John Patrick2024-12-29T09:57:33-05:00December 29th, 2024|

Can’t resist this seasonal one from the brilliant folks at Joy of Tech:

John Patrick2024-12-09T13:12:14-05:00December 8th, 2024|

There are apparently some very capable folks working at Google’s DeepMind.  First the brilliant AlphaFold and now GenCast  — their New AI model that they claim (see their presentation in Nature here) “advances the prediction of weather uncertainties and risks, delivering faster, more accurate forecasts up to 15 days ahead.”  The Nature paper claims that GenCast has “greater skill and speed than the top operational medium-range weather forecast in the world, ENS, the ensemble forecast of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts…GenCast is trained on 40 years of best-estimate analysis from 1979 to 2018, taken from the publicly available ERA5 (fifth generation ECMWF reanalysis) reanalysis dataset. Reanalysis provides a reconstruction of past weather by computing analysis for historical dates and times.”  Though the comparison is with the 2019 ENS modeling (and the latter has improved since then), this seems pretty impressive.

• Writing in the Harvard Gazette, Christina Pazzanese interviews Daniel Poneman on the state of the nuclear industry in the US.

• We’re littering near-earth space just like we junked up the planet. The Washington Post Editorial Board describes the issue well – Space trash is falling from the sky. And that’s not the worst of it.

• John Muyskens, Kevin Crowe, Shannon Osaka, and Niko Kommenda, writing in the Washington Post,  do a commendable job of describing the variable rise in sea levels across the globe. Definitely worth a read: WHY SEAS ARE SURGING

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