIPPETS

• Who saw it coming? 6 months after his loss in the Senegalese presidential race, Pres. Macky Sall is back on the scene after being nominated leader of Senegal’s opposition coalition. Analysts tout a potential standoff between him and current president, Bassirou Faye in November’s legislative elections.

• Also, veteran football coach, Aliou Cisse who heads the Senegalese National Football team has been ousted ahead of AFCON qualifiers. Surprising to many given that the led the team through its most successful decade, winning the AFCON in 2022 and making the round of 16 in 2022 World Cup.

• Yikes. Two vessels carrying migrants from Africa are reported to have sank in the Red Sea off the coast of Djibouti on Tuesday. The boats ferried migrants from Yemen back to Africa along a popular route usually sought by Africans seeking greener pastures.

•  Another one. Rwanda has reported the passing of at least 8 people from effects of contracting the Marburg virus, just days after it declared an outbreak of the disease. Thankfully, the country hasn’t had much to do on the mpox side of things, it’s reported only six cases so far.