October 19, 2024
Saturday
The Guardians and Yankees played another great game in the ALCS last night. Cleveland fell short this time, though, which naturally puts the game a notch below Thursday's game on the instant classic meter. Tonight is now an elimination game and things are looking bleak. But, Guardians baseball is all about never giving up. Let's go.
NASA made some significant advancements in the search for extraterrestrial life this week. First, SpaceX launched NASA's Europa Clipper, which will eventually make about 50 flybys of Europa, the moon of Jupiter that scientists believe has ice-covered oceans that are twice the volume of Earth's. Second, NASA scientists published a paper in Nature describing computer modeling that predicts the presence of “radiatively habitable zones within exposed mid-latitude ice on Mars.” If there's water in those ‘radiatively habitable zones’, “mid-latitude ice exposures could represent the most easily accessible locations to search for extant life on Mars.”
I'm 54. I'm beginning to think it's entirely possible, that in my lifetime, we'll have evidence of extraterrestrial microbial life.
What a time to be alive.
Penguin Random House underscores copyright protection in AI rebuff (thebookseller.com)
This is great to see, but I’m not sure it does much to prevent AI companies from training on newly published books. I can’t imagine they’re scanning printed books for or buying ebooks to plug into model training. Maybe they’re scraping copies available on rogue sites, which would already be a copyright infringement.
It certainly feels good, though.
The new wording states: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems”, and will be included in all new titles and any backlist titles that are reprinted.
Solar-powered desalination system requires no extra batteries (mit.edu)
Drinking water from brackish ground water, with only renewable energy input and no battery storage. Pretty cool.
“Being able to make drinking water with renewables, without requiring battery storage, is a massive grand challenge. And we’ve done it.”
We’ve decided to put the Spitfires in storage for the winter. I originally planned to just park my car on the driveway, but that got old as soon as the colder temperatures arrived last week. We drove mine over there today and will take Jake’s tomorrow. Winter is coming.
