Hi!

About a week ago, I came across a brilliant idea on reddit. An elementary school principal had a student who lost a tooth — literally. The student, Gavin, had a tooth fall out as baby teeth often do, but before the tooth could be put aside safely, someone misplaced it. And that’s a problem because of the Tooth Fairy. The Tooth Fairy, as we all known, visits children who place their dislodged baby teeth under their pillows at night, and takes the teeth for her own noble purposes (she turns them into stars, I’m told), leaving some money in return. Gavin wanted his money, but he didn’t have the tooth.

Enter the principal. He or she wrote a letter to the Tooth Fairy, seen here, explaining that the tooth was lost and requesting that the Fairy still “provide the standard monetary exchange rate” that the Fairy provides for real teeth. (It’s a nice note. You should click through and read it. And the postscript is fun, too.)

My kids are older and I never had this specific issue come up, but I could see it being an issue. I’ve been looking for ways to use generative AI to build simple websites — I’m not a software developer by any means — and this sparked an idea. Could I use ChatGPT to create a website that created a similar certificate of misplaced teeth for parents to use? I started chatting with the bot and within 15-20 minutes, had something I kind of liked. And then I realized that there some other tools parents of young kids could use — a web app that scanned the room for monsters, ensuring that there were none to be found; and another that shielded young would-be sleepers from bad dreams. Three tools, all of which help parents get their little kids to actually go to bed. (As this best-selling book proves, that can be easier said than done.)

I call it the Parent Toolkit, because I don’t have a better name. If you want to try it, click here or the image below.

I doubt I’ll do much more with it — again, this was primarily (if not solely) an effort to see if I could build something just by chatting with a gen AI bot. But it works, so why not share it, right? Please let me know if you find it useful and if you have ideas for other things I can add. I’m glad to try to do so.

And don’t let the bed bugs bite!

The Now I Know Week In Review

Monday: The British Dubbing Loophole of 1988: This is so silly. There’s no reason it should have happened at all.

Tuesday: Do Not Touch, Eat, or Even Smell The Flowers: Seriously, it’s a bad bad bad idea. And thanks to everyone who wrote in to let me know that there are other similar gardens, including one in Dublin near the Blarney Stone.

Wednesday: Nuclear Shadows: The lasting aftermath of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Thursday: Extreme Paint Ball, Literally: I really like this idea and am glad someone is dedicated enough to have pulled it off.

Long Reads and Other Things

Here are a few things you may want to check out over the weekend:

1) “Finding Robert Bogucki, the man who disappeared on purpose” (ABC News Australia, 16 minutes, July 2025). The subhead: “In 1999, an American trekked into the Australian desert alone, sparking an international rescue mission. Decades later, he returns to meet the people who tried to save him from himself.”

2) “How Ireland’s ‘Mediocre’ Milk Powder Made it Big in West Africa” (DeSmog, 14 minutes, July 2025). They should have just went full Simpsons and called it “malk.”

3) “The Case for Lunch” (New Yorker, 15 minutes July 2025). Apologies if this one is behind a paywall — it wasn’t when I first bookmarked it, but when I went to write this, it was. It is, as the title says, the argument for making lunch the special meal of the day.

Have a great weekend!

Dan