"Models can't even get the past right" is wild to say about a field whose models from the 1970s predicted today's temperature within a fraction of a degree, and erred on the side of underestimating it. The warming we've experienced is pretty much exactly what climate models predicted as much as 30 years ago.

Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth. #ApostolicJourney #Cameroon vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/e…

God’s heart is torn apart by wars, violence, injustice and lies. But our Father’s heart is not with the wicked, the arrogant, or the proud. God’s heart is with the little ones and the humble, and with them He builds up His Kingdom of love and peace day by day. Wherever there is love and service, God is there. #ApostolicJourney #Algeria

Cue the epic arrival of the second half of our vacuum vessel. ⚡️💫 With both halves of the SPARC vacuum vessel now inside Tokamak Hall, the donut shape of our tokamak is starting to make more visual sense. But it'll be some time before we bring these two halves together to form most of the inner portion of our fusion demonstration machine. That’s because we need to do a heap of prep work for each one, on top of the fact we'll need to thread each through a set of nine D-shaped toroidal field (TF) magnets before we can weld the two assemblies together. Each component of SPARC is an intricate construction, but figuring out how to piece this 3D jigsaw puzzle together brings another level of complexity. SPARC has many, many pieces. It'll only work if it’s assembled in a very particular order, and some of those moves are irreversible. You can see why they call this tough tech. #FusionEnergy #Energy

Happy Solar Pessimism Chart Update Day to all who celebrate

My God, the zombie boomer arguments never die! But but but the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. Are they familiar with the battery learning curve where costs have fallen as much as wind and solar? But but but subsidies! The IMF shows that fossil fuels are subsided to become of $7 trillion a year. Let’s fix that first, please. My advice to boomers is to get your damned head out of your ass and for once give a damn about the world you are leaving behind.

This is a golden opportunity for Europe. Welcome Anthropic with open arms. Offer a special deal. Fast-track permits. Europe is been powerless in the AI race so far - welcoming the best AI lab in the world would change everything. @MinPres @EmmanuelMacron @_FriedrichMerz

Join the international boycott now.

Just cancelled my subscription to ChatGPT and shifted to Claude. While they are far from perfect, I like to reward those with a shred of ethics.

The BBC just released a new adaptation of Lord of the Flies, the classic novel by William Golding. It's beautifully made, but it's still telling the wrong story. A few years ago, I went looking for the *real* Lord of the Flies. I wanted to know: has it ever actually happened? Have kids ever been shipwrecked on a deserted island? It took me a year of research, but I found it. In 1965, six boys from a boarding school in Tonga stole a boat, got caught in a storm, and drifted for eight days without food or water. They washed up on 'Ata, a remote, uninhabited island in the Pacific. They stayed there for 15 months, and what happened on that island was the exact opposite of William Golding's novel. These boys set up a small commune. They built a food garden, stored rainwater in hollowed-out tree trunks, created a gym with improvised weights, and built a badminton court. One of them, Stephen (who would later become an engineer) managed to start a fire using two sticks. They kept it burning the entire time. Of course they fought too. But then they argued, they had a rule: go to opposite ends of the island, cool down, then come back and apologize. As one of them told me: ‘That's how we stayed friends.’ Back home, everyone assumed that the boys – Luke, Stephen, Sione, David, Kolo and Mano — were dead. When they were finally discovered by an Australian captain named Peter Warner, he radioed their names to Tonga. After twenty minutes, a tearful response came back: ‘You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it's them, this is a miracle!’ Peter commissioned a new ship, hired all six boys as his crew, and named the boat the Ata, after the island where he found them. They remained friends for the rest of their lives – Peter and Mano even became soulmates. I tracked them down, and it became one of the central chapters of my book Humankind. Here's what struck me most: William Golding (the author of Lord of the Flies) was a troubled man, an alcoholic who once said ‘I have always understood the Nazis, because I am of that sort by nature.’ I think he was projecting his own darkness onto children. And we turned it into a lesson about human nature that we teach to millions of kids around the world. I think the real lesson is the opposite. When real children found themselves alone on a real island, they didn't descend into savagery. They cooperated, they took care of each other, they survived. I'm not saying that the Tongan castaways were representative of all kids everywhere. But I am saying that every kid who has to read or watch the fictional Lord of the Flies also deserves to know what actually happened when it played out in real life. Stories are never just stories. We become the stories that we tell ourselves.

It’s very obvious that 🇨🇳 is making great progress with humanoid robots. This is from their New Year Gala. Truly impressive.

I'm increasingly annoyed by how many journalists, academics and large parts of the left get everything wrong about AI. So many smug dismissals from people who clearly don't use it (much) or don't know how. I have multiple wtf-moments every week now. For example: was about to get a $100 teleprompter app with voice-recognition yesterday. But had a last minute thought: 'hm, let's ask Claude Code'. For context: I've never written a line of code in my life. But I was able to give Claude two rambling prompts – 2 minutes later: it works better than the fancy $100 software with 'Patented VoiceTrack technology'. Most surreal technology experience I ever had. And it's all moving so much faster than I expected. Even the so-called "AI skeptics" in the industry now think we'll have AGI within a decade. 'AGI' is not a very clear or even coherent concept to me, but I do know that what's available now is just f*cking impressive - and it will only get better. It's totally unserious to keep dismissing the greatest technological revolution of our time. Sticking your fingers in your ears – 'it must be BS because it comes out of Silicon Valley and these Huns haven't read Marx or Adorno' – is not helping anyone.

If Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie & $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don't tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff. Democracy dies in oligarchy.

For anyone who would like to hear Mark Carney’s outstanding Davos speech in full here it is. This is what true global leadership looks like. Canada should be immensely proud today, because they are leading the fight back when others dare not. 🎥 TikTok - vm.tiktok.com/ZNRBDT4mB/

Can you read 900 words per minute? Try it.

Putin: 73 years old Trump: 79 years old Xi Jinping: 72 years old Khamenei: 86 years old Netanyahu: 76 years old Narendra Modi: 75 years old All these leaders have lived their lives and are now destroying world peace and the future of coming generations. The world needs young leaders.

Remember, Maduro is a highly corrupt leader, a known criminal who used his high office to make billions for himself, and has manipulated elections to stay in power, has used his military against his own citizens, has protected his corrupt friends and punished his political enemies. I imagine if we ever had a President like that, other countries might consider invading us to kidnap him too.

🚨 We have under 3 days if disaster strikes until satellites come crashing down. That's right, we live in a House of Cards. In low Earth orbit, close approaches between satellites now happen every 22 seconds. For Starlink alone, that number is every 11 minutes. Each satellite performs dozens of collision-avoidance maneuvers per year, dodging not only other satellites, but also fragments of old missions, rocket bodies, and debris. So what happens if satellite operators lose the ability to steer? According to new research, we’d have just 2.8 days before a catastrophic collision. That’s how quickly the chain reaction would begin. In 2018 — before satellite megaconstellations exploded in number — that window was 121 days. The margin for error is collapsing. One solar storm is all it might take. The 2024 “Gannon Storm” forced over half of all satellites in low Earth orbit to use fuel for emergency maneuvers. That was a mild dress rehearsal compared to the Carrington Event of 1859 — the strongest solar storm on record. If something like that happened today, it could disable satellite communications for days. Without real-time control, thousands of satellites would become blind, deaf, and drifting — in an environment where losing control for just 24 hours now brings a 30% chance of disaster. This is how you get Kessler syndrome: a runaway cascade of orbital collisions that turns Earth’s orbit into a minefield and makes launching into space nearly impossible. We're not there yet. But we're closer than we’ve ever been. The trade-offs are real — satellite constellations expand global internet access, enable science and surveillance, and lower launch costs. But they’ve also made space riskier, faster. And now, we’re on a tighter clock than most people realize. Read the study: "An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions." arXiv, 2025.

If you’ve a problem with countries withdrawing from a music competition because one of those countries is committing genocide and dismembering children on a daily basis, you need to take a good look at yourself.