The Trump budget once again proposes to eliminate NOAA OAR, which brings you the CO₂ Keeling Curve. In this piece, I argued that the Keeling Curve is a treasure that belongs to humanity as the most poignant indication of our impact on the environment and as a testament to our ability to document it.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/trump-global-emissions-measurement-20780999.php?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=copy-url-link&utm_campaign=article-share&hash=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuc2ZjaHJvbmljbGUuY29tL29waW5pb24vb3BlbmZvcnVtL2FydGljbGUvdHJ1bXAtZ2xvYmFsLWVtaXNzaW9ucy1tZWFzdXJlbWVudC0yMDc4MDk5OS5waHA%3D&time=MTc1NDE4MDA4MTczNg%3D%3D&rid=YTViMGY0ZmUtMjcxNi00ODNlLWFiZTEtMDg3ZjQ5OTU5YjRm&sharecount=Mw%3D%3D

According to reporting by Bloomberg, about half of the data centers slated to open in the US in 2026 will either face delays or outright cancellations.
The publication interviewed analysts at market intelligence company Sightline Climate, which in research first flagged by Ed Zitron last week noted that 12 gigawatts worth of power-consuming data centers are set to open in the US this year.
But here’s the catch:
they say only a third of those are actually under construction right now, with the rest in a liminal pre-production stage
in which they could, and likely will be, canceled.

It’s not just a problem for data centers planned for 2026, either.
Among data centers slated to open in 2027, only about 6.3 gigawatts worth of computing infrastructure are actually under construction,
-- compared to 21.5 announced gigawatts.

Things get even dodgier in the coming years, with the vast majority of data centers planned for launch between 2028 and 2032 having yet to even break ground.
There are a further 37 gigawatts of planned infrastructure which haven’t even received a firm completion date,
-- only 4.5 of which have actually begun work.
https://futurism.com/science-energy/data-centers-construction-supply

Just one study but we have seen clear decreases in human attention spans, esp since 2012...

"Watching fragmented short videos rather than a single continuous video leads to poorer memory recall and alters how the brain retrieves information. A recent experiment revealed that fast-paced episodic media formats disrupt the neural systems responsible for integrating details and maintaining cognitive control." via PsyPost

https://www.psypost.org/brain-scans-reveal-how-short-videos-impair-memory-and-disrupt-neural-pathways/

#Science #Psychology #SocialMedia

"Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service."
https://morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/breaking-trump-administration-orders

"They’re shuttering every single one of the ten regional offices that have governed this agency since Gifford Pinchot built the system over a century ago — and with them, the career professionals who spent entire lifetimes earning the expertise and the authority to push back when politicians came calling with bad ideas and worse motives. They’re destroying more than fifty research facilities across thirty-one states…And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with fifteen political appointees called 'state directors,' embedded in state capitals alongside the very governors, legislators, and industry lobbyists who have spent their careers demanding that the Forest Service log more, protect less, and get out of the way."

#DefendResearch #Environment #Forests #Forestry #Trump #TrumpVResearch #USPol #USPolitics

In "Kelo v New London"
SCOTUS (inadvertently) provided a mechanism for the federal government to seize and appropriate the assets of billionaires, and redistribute them for the public good

https://mastoreader.io/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fc.im%2F%40cdarwin%2F116336656105085578

A year ago Sajedeh Rasti and I reached out to 20 Dutch metascientists and asked: Instead of competing for this upcoming grant, how about we collaborate, determine priorities, and combine our expertise? Both grants were funded. We discuss our experience in a new preprint.

The preprint is available on Psyarxiv: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/fmnc5_v2

We had not heard of people trying collaborative grant writing like this before. If you have experiences with this format you would like to share, let us know!

The gap between what artificial intelligence promised and what the battlefield delivered has become the defining scandal of the Iran war.

AI-powered targeting systems generated over 1,000 strike coordinates in the first 24 hours.

AI simulations projected rapid regime collapse.

AI logistics models forecast a 12-hour securing of the Strait of Hormuz.

None of it happened as predicted.

Thirteen American service members are dead,
over 200 wounded,
oil has breached $120 a barrel,
and the regime in Tehran
— far from collapsing
— has installed a new supreme leader and triggered nationalist rallies
rather than the pro-US uprising planners had expected.

A growing body of evidence, drawn from leaked planning documents, academic research, and the testimony of intelligence professionals,
suggests that the most consequential military operation of the twenty-first century
may have been shaped less by strategic necessity than by a phenomenon researchers now call
AI sycophancy
— the tendency of large language models to tell their users exactly what they want to hear

https://houseofsaud.com/iran-war-ai-psychosis-sycophancy-rlhf/