"The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall."
- E. O. Wilson
"If the Earth's Energy Imbalance trend extrapolates into the future… then we can expect as much warming in the next 20 years as we have had in the last 40 years, which is quite a marked acceleration" -
Chris Merchant, University of Reading, quoted in the article.
An excellent read.
"At the height of the dotcom mania in the 1990s, many critics warned of a creeping reactionary fervor. “Forget digital utopia,” wrote [...] journalist Michael Malone, “we could be headed for techno-fascism.” Elsewhere, the writer Paulina Borsook called the valley’s worship of male power “a little reminiscent of the early celebrants of Eurofascism from the 1930s
Their voices were largely drowned out by the techno-enthusiasts of the time."
We walked up rivers, climbed and nearly got lost twice, but finally we found this beautiful giant Rata. Estimated to be over 1000 years old, it was a sapling long before Genghis Khan was in nappies.
Even more wondrous, it was in bloom.
It appears that melting Antarctic sheets may result in larger volcanic eruptions This is due to the unloading of ice mass shifting pressure across vast chambers of magma.
"The researchers note that even if anthropogenic warming ceased immediately, the effects of ice mass unloading that the West Antarctic Rift System has already experienced will still affect volcanic behavior here for thousands of years to come."
https://phys.org/news/2025-01-antarctic-ice-sheets-larger-volcanic.html
#climatechange #geophysics #fossilfuels
The ML-enabled voice-theft space is heating up.
Here's an article from presenter Georgina Findlay, who had her own voice cloned and used in far-right disinformation videos on YouTube.
"I was horrified to find that eight out of 12 of the channel’s most recent videos had used my voice"
In the article Georgina also provides some good coverage of the state of 'AI' voice-cloning policy and mitigations.
#GrapheneOS appears to be standing up to UK forensics, in this painful and "unprecedented" case which could see a UK journalist go to jail for not relinquishing the passphrase to his devices. Not only is withholding his basic human right, but he does it to protect his sources, and as ratified in the European Court of Human Rights.
