Kevin Drum 🕸

December 2023 was the warmest December on record for the Contiguous U.S. by a wide margin using Prism Climate Group data. It was 0.67°F (0.37°C) warmer than December 2021. 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/nhRL9j0O4G — Brian Brettschneider (@Climatologist49) January 1, 2024

These are mostly years in which a surprising number of important things happened. For the most part, wars are excluded. Go ahead and argue with my choices in comments. 1687: Isaac Newton invents physics. 1776: American Revolution, Wealth of Nations, first commercial Watt steam engine, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 1789: French Revolution, ...continue reading "Top 10 years of the past few centuries"

Ha ha, the headline is just clickbait. Most of these aren't really extinction level events, they're just really bad. And the odds of any of them happening in 2024 are minuscule. But still possible! Miyake event. This mysterious burst of cosmic rays has occurred several times in the past 10,000 years. It wouldn't actually kill ...continue reading "Top 10 extinction level natural disasters for 2024"

Here are a few miscellaneous predictions for the new year: Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination. Joe Biden will be reelected president. Waymo will solve its highway problems and finally have a true driverless car that can go pretty much anywhere in pretty much any conditions. It will still be a couple more years ...continue reading "Top 10 predictions for 2024"

Unlike the photos, I had no problem finding ten interesting charts. In fact, I found 20. So at the risk of taking a good thing too far, here are the top 20 most interesting charts of 2023. By the way: by "interesting," I mostly mean "something you might find surprising." 1. The cost of college ...continue reading "Top 20 charts of 2023"

This was a bit of a weak year for photos, largely because I haven't gone out a lot since the CAR-T treatment in April. Not only did I not have a hard time paring my choices down to ten, I actually had to work a bit to find a full ten I really liked. In ...continue reading "Top ten photos of 2023"

Harvard has been in the news a lot lately, and among other things critics say that wokeism has gotten so out of hand that it's all but impossible to be hired there unless you're a person of color. That got me curious, and luckily Harvard has a convenient page listing all the new full-time, tenure-track ...continue reading "How woke is Harvard?"

I'm not a big NBA fan, so I've followed the hype over French superstar-to-be Victor Wembanyama only distantly. But I think I'm really starting to like the guy. “With your first experience in Vegas — what did you think?” “On earth, it’s probably the closest thing to a dystopia.” - Victor Wembanyama 😂 pic.twitter.com/PoJRveKG3w — ...continue reading "NBA star speaks the truth only Stephen King has spoken before"

Marc Thiessen has a list today of the ten worst things Joe Biden did this year. Here's the first: 10. He made the child-care crisis worse. As my Post colleague Alyssa Rosenberg and I pointed out in September, child-care costs have been rising at nearly twice the rate of inflation. We proposed expanding the State ...continue reading "Joe Biden has crushed the working class by raising the price of au pairs"

Someone on Twitter recently re-upped a Fast Company piece from a few months ago about our old friend, right turn on red—known to all traffic cognoscenti as RTOR: It's time to ban 'right-on-red' Cognitive overload is inevitable if drivers are expected to simultaneously watch traffic to their left and keep an eye out for anyone ...continue reading "Right-on-red works fine. There’s no need to ban it."

When we last saw Charlie he was wearing a stylish black cone to keep him from picking at a sore spot on his back leg. That proved unworkable: it didn't keep him from getting to his leg and he was able to get it off anyway. So it was back to the ordinary plastic cone ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 29 December 2023"

Interesting data: Wish we had seen more takes about this trend. pic.twitter.com/zvQVVi75q9 — Conor Sen (@conorsen) December 28, 2023 What surprises me about this is not that passport holding has risen so much but that it was so low as recently as 30 years ago: There were only 7 million passport holders in 1989. That ...continue reading "Why does everyone have a passport these days?"

Now we're talking: Maine and Colorado say Trump can't run for president while Michigan and California say he can. No matter how you come down on this question, it really does seem like it needs a definitive national answer. Supreme Court, here we come.

I accidentally found myself last night on the home page of the State Department's list of (non-natural) overseas deaths, which Congress has required it to compile since 2003. I learned a few things: Americans like to go to sunny places and then drown themselves. Man, do a lot of Americans die in Mexico. An awful ...continue reading "Raw data: How Americans die overseas"

Over at National Review, Jeffrey Blehar tells us that Nikki Haley's real gaffe last night wasn't racism or something racism adjacent. Oh no: The real gaffe Haley committed on Wednesday was that, when she froze up under an unpredicted question and defaulted to her factory settings in answering, those answers demonstrated such contempt for the ...continue reading "Did Nikki Haley insult Republican voters?"

A coyote at the Orange County zoo.

Last night Nikki Haley was asked about the cause of the Civil War. Oh, it was this and that, she said, freedoms and the role of the government, that sort of thing. How about slavery? “What do you want me to say about slavery?” Haley asked. As near as I can tell, this is the ...continue reading "Nikki Haley fumbles the ball on slavery"

Apropos of nothing in particular, I thought it might be a good time to take a fresh look at Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine these days: The southern portion of the Russian territory is east of the Dnieper river and is all but impossible to attack successfully. The Dnieper is a big river. Further north, the ...continue reading "Here are the current trench lines in the Ukraine war"

My previous post was about a New York Times lawsuit accusing Microsoft and OpenAI of copyright infringement for training their AI models on Times data. This prompts me to remind everyone of what "training" really means. Most people have a vague idea that AI models just trawl the internet and ingest whatever they find, which ...continue reading "Training an AI is much harder than you think"

The New York Times is suing Microsoft and OpenAI for training their AI software on Times stories: In a complaint filed Wednesday, the Times said the technology companies exploited its content without permission to create their AI products, including OpenAI’s humanlike chatbot ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot. The tools were trained on millions of pieces of ...continue reading "The New York Times has sued OpenAI for copyright infringement. They should lose."