“Ireland has conquered most of Britain’s major National Hunt races in recent years but like the Gaulish village in the Asterix series, one stable in Scotland continues to resist.” https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/apr/15/corach-rambler-wins-grand-national-after-animal-rights-protesters-force-delay-to-race-horse-racing
This is bleak: The human cost of the climate crisis will hit harder, wider and sooner than previously believed, according to a study that shows a billion people will either be displaced or forced to endure insufferable heat for every additional 1C rise in the global temperature. In a worst-case scenario of accelerating emissions, areas currently home to a […]
I had always been interested in the story of the TSR2 (Tactical Strike Reconnaissance) aircraft ever since I read about it in an old copy of Take Off magazine a long time ago. It was a story shrouded in faded grandeur, a tale of brilliant and far-sighted engineering defeated by mucky politics, parsimonious accountants and […]
This came to my attention recently: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-03-17/ocean-cleanup-plastic-pollution-great-pacific-garbage-patch/102075810 “[But] if the plastic density was a tenth of what it is in those [Ocean Cleanup] videos, they’ll just be sailing around at sea wasting fuel and everything else.” For their part, The Ocean Cleanup say they’re using computer modelling and sophisticated ship navigation technology to concentrate their efforts on […]
David Mitchell has a refreshingly good take on the latest culture kerfuffle: The debate has inevitably focused on whether the publishers have been too “woke” in making these changes. Have they been soft, giving in to snowflakery? Have they betrayed the works of which they are supposed to be custodians? This is missing the point. […]
“What would make a difference is developing mass transport and substantially reducing car ownership; closing coal mines and ending oil and gas exploration; promoting decentralised and community-managed renewable energy systems; doing away with industrial-scale monoculture farming; and supporting smallholder and Indigenous-led agroecological systems that have been shown to enhance nutrition, biodiversity and quality of life. […]
This sounds like a great tool: “Cities account for more than 70% of global CO2 emissions,” Shalit said. “They are clearly critical to climate action, but they are also complex and highly interconnected systems – and they really lacked the tools to plan and manage their transition.” ClimateOS, the integrated platform developed by Shalit’s Stockholm-based startup, […]
https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-chatgpt-ceo-sam-altman-responds-school-plagiarism-concerns-bans-2023-1 Given how popular ChatGPT has become, Altman believes that the world must adapt to generative AI and that technology will improve over time to prevent unintended consequences. “It’s an evolving world,” Altman said. “We’ll all adapt, and I think be better off for it. And we won’t want to go back.” I’m not convinced. […]
Thoughtful piece about AI tools and creativity on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: Promoters of AI tools like to talk about user creativity. But I’ve found the relationship between my prompts and results to be unsatisfyingly obscure. It’s almost impossible to know what difference using one input word versus another makes, since the algorithms that […]
