Well don't I feel stupid

Making decisions is frightening, and for a lot of people asking for advice is more about the hope of sharing the blame rather than of learning something new. The algorithm is an alibi.

One of my least favorite tech language things, which has totally infected pundits, is making wildly speculative statements in the present indicative.

I dunno. I’m pretty sure it didn’t look like that in 1993.

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

Something doesn't smell right about this US government report today saying new home sales soared 20.5% in August. Why? Because a separate report from homebuilders themselves say business is way down. Here's the new home sales report vs the NAHB Housing Market Index:

The newspaper version of this joke: When someone restarted the New York Sun (briefly) in print in the 2000s, the first issue contained the answer to the crossword published in the last issue of the old Sun, published in 1950.

My ex-student James Cook just released a new bicycle safety helmet technology. A deceptively simple way to reduce the rotational impact forces that cause brain injury in crashes. Check it out: About RLS share.google/T1GY4iYSC32f...

Setting aside systemic factors, there were some Biden-specific problems: > After a lifetime of sitting for Sunday morning talk shows, Biden overestimated his ability as a communicator. > Biden and his team prized loyalty so much so that they didn’t support younger/charismatic surrogates /+

One thing that has been studied repeatedly is that voters (esp in the US) care more about relative status than objective individual ec status/quality of life, & I believe surveys suggested a shift R for upper middle class as lowest quintile did better under post-Covid welfare policies. Also? Gender.

We may have hit a level of material comfort that politics have become less distributive and more expressive. I think this expressive form of politics is basically a luxury good, because people believe they will be "fine" no matter who wins so just do what "feels" right.

A Handy Guide [1/4]

So, agree we shouldn't ignore the land used by extractive industries, but there is a metric to compare this apples-to-apples: land use intensity of energy (or electricity). We did a meta-analysis for electricity production if you are interested! journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

huh, the entire alberta energy grid was free for 16 hours yesterday wind power was overproducing, so it just... goes to zero apparently

The offer made to women in the enticement to become trad wives is the same as the offer made to citizens in the enticement to embrace authoritarianism: give up. Abandon the aspiration to self rule. It’s imprisonment recast as rest and relief.

If the Rapture is on Tuesday, that means the Antichrist is currently a leader on Earth. Ok, this might be right

Two parts of Trump administration policy are going to intersect at some point in a way that’s destructive and that the media hasn’t covered yet: (a) collapse of core economic sectors (ag, manufacturing, construction) and (b) bureaucratic demands and requirements for an understaffed safety net.

Thermoelectric heat pumps are still very far from competing with today's vapor-compression cycles, but I wouldn't be shocked if more breakthroughs are made and they eventually take over. Solid state tech offers some huge advantages!

By @adamtooze.bsky.social, worth a careful reading. I pay attention to the topic, but my lack of awe [until now, I guess] suggests I haven't been paying enough attention.

#OTD 19 September 1991, walkers in the high Ötztal alps on the Italian border, found a body melting out of the ice. It turned out to be the remains of a c.5200 year old man preserved with all his kit. Of course, it was essential to replicate him in Playmobil. 1🧵 #PlaymobilÖtzi #PlaymobilInfestation

I heard AI and its relationship to the economy recently described as “The wasting is masked because the tumor is growing so fast that the body isn’t losing weight.”

I think about this post every single time I'm stuck at work when it's rainy or snowing.

I had a conversation with a reporter who had spoken to one of the big turbine manufacturers and they said they weren't planning to ramp up production as they didn't expect any demand after 2030. I thought that was a major story. Apparently they didn't.

NEW | The Electrotech Revolution slidedeck Electrotech combines solar & wind, EVs & heat pumps, batteries & digitalisation. @kingsmillbond and Ember Futures team unpack how this is reshaping the global energy system 🧵 http://ember-energy....

I’m reading a book about the decade and have gotten up to 1928 without noticing any problems in the market so I feel confident it will.

you could write an entire book about this post and I will for the right price

1/ New report from @bentleyallan.bsky.social's Net Zero Policy Lab: As the US withdraws from green tech industries and pressures allies to follow suit, China is stepping in to power the developing world's energy transition. The scale is staggering. www.netzeropolicylab.com/china-green-...

The IEA is now predicting oil demand will be lower next year than this year. "Meanwhile, global demand is forecast to grow by 737,000 barrels a day this year... Next year, demand growth is projected at 698,000 barrels a day" Subtle but also a very big deal. Structural change in oil markets.

Oof, this graph. No wonder folks are pissed all the time, when even relatively good news eras are presented as worse than the Great Depression and the onset of World War II. And that constant negativity makes it tough to recognize when there’s something they ought to actually worry about.

Distressed reporters? Thinking we’re all distressed at this point.

US oil and gas employment.

Why would anyone want to be a scientist? "Doing good science requires the utmost exertion of body, mind and spirit, yet is consistently filled with failure and rejection." journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

Outgoing editor-in-chief Jeffrey Winters reminisces on some of his favorite stories from over the past 23 years. www.asme.org/topics-resou...

Maybe @lukeoneil47.bsky.social is the poet laureate of our times...

This is actually really interesting.

My former crew at @asmedotorg.bsky.social @mengineeringmag.bsky.social have a long cover story this very month about the maintenance and repair of these cables. Fascinating stuff.

Over a year ago I tried LLMs and found their results so unreliable that they were useless. With so much hype I decided to give GPT another test yesterday. I fed MSFT Copilot a zoning document and asked it to extract the differences between 2 columns in a table, it claimed success but was very wrong.

Important to remember that everyone involved in renaming the DoD to the Department of War is afraid to take the subway.

US blue-collar job growth has completely stagnated, hitting the lowest level since the onset of the pandemic—manufacturing is currently losing jobs at a rapid pace, and growth in construction/transportation has slowed to a crawl

1/x 🧵 🔌💡 #Greensky. Hey climate peeps! Here’s a local victory to celebrate, and some lessons from it. Last night, the Town of Poughkeepsie, NY, voted to overturn its 18-month moratorium (6 months, renewed twice) on grid-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS).

Epstein was playing a pincer game with the authorities. He created unsympathetic victims and then he squeezed the cpos and prosecutors. He was saying: You'll probably lose in court and if you try, I'll destroy you. It's more or less the game Trump plays. It defines our society.

10 years ago: China is building a new coal plant every 3 days, why should the US make itself less competitive by transitioning to renewables? Today: One in four emerging economies (led by China) get more of their final energy from electricity than the US...and it's making them more competitive.

There is only enough safe underground storage space for 1,460 Gt of CO2, according to new research in the journal Nature. This is an order of magnitude less than previous estimates, and only enough to cut global warming by 0.4-0.7 degrees C, not 6 degrees. @grist.org grist.org/science/carb...

> "41% of Millennial and Gen Z employees admit they’re sabotaging their company’s AI strategy, for example by refusing to use AI tools or outputs translation: workers who know how to do work correctly keep the business on rails in spite of the bosses who can't tell answer-shaped output from answers

Excited to maybe add “slop” to the list of things millennials have killed

Uh oh.

This seems important:

One of my biggest 🤯 moments in cognitive psychology was when I learned that our brains and bodies don’t really know the difference between good change and bad change. It’s all just stress. That framing really made a difference in how I regulate. As you said, it’s still big (stressful) feelings.