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Occasionally, a paper comes along that stares very hard at global average temperature , notes that average admits a variety of interpretations, and then wanders off on a little adventure exploring other possibilities. Some of these papers the best or worst of them, depending on your taste throw in a little physics too. You [ ]
‘Was this heatwave caused by climate change?’ – we’re asking the wrong question. I have to admit I like this framing of the attribution question. It has a zen feel to it: unask the question. On the other hand, telling someone they re asking the wrong question is quite bold so it s not something I could pull [ ]
It s too hot to do anything at the moment other than lie on the sofa with a fan pointed at my face and think. What I was thinking about was crochet and amigurumi and how a simple flat spiral can become such an astonishing array of shapes. You just follow the pattern, making one knot [ ]
The joule is the unit of energy. One zettajoule (ZJ) is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Joules. One times ten to the power of twenty one Joules. One followed by twenty one zeroes Joules. I will tell you now; it represents a lot of energy. You might wonder under what circumstances a zettajoule might be a useful unit of [ ]
It s not often one gets a paper on uncertainty in estimates of ocean heat content written by a clarinettist whose wikipedia page has a section on their extra curricular activities that goes as they say hard. Life is sometimes generous in its treats. The paper is a sceptical confection whipped up by Jonathan [ ]
Each month, you put a little aside in a savings account. It s not always the same amount because you know life is life, but each month a little gets squirreled away. Then you get a promotion and the amounts, though still variable, get bigger. If you were to give the monthly balances of [ ]
Someone on Bluesky was asking people for their favourite $20 words. That seems kind of steep, but such is inflation. Mine were: peristeronic, septentrional, titivation, and velleity. However, the list could go on and on because languages have to express such an astonishing array of things and these were the four that came instantly to [ ]
A new paper has appeared on arXiv: Generative deep learning improves reconstruction of global historical climate records. It uses, as you might guess from the title, generative deep learning to reconstruct global historical climate records. It does temperature and precipitation, but I m largely interested in temperature. This is a good thing to try because This [ ]
I read 35 books in 2025 out of my 24 book reading goal . Damned if I can remember what happened in half of them. Occasionally, I took notes. Here is my attempt to dredge something up from the sump of my memory. Mostly what I remember are the hilariously bad Goodreads reviews for each of [ ]
In a narrow sense, LLMs are superhuman. They operate at computerish speeds and can now churn out text in seconds or minutes, that a human would take hours to write, if they could write it all. Thus, generating text joins the list of things that computers can do very well, like mathematical calculations, playing chess, [ ]