On this day:
1791
The National Constituent Assembly in Paris is dissolved; Parisians hail Maximilien Robespierre and Jérôme Pétion as “incorruptible patriots”.
1882
Thomas Edison’s first commercial hydroelectric power plant (later known as Appleton Edison Light Company) begins operation on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin, United States.
1888
Jack the Ripper kills his third and fourth victims, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes.
1927
Babe Ruth becomes the first baseball player to hit 60 home runs in a season.
1938
At 2:00 am, Britain, France, Germany and Italy sign the Munich Agreement, allowing Germany to occupy the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.
The National Constituent Assembly in Paris is dissolved; Parisians hail Maximilien Robespierre and Jérôme Pétion as “incorruptible patriots”.
1882
Thomas Edison’s first commercial hydroelectric power plant (later known as Appleton Edison Light Company) begins operation on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin, United States.
1888
Jack the Ripper kills his third and fourth victims, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes.
1927
Babe Ruth becomes the first baseball player to hit 60 home runs in a season.
1938
At 2:00 am, Britain, France, Germany and Italy sign the Munich Agreement, allowing Germany to occupy the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.
"We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.-- Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, in the journal Red Terror, explaining the scientific nature of Marxism and giving us all hope
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The word “scientist” was invented by William Whewell, a nineteenth-century Cambridge philosopher. As a result, science grew to a dominant position in public life, and philosophy shrank. Philosophy shrank even further when it became detached from religion and from literature.
Don't worry, Dzerzhinsky's coming.
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The Falcon Heavy has a capacity of nearly 64 metric tons, Starship can deliver over 100. Starship is the largest rocket ever launched, and its size allows SpaceX to deploy upgraded Starlink satellites that would not fit into any other rocket payload.
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The Apache Indians ritually killed one twin, arguing that the mother did not have sufficient milk to feed two infants, and some Eskimo tribes left one twin outside to die in the cold. So utilitarianism was introduced to the Americas.
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Just because something is good does not mean that we have the obligation to maximize that. It can be the wrong thing to maximize that.--Rebecca Lowe. So optimization, which sounds very AI, may not be its own reward.
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So, did the White house come to a Memorndum of Understanding with the AI leaders?
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Deleting the Catastrophe
"You’ve probably never heard of the term “RCP 8.5” — the highest-emission scenario used by climate scientists to project the planet’s future. But if you’ve read about climate change, you’ve seen the numbers and nightmarish outcomes it produced: 4°C of warming by 2100, sometimes 5°C, sea level rising multiple feet, parts of the planet too hot for humans.
Those numbers shaped a decade and a half of climate journalism, including a lot of my own when I covered climate change at Time magazine. I didn’t always know — and didn’t always communicate — that the scenario behind the most apocalyptic, attention-getting findings was largely an attempt to imagine how bad things could get, not a true forecast. But I wasn’t alone. RCP 8.5 was a frequent background presence in climate journalism.
Last month, though, the scientists who built that scenario formally retired it. In a paper published in Geoscientific Model Development, Detlef van Vuuren and more than 40 co-authors eliminated RCP 8.5 from the scenarios that will feed into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Seventh Assessment Report, which is due in 2029. Based on falling clean-energy costs, climate policy, and recent emissions trends, the highest-emissions pathway had become, in their words, “implausible.”
I can understand if your eyes began glazing over as soon as you read “seventh assessment report,” but this shift represents real progress and hope. It means that the apocalyptic climate change future that we’ve been describing for 15 years is officially no longer on the table. Instead, a merely bad climate future — about 2.8°C by 2100 — is now the central scientific estimate. Given how hopeless our climate future has appeared at times, that really does qualify as good news.
Counting to 8.5
Climate models can’t tell you the future on their own, because how much the planet will warm depends in large part on what humans do. So scientists build scenarios: structured guesses about how the next century might unfold under different assumptions about energy use, growth, and climate policy."--from Walsh
"You’ve probably never heard of the term “RCP 8.5” — the highest-emission scenario used by climate scientists to project the planet’s future. But if you’ve read about climate change, you’ve seen the numbers and nightmarish outcomes it produced: 4°C of warming by 2100, sometimes 5°C, sea level rising multiple feet, parts of the planet too hot for humans.
Those numbers shaped a decade and a half of climate journalism, including a lot of my own when I covered climate change at Time magazine. I didn’t always know — and didn’t always communicate — that the scenario behind the most apocalyptic, attention-getting findings was largely an attempt to imagine how bad things could get, not a true forecast. But I wasn’t alone. RCP 8.5 was a frequent background presence in climate journalism.
Last month, though, the scientists who built that scenario formally retired it. In a paper published in Geoscientific Model Development, Detlef van Vuuren and more than 40 co-authors eliminated RCP 8.5 from the scenarios that will feed into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Seventh Assessment Report, which is due in 2029. Based on falling clean-energy costs, climate policy, and recent emissions trends, the highest-emissions pathway had become, in their words, “implausible.”
I can understand if your eyes began glazing over as soon as you read “seventh assessment report,” but this shift represents real progress and hope. It means that the apocalyptic climate change future that we’ve been describing for 15 years is officially no longer on the table. Instead, a merely bad climate future — about 2.8°C by 2100 — is now the central scientific estimate. Given how hopeless our climate future has appeared at times, that really does qualify as good news.
Counting to 8.5
Climate models can’t tell you the future on their own, because how much the planet will warm depends in large part on what humans do. So scientists build scenarios: structured guesses about how the next century might unfold under different assumptions about energy use, growth, and climate policy."--from Walsh
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