Posts tagged science

Det er vanskeligt at spaa, især naar det gælder Fremtiden.

— maybe Niels Bohr

Here’s what I think is coming and why: make of it what you will.

Some time ago I wrote a post with empirical evidence for sexism in computer science. I’ve since realised that the data I used then is part of a much larger data set maintained by the US National Center for Education Statistics: here are some more pictures of their data.

In late 2018, when I still worked at the Met Office, I sent a document to some people there which explained why I thought AI would come to dominate weather forecasting, and why weather forecasting organisations should be looking at AI, urgently. Today, the 28th of July 2023, there is a leader on the subject in The Economist as well as an extended article in its Science and Technology section.

Many people would like to believe that the CV19 pandemic is over. Unfortunately viruses do not listen to what people want to believe: the CV19 pandemic is not over, and there is a significant possibility it may never be over. The way out is not to pretend that it is.

If you think that we can continue economic growth by simply moving to Mars, you’re a fool.

People attacking carbon offsets or net zero emissions are attacking the wrong target and harming their cause. The problem is that the things we call ‘carbon offsets’ are not carbon offsets and ‘net zero’ is not net zero: they are lies. That’s what they should attack.

Or: how many people will be needed to vaccinate enough people? How many people will keep on being needed?

A comment to this excellent post by Sabine Hossenfelder¹

I think that it’s easy to deride the ‘let’s just do what we’ve already done, but an order of magnitude bigger/better/more expensive’ (BBME). But really it’s more subtle.

Or: Hi-Fi and the death of truth.

Or: the Cummings-Johnson effect.

I thought it would be interesting to get an idea of how many people will die because Dominic Cummings thought it was fine to ignore the lockdown rules, and Boris Johnson agreed with him. So I wrote a program to explore this Cummings-Johnson effect.