GOOD NEWS SUNDAY

Five real stories this week. Here’s what went right. A KIDNEY TURNS 100 Betty Vetuskey offered her son a kidney. Ray Vetuskey does not think she gave it two thoughts. He was a teenager when his kidneys stopped working. Doctors put him on dialysis. Betty was 52. “She’s right by my side, all the time,” Ray says of her now. The surgery was in March 1978 at Strong Hospital. Ray was 16. He still has the calendar from that month. The surgery date is circled. So is the date of a Genesis concert. On surgery day, mother and son lay on gurneys, holding hands. Betty was crying. The transplant was a success. Ray made the concert. He still has the ticket stub. Forty-eight years later, the kidney still works. Ray lives in Webster, New York. He is the longest surviving kidney transplant recipient in Strong Hospital’s history. Dr. Miklos Molnar, the hospital’s director of transplant medical services, said a living-donor kidney typically lasts 15 to 20 years. Molnar was asked about the record. “In our program for sure, and I think in my life too,” he said. He added that the biological match between a mother and son matters. So does the emotional bond. Betty has since died. This year she would have turned 100. Ray had a star named after her in the national star registry. He now visits Strong Hospital once a year for a check-up. His doctors believe the kidney could last him the rest of his life. About 500 people in the region are waiting for a kidney. Anyone older than 16 can sign up to be a donor. Sources: WHEC (Vetuskey transplant, calendar and concert, hospital record, Molnar statements, star registry, donor figures) MILT WINDLER, 94 When Apollo 13 went wrong, Milt Windler asked the room. Apollo 13 was supposed to be the third crewed moon landing. Instead, Windler and Gold Flight director Gerry Griffin polled the flight controllers in the room. They developed three options for when, where and how long to fire the lunar module’s engine. The goal was to put the spacecraft on a path back to Earth. Windler was one of the four leaders of Mission Control in 1970. They directed the round-the-clock effort to bring the Apollo 13 astronauts home. The Apollo 13 team received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Richard Nixon that year. Windler died Thursday, October 1, at 94, surrounded by his family, according to a brief notice posted online. A memorial service is planned in Friendswood, Texas. He was born January 10, 1932, in Hampton, Virginia. He earned an aeronautical engineering degree from Virginia Tech in 1954. He worked for NACA, served four years in the Air Force, then returned to NACA at Langley Research Center. He stayed as it became NASA and moved to Houston as the Manned Spacecraft Center was being built. NASA named him a flight director in 1968, after recovery work on the Mercury and Gemini programs. He led a shift of flight controllers on Apollo 8 and on the Apollo 10 lunar landing dress rehearsal. He led one on the second, third and fourth moon landings. He then served as a flight director on all three crewed Skylab missions. Later he worked on the space shuttle, the Canadarm and International Space Station operations. NASA awarded him its Exceptional Service Medal. Looking back, Windler said Apollo moved so fast that few people had time to think about it. He said he might have tried to pay more attention. Sources: collectSPACE (death notice, Apollo 13 role, early life, career timeline, honors, memorial, Windler’s reflection) FRIENDS GET MORSE CODE BUZZES A blogger who writes as liquidbrain enjoys getting texts out of the blue. So he made sure he would know who they were from. His phone sits in his pocket with notifications on. He can feel every buzz. A buzz said a text had arrived. It did not say from whom. He wrote that texts are the highest signal-to-noise notification on his phone. Most come from friends or colleagues. At any moment, he figures, there is maybe a 40 percent chance a text is relevant. So he either pulls out the phone or wonders who wrote. An iPhone can give each contact a custom vibration. He had already done it for his family. He wanted to reach more of the people in his life. He got fed up and made custom tones for about 25 of them. To stay systematic, he used the Morse code of each person’s initials. He could not automate it. He recorded each pattern by hand in the phone’s settings. The whole project took about 45 minutes. Each tone took between one and five attempts. Then he went contact by contact and assigned the pattern, one friend at a time. He added a note to those friends. If something is urgent, call. Calls go through on Do Not Disturb. If he misses a call, he asks them to leave a message saying why they called. “(If it’s just a social call, I appreciate hearing that it is!)” he wrote. Sources: liquidbrain.net (Morse vibration project, September 30 post) TOMLIN’S 12-YEAR MINECRAFT CITY “I started playing Minecraft, man, when my kids were young,” Mike Tomlin said. That was about 12 years ago. He has been building the same city ever since. Tomlin was the longest-tenured head coach in the NFL before he stepped down following the 2025 season. He described the project in a television interview with Craig Melvin. He did not build it alone. He said he lacks the technical knowledge to move a game world from one console to the next. His children did that for him. The world has gone from the PlayStation 3 to the PlayStation 4 to the PlayStation 5. His oldest son is now the one pushing to show it off. Tomlin said the son told him to share the city with the world. The family has been discussing how. That son is Dino Tomlin. He posted that his father wants him to record the city and put it on YouTube. Uncut, the video would run two hours, so he would break it into sections. He asked his followers whether they wanted it. He also wrote that the world file itself cannot simply be released. No release date has been announced. Sources: Bleacher Report (Tomlin interview, tenure, his son’s encouragement, sharing plans); EssentiallySports (Dino Tomlin’s posts, console history, YouTube plan) A MATHEMATICIAN’S CASE FOR OPTIMISM Kevin Buzzard says he wakes up every morning excited about the future of his field. Buzzard runs the Xena Project. His essay, published October 1, is about colleagues who feel grief over AI. He does not share it. He writes that machines are now answering questions humans could plausibly have answered themselves. The change is the speed. In his view, mathematics is about proving theorems, building theory and seeing where to go next. Understanding is a nebulous concept, he writes. The number of theorems correctly proved can be measured. His case for optimism rests on infinity. Mathematics is infinite, he argues, and infinity beats exponential growth. He also expects people to keep up. In every case but Navier-Stokes, he writes, humans have reverse-engineered mathematics produced by AI. He expects the Navier-Stokes result and OpenAI’s unreleased theorems to be no different. If humans want to understand, he writes, they will. That is why he signed an open letter urging OpenAI to publish its data. He wants mathematicians to see exactly what the company claims to have done. He writes that he cannot fail to be excited by the powerful new tools. He closes with Hilbert’s motto, “we must know, we will know.” Sources: Xena Project (Buzzard essay “To grieve, or not to grieve?”, October 1) “Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1789 Get full access to The Rest of the World Report at www.restoftheworldreport.com/subscribe