Apparently, (see this science article in the NYT by Raymond Zhong) polar ice cap melting from increased global temperatures is not the only way we affect the wobble in the earth’s rotation axis; there are also effects due to our pumping of ground water!  I was completely unaware of the vast volume that must be being pumped in order to have a demonstrable  planetary influence.

I guess Jamelle Bouie agrees – from his NY Times Republicans Have Made Their Choice piece:

“Most things in life, and especially a basic respect for democracy and the rule of law, have to be cultivated. What is striking about the Republican Party is the extent to which it has, for decades now, cultivated the opposite — a highly instrumental view of our political system, in which rules and laws are legitimate only insofar as they allow for the acquisition and concentration of power in Republican hands.”

And don’t miss his June 24 column, Republicans Serve Up Red Meat for a Reason; it’s devastatingly accurate.

Setting aside the all-too-commonly voiced support for the candidate who is so obviously unfit for office, what I find most disgraceful among many republican political office holders is the divisiveness they continue to stoke with their pro forma statements of support for the orange one, statements that most of them know are untrue.  What they keep spouting with their “deep state,”weaponized,” “politicized,” (and worse) rhetoric is bad for a country already suffering from excessive division.  But apparently their concern is not for the country – it’s for staying in power, despite the obvious cost.

Another obvious example of politicking without regard to consequence – their push to cut funding for the IRS, which could result in an INCREASE in the deficit, since it will likely cut tax revenue by over $200 billion.

Maybe this is the first example of, well, AI offsetting some of the emissions costs of generative AI.  From venturebeat.com:

“Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) research lab DeepMind has achieved a remarkable feat in computer science through its latest AI system, AlphaDev. This specialized version of AlphaZero has made a significant breakthrough by uncovering faster sorting and hashing algorithms, which are essential processes utilized trillions of times daily by developers worldwide for data sorting, storage and retrieval…In a paper published in the science journal Nature, DeepMind asserts that AlphaDev’s newly discovered algorithm achieves a 70% increase in efficiency for sorting short sequences of elements and approximately 1.7% for sequences surpassing 250,000 elements, as compared to the algorithms in the C++ library. Consequently, when a user submits a search query, AlphaDev’s algorithm facilitates faster sorting of results, leading to significant time and energy savings when employed on a large scale.”

Wait, I can’t forget DeepMind’s leap in solving protein structures…