John Young @jsy1001@qoto.org

#Ireland just got their first test match win, in their 8th match! By way of comparison, when #India got their first win it was their 16th match. I therefore conclude that Ireland are twice as good at #cricket as India are. 🏏

I worked on #Lemmings and am therefore old.

“It Was 33 Years Ago Today: Happy Birthday Lemmings! - The Scottish Games Network”

https://scottishgames.net/2024/02/14/it-was-33-years-ago-today-happy-birthday-lemmings/

The AI boom requires massive data centers that consume enormous amounts of water and energy.

Tech CEOs have plans for hundreds more hyperscale facilities in the coming years, but activists around the world are fighting back to protect their communities and force us to ask who really benefits from the future Silicon Valley is building.

https://disconnect.blog/ai-is-fueling-a-data-center-boom/

#tech #ai #chatgpt #openai #google

Librarians

Very impressive images of the International Space Station taken from the ground with a 0.8 metre telescope and a fast off-the-shelf CMOS camera.

Credit: Damien Peach & E. Enzmann

https://www.damianpeach.com/iss/iss_2024_01_29rgbeedp.jpg

H/T https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10161917230360934&set=a.483374755933

Please choose from the two contemporary design styles for your wifi hardware: “rounded soft box with white light” and “satanic death cult blood sacrifice altar”

Albuquerque, NM, has become the largest U.S. city to permanently make public transportation free for everyone. The city found that fares didn’t cover the administrative fees, so they actually save money by making public transportation free.

Inventor of NTP protocol that keeps time on billions of devices dies at age 85

Dave Mills created NTP, the protocol that holds the temporal Internet together, in 1985.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/inventor-of-ntp-protocol-that-keeps-time-on-billions-of-devices-dies-at-age-85/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

TOMORROW is the day... Rare Earth, BBC Radio 4's new climate and environment show, will start on 12-1pm on Friday January 19th, co-hosted by me and the ace Tom Heap. The first show is all about whether we can best help nature by just leaving it alone.

You can listen on the radio or on BBC Sounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001vbsp

#science #climate #podcasts #Earth

The first 18 segments of the primary mirror of ESO's Extremely Large #Telescope have arrived safely to #Chile !

Our engineers at Paranal Observatory checked that they hadn't suffered any damage during their 10000 km trip from France.

The ELT's 39-m mirror will be comprised of 798 of these segments, working together as a gigantic eye on the sky.

https://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann24001/

#astrodon #astronomy #space #engineering #technology

Astronomers measure the Universe's expansion rate and have found a discrepancy between the speed nearby versus the speed measured in the Cosmic Microwave Background. This is known as the Hubble Tension, and the search is on for anything that could explain it. One possible explanation is measurement error, which causes the Cepheid variables in galaxies to be too close together, obscuring results. New observations from JWST have removed this as an explanation.

http://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04773

Programming language clichés never die. That's perhaps why Jim Cownie had to debunk the "death" of Fortran:

https://cpufun.substack.com/p/is-fortran-a-dead-language

and the XYplorer developer constantly needs to justify using a "toy" language like Basic for production code:

https://www.xyplorer.com/faq-topic.php?id=VB6

Jim wrote:

"For reasons I cannot understand, “legacy” has become an insult, despite most of our knowledge being a legacy from previous generations."

#fortran #basic #development

Found a new author!

(new to me anyway lol)

The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu.

This one's been on my to-read list for quite a while. I'm about halfway thru (switching back & forth btwn audiobook/library book bc I'm weird like that).

I'm really into it. The whole thing is fascinating - deep, complex, thought-provoking, mysterious, mind-bending. It's honestly like the epitome of really cool sci-fi.

Always such a thrill to find a book that just pulls you in, y'know?

#NowReading #Bookstodon #TheThreeBodyProblem #CixinLiu #SciFi

Dragon Aurora over Iceland https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240114.html #APOD

The IPCC should hire the BBC’s graphics team for AR7.

Well, the picture at the top isn't one I sent them and completely mis-represents the situation (it was constantly stormy and there was no sea ice!), but here's the piece I wrote for the Observer about the five weeks I just spent on a research ship in the Labrador Sea with 21 colleagues, measuring air-sea gas transfer and the mechanisms behind it:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/07/ocean-breathing-climate-crisis-carbon-oxygen-helen-czerski-blue-machine

#science #ocean #ship #OceanBreathing

"The board is set. The pieces are moving." 🧙‍♂️

Much like pawns on a giant #chess board, the Auxiliary Telescopes of ESO's VLT Interferometer can be moved around and arranged into different configurations.

They all point to the same target, and the light they gather is channeled into a lab where light beams interfere. This allows us to discern tiny details, as if we had a huge virtual telescope.

Here's how this works: https://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/technology/interferometry/

#astrodon #astronomy #space #BlackAndWhite

Collaborator Ernst de Mooij brought a 3D printout of the data we are analyzing in our latest research paper, a fantastic and very tactile gift! Any guesses as to what the data represents, and which star we're looking at? 🔭🪐Hint: it's not pulsar data! #astrodon #3dprinting

So many astute observations about science, politics, & religion by Carl Sagan & still a beautiful film 🎥

Just watched “Contact” again after many years & for the first time with my son.

He loved it – a true chip off the old block 👴💁‍♂️

Time to lend him my copy of “The Demon Haunted World”, I think 🙂👍

#Astronomy #Astrodon #Science #ForCarl