“On the other hand, it has been shown that one can get a remarkable semblance of a language like English by taking a sequence of words, or pairs of words, or triads of words, according to the statistical frequency with which they occur in the language. 1/2

California is about to hit licence plate 9ZZZ999. I’ve already seen 9ZR____. The DMV announced the new format well be simply reversed — 000AAA1. That means the first 3 characters increment the fastest. Yuck. I would have gone with 11AAA00.

New distance measurements for our galaxy 📏 ESA's XMM-Newton & NASA's Chandra have measured the distance to three bright explosions echoing through the outer spiral arms of our galaxy. In doing so, they found the arms to be up to 10% further away than we thought 👉 www.esa.int/Science_Expl... 🔭 🧪 ☄️

We bought a small cactus (apparently a rainbow hedgehog cactus) and after less than a year, it has an amazing set of flowers.

Barack Obama — an elegant president for a more civilized age.

My latest cartoon for @newscientist.com

One thing I mentioned in passing in my Fable post is that, for long running tasks, Fable starts to develop its own dialect as its many agents and tasks reinforce themselves and make Claudish language ever more Claudish. You need to ask it to report out in plain English or this happens after 9 hours

Looks like 'spark' is the latest trendy word in AI. There's Meta's "Muse Spark", Google's "Gemini Spark", and Nvidia's "Nvidia RTX Spark".

what do you mean the lathe of heaven isn't dishwasher safe

hero

Here is the evolution of the projected El Nino event by month in the latest CFSv2 model runs (last 8 days):

sorry Allen Ginsberg, sorry, i'm trying to delete it www.qwantz.com/index.php?co...

A bit of a read, but worth it.

“A republic, if you can keep it.” Spoiler alert: you can’t.

I found this experiment fascinating arman-bd.hashnode.dev/i-left-port-...

The human circulatory system, before and after proper cable management.

🦅🇺🇦 Ministry of Defense announced the introduction of a new model of warfare - drone assault units, which combine drones and infantry into a single system. This approach has already shown results in the south, where a large amount of territory has been liberated since February.

Man Who Threw Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s Home Claims He Was Following ChatGPT Recipe For Risotto https://theonion.com/man-who-threw-molotov-cocktail-at-sam-altmans-home-claims-he-was-following-chatgpt-recipe-for-risotto/

Apropos today. www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-0...

I’m getting somewhat exasperated by people using the phrase “war crimes” as though it’s actionable. Unless the perpetrators are arrested by the war police, tried in a war court by a war judge, found guilty by a war jury, and sent to war prison, it’s just propaganda.

He is risen

Thought of the day — I may be the last human to ever look at some of the code I’ve written.

My president told me Iranians keep shooting down his planes so I asked how many planes he has and he said he just goes to the airbase and gets a new one so I said it sounds like he’s just serving up planes to the Iranians and then his vice president started crying.

When the president says Iran’s forces are decimated I can only assume he’s using the word’s original meaning of reducing by 1/10th.

There are now 10 toilets in Space International Space Station: 4 Crew Dragon Docked at ISS: 1 Soyuz Docked at ISS: 1 Tiangong Space Station: 2 Shenzhou Docked at TSS: 1 Artemis II on way around Moon: 1 This will be the first time a toilet has left low earth orbit!

Hospital Decides Cancer-Sniffing Leopard More Trouble Than It’s Worth https://theonion.com/hospital-decides-cancer-sniffing-leopard-more-trouble-than-its-worth/

My secret hope is that AI companies spend prodigious amounts of money on renewables over the next couple of years to sate their energy demands but then go bankrupt leaving the world a better place with excess clean power.

* DOW CEO SAYS UP TO 50% OF POLYETHYLENE SUPPLY IS OFFLINE, CONSTRAINED OR IMPACTED AMID MIDDLE EAST DISRUPTIONS -- CONF CALL * DOW CEO SAYS COMPANY REMAINS FOCUSED ON WHAT'S FIRMLY WITHIN ITS CONTROL, REGARDLESS OF THE SITUATION THAT'S UNFOLDING IN THE MIDDLE EAST -- CONF CALL @reuters.com

good night, sewers. good night, streams. good night, operations and maintenance teams. good night, settling tanks. good night, stream banks. good night, engineers, scientists, crews, managers, inspectors, analysts too. a good night for us means serving with care. good night, sewers, everywhere.

The traditional model of a steady, linear climb in global temperatures is increasingly at odds with observations. We've relied on the ocean’s ability to act as a storage buffer for thermal energy. Recent data on Ocean Stratification indicates this buffer is undergoing a mechanical decoupling.

The Lost Generation The Greatest Generation The Silent Generation Baby Boomers Gen X Millennials Gen Z Gen Alpha Gen Beta Gen AI <end>

Whew. All signs are increasingly pointing to a significant, if not strong to very strong, El Niño event. I'll have more to say in coming weeks & months, but for now I'll just say that this is increasingly likely to become a major regional-to-global climate driver in 2026-2027.

Board of Peace - Season 1

Because it's been a while, here is an update of my plot on the altitude of the Hubble Space Telescope versus time

Secure your own squid first before helping others. (I'm disproportionately proud of this drawing.)

The Top 1% of U.S. earners now have more wealth than the entire middle class

"On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. 1/2

How could a simple self-replicating system emerge at the origins of life? RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but existing ones are so large that their self-replication seems impossible. Could they be smaller? Excited to share our latest work in @science.org on a new small polymerase. 1/n

Welcome to the Plutocracy

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

When I heard that Bad Bunny’s song was called DTMF I wondered why someone wrote a song about Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency aka telephone keypad dialing tones.

I can already tell the nature of programming with AI is going to change how programs are written. In ancient times, we built mental models of the code — where functions are, how it executes, and what state it's in while running. Instead “programmers” will become coding managers. 1/3

The CIA has not only discontinued the CIA World Factbook but has deleted all the content. www.cia.gov/the-world-fa...

Groundhog predicts there are only 9 springs left

This is my blood

Moderna curbing investments in vaccine trials due to US backlash, CEO tells Bloomberg TV reut.rs/3NBzBtS