Nowadays it has become exceedingly hard to distinguish legitimate academic endeavours from scam in my mailbox. Not even AI filters can sort stuff out properly: my inbox often contains invitations to fake conferences, or to publish with non-existing journals, while my spam folder at times contains honest invitations of academic value.
I could touch the reality of the problem a few months ago, when I was invited to an AI conference in Singapore. I was about to trash the email, when something in the name of the sender rang a bell. Upon checking, it turned out that he was a Nobel prize winner in Physics! Needless to say, I was happy to accept the invitation, and indeed in two weeks I will travel to Singapore to deliver my talk at AI4X.

Every now and then, for one reason or another, an academic will have to update one's own CV. This is a chore in general - once you get tenure, why should you care to keep a detailed record of your past activities? - but it also carries some benefits. In fact, by sifting through the data (hard disk folders containing talks, large databases of publications, mailbox) you can get a bird's eye view of where your time has gone, and draw inspiration for future rationalization of your agenda.

Though numerical models and popular films like An Inconvenient Truth projected Arctic ice collapse due to global warming and then climate change, the reverse was true in the real world. Ice expanded. That changed in 2015 and a new model estimates why. The authors say the Southern Ocean which surrounds Antarctica has gotten warmer, bringing salty water from the deep up to the surface.

Those water changes led to record-breaking lows in 2023, which could destabilize the world’s ocean current systems, and it will be due to three changes.

In 2013, they write stronger winds led to salty Circumpolar Deep Water getting closer to the surface.

You may have read that Asian cultures respect the elderly more than Europe but Asian senior citizens may not agree. However, it may not be that young people have gotten less respectful, it could be that young people are wealthier than in the past. And that makes them lonelier.

Over the last 40 years, the wealth of countries like the United States and Japan have increased substantially. Poor people now have a life that the poor even two generations ago could not imagine would be possible. Yet a new cross-temporal meta-analysis says that despite the changes in wealth which make socializing more possible, young people report more loneliness.

[For the first part of this two-part post, see here]

A new tool drawing on billions of uses of more than 20,000 words and diverse real-world texts claims to have found that human language is systematically biased, but not against things. It is instead biased toward safety and that has impacted everything from psychology claims to how Large Language Models (LLMs, colloquially called Artificial Intelligence and AI).

I was reached this evening by the news of the passing of a dear friend, Enrico Stomeo. Enrico was an architect by profession, but for me he was rather defined by his activity as an amateur astronomer - in fact, if I had to define what a serious amateur astronomer is, I would more or less consciously be describing him. 


[Above, a recent picture of Enrico]

The Associazione Astrofili Veneziani

Californis is the largest dairy producer in the United States. It is also the most anti-science state, distrustful of the modern world. That is why coastal cities had measles parties until the COVID-19 pandemic happened; they believed the MMR vaccine caused autism in children. They love raw milk because they believed pasteurization eliminates magical nutrition that scientists can't detect.

There are concerns about projected warming on the Earth’s surface and in the lower atmosphere even while the planet’s upper atmosphere has cooled.

It's not a paradox, it's a pattern and a recent paper described the mechanics of how it works. The short answer is that carbon dioxide (CO2) reacts differently to wavelengths of light. Closer to earth, CO2 traps it but it makes the stratosphere better at radiating, which cools it—but because it becomes colder, the Earth system ends up losing less heat to space overall, strengthening warming below.

Nobody likes to wait in line. Whether you are sitting in your car waiting to reach the toll booths, on a plane waiting to disembark along with the other passengers, or in a queue at the ticket office, you may experience a range of feelings ranging from perplexity (“What am I doing here?”) to impatience (“Why is this not moving forward?”), to annoyance (“What is that idiot in the front chatting about with the operator?”).