- sleet_spotterFYI there is a long-standing bug with ProMotion and switching spaces. Their length is tied to refresh rate somehow. Switching to static 60hz makes them faster (but what an annoying choice to have to make!)
- I’m not sure if you are intentionally trying to miss the point. The comment was claiming they are obligated by law to support media they don’t agree with. We are all equivalently obligated by law to not steal or commit other crimes. We pay taxes. They are part of the contract of our society. What our representatives decide to spend them on doesn’t change that.
- While I sympathize with the feeling, it’s a stretch to say “obligated by law”. You pay taxes, which your legally-elected representatives decide how to spend. We elect them to speak and choose on our behalf. It isn’t a “loophole” when this runs afoul of an individual’s values. It is simply that we have a representative government that makes decisions by majority votes. I don’t agree with most defense spending, but I acknowledge that a majority of this country wants it. This is the purpose of compromise. If there had been a good-faith proposal to reform CPB [1], we could have made it better. The collateral damage from destroying the good parts (e.g., PBS) due to our failure to compromise should not be celebrated. [1] Such a proposal isn’t hard to imagine. A key purpose of local stations is to give a platform to the voices of local people. Simply shifting funding from national programming to local programming (without changing the total) would have accomplished this “debiasing” and empowered the (tragically endangered) local news.
- NSF also uses expert panels to recommend grants for funding. The systems are very similar.
- This is a helpful way to think about it. Though, is the problem of having an incomplete definition the same as lacking a unique name? Maybe the solutions are different, and the author points out that made-up names don't cut it. Is it instead more of a catch-22 situation?
The other dimension implied here is the timing of when variety is introduced. If all the options were known when the system was originally designed, the issue may have been more clear. So then the other problem is that, when the need to distinguish between cases first came up, the solution was designed for only 2 cases. And if there were only ever those two cases, the solution presented would probably be the most efficient.
The solution to this incremental scope problem is a lot less clear to me and something I struggle with personally in scientific computing projects. When variety #2 pops up, how does one decide whether to restructure everything in case of a variety #3, or take the quicker (potentially more efficient) path and avoid unnecessary complexity? Assuming I've done as much as I can to anticipate and constrain my needed functionality. It somehow feels like I end up losing either way.
- As someone in grad school for related topics, this stuff will undoubtedly surpass physical weather models (climate change is a different story). As I chart my own research direction, I wonder what kinds of problems meteorology will still be working on in a few decades? AI models like this will render many physical models obsolete. And with the leaps made recently by cube satellites and other remote sensing tech, direct observations may soon no longer be sparse. So what does that leave? Understanding the physical principles? Yes, and doing so will augment these advances. But what else? And what kind of applied problems could the physical principles solve? At some point, AI weather forecasts may cross the threshold of being "good enough" for 99% of use cases. I don't doubt that there is much more important science to be done (I recall someone famously claiming science was "done" in the 1800s), but admittedly it takes some creative thought to imagine. The field will have to evolve. I don't know if it is possible to know how it will evolve before it does. Just something I wonder about.
Also, I certainly don't mean to detract from this achievement . This is great work and it is truly awesome to see these kinds of leaps. There is plenty of vanity in science and the urge for self-preservation, but such advances in weather forecasting will save so many lives and do a lot of good in the world. I wholeheartedly cheer on the scientists behind this work and am excited to see what is around the corner.
- Pre-industrial CO2 concentration is synonymous with the "natural concentration", at least in the recent past. We made a very large change that has thrown Earth's systems out of equilibrium. Returning to pre-industrial CO2 levels would undo that change and bring things back towards equilibrium.
- I'm not totally sure how systems work for drilling this deep, but typically ice core setups attach the coring apparatus to the surface via a cable that is spooled by a winch. The cable itself ends up being the heaviest part of the system.
- As the hole gets deeper, the amount of time to bring up core sections and send the drill back down become significant. That combined with the previously mentioned short field season. Drilling more than a few hundred meters becomes very difficult logistically as well, especially in such a remote setting.
- Also work on ice, though not with cores. Just 2nd'ing this as being a great point. Arctic amplification is fascinating and IMO understudied relative to its importance.
The distinction I believe the article is trying to make around the "first-core-to-ground" sentiment, is that this is the first time a core has been drilled through the full thickness of an ice *stream*. These are regions of an ice sheet with very rapidly moving ice. Ice loss from ice streams may have a larger and more immediate impact on sea level than other regions in Greenland and Antarctica. However, I do not actually know whether this is the first core drill ed through an ice stream, but I'm assuming that was the article's intent.
- A critical piece is the speed at which the climate is warming. The Earth has had much warmer and colder periods in its history that (most) life adapted to. However, life was only able to adapt happened because those changes happened at a sufficiently slow pace. To perhaps put the current trend in the context of geologic time, there have been 5 mass extinctions in the fossil record of life on Earth. These are associated with rapid changes in climate (e.g. asteroid impacts, large volcanic eruptions). Anthropogenic climate change is driving Earth's 6th mass extinction event. To be clear: what is happening now has not happened often in Earth's history. Life has survived, but it has not been pretty. Some alarmism is warranted from the ecosystem collapse alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction