Jon Kåre Hellan

The Scottish Highlands, the Appalachians, and the Atlas are the same mountain range, once connected as the Central Pangean Mountains

Aftenposten villeder om hvorfor RCP8.5 blir fjernet fra klimamodeller. Ekstremscenarioet skulle aldri vært formidlet som «business as usual». De fleste mediene stilte ingen kritiske spørsmål eller gjorde noen kritiske refleksjoner. Det lå alltid urealistiske forutsetninger i dette modellscenarioet og mediene lot seg bruke til propagandaformål. Det mediene burde stille spørsmål om nå er hvorfor norske myndighetene brukte dette scenarioet i samfunnsplanlegging.

Despite their ideological differences, the far right and far left often unite in their backing of Russia

The median American from the northern half of the country knows to pack a heavy sweater when traveling south in the summer, as a defense against the Arctic air-conditioning.

Via NRK: New analyses show that this house in Numedal may be Norway’s oldest house, at a full 850 years old. To put that into perspective, when the house was built in 1168, Norway was ruled by the 12-year-old boy king Magnus Erlingsson.

One of my favourite parts of that interview that people bullish on automated research seem to miss (Tao essentially saying AI doesn’t make him more productive): Dwarkesh Patel So let’s see if you can continue this streak. You personally are 2x more productive as a result of AI. What year would you say that? Terence Tao Productivity, I think, is not quite a one-dimensional quantity. I’m definitely noticing that the style in which I do mathematics is changing quite a bit, and the type of things I do. For example, my papers now have a lot more code, a lot more pictures, because it’s so easy to generate these things now. Some plot which would have taken me hours to do, now I can do in minutes. But in the past, I just wouldn’t have put the plot in my paper in the first place. I would just talk about it in words. So it’s hard to measure what 2x means. On the one hand, I think the type of papers that I would write today, if I had to do them without AI assistance, would definitely take five times longer. But I would not write my papers that way. Dwarkesh Patel 5x? Terence Tao Yeah, but these are auxiliary tasks. Things like doing a much deeper literature search or supplying a lot more numerics. They enrich the paper. The core of what I do, actually solving the most difficult part of a math problem, hasn’t changed too much. I still use pen and paper for that. But there’s lots of silly things. I use an AI agent now to reformat. Sometimes if all my parentheses are not quite the right size, I used to manually change them by hand, and now I can get an AI agent to do all that quite nicely in the background. They’ve really sped up lots of secondary tasks. They haven’t yet sped up the core thing that I do, but it’s allowed me to add more things to my papers. By the same token, if I were to write a paper I wrote in 2020 again—and not add all these extra features, but just have something of the same level of functionality—it actually hasn’t saved that much time, to be honest. It’s made the papers richer and broader, but not necessarily deeper.

Reports indicate russia is furious over Ukraine’s long-range strikes and is preparing a massive retaliation attack on Kyiv. Remember every Ukrainian strike is in self-defence. If Russia wants this to stop, it can very simply leave Ukraine at any moment.

APPLEBAUM: If you are leader of Russia or China, what's thing that's most threatening to you? Language of liberal democracy. All this stuff we find boring and we're used to, like idea of freedom of speech, separation of powers, rule of law, all those things we take for granted in our societies are huge challenge to political systems in Russia or China. What's Putin most afraid of? He's most afraid of street revolution of the kind we had in Ukraine in 2014. When people are standing in the street and they have signs saying "we're against corruption, we want democracy, we want to be in the European Union, we want to be integrated with Europe." He's afraid of that happening in Russia because if you live in autocratic state where you don't have freedom of speech, where there's no justice, where government decides what all the rules are, then those ideas are explosive and exciting. They were the same way in 18th century when they first appeared in Declaration of Independence. People can be motivated by them, people will go into the street for them, people will risk their lives for them, and autocrats know that. Really, for the past decade you see them seeking to spread those ideas, to promote them. I mean, we all know now about Russian propaganda campaigns, we know what Russian disinformation looks like. There's a Chinese version, too, which we don't see that much in English, but it appears in other countries. We see them seeking to undermine democracy, trying to spread the influence of different set of ideas.

Which is why it was wise of Ukraine not to take the bait to trade territory for “security guarantees.” Security guarantees mean whatever Trump, Colby and Hegseth want them to mean at any given time.

FREDERIKSEN: Main reason Ukraine still standing is Ukraine. We supported them, that’s good. But we were slow on weapon deliveries, imposed red lines. Ukraine still not in NATO. We asked them to fight with one hand behind their back. Huge mistake. You have to fight war to win it.

When I talk to police officers privately, they almost always say the same thing: "you have no idea what's going on out there in the real world". To which I reply: I think the opposite is true. *You* have no idea what's going on out there, because you have self-selected into a

Suomi on sähkömarkkinoiden näkökulmasta lilliputti jonka kohtalo ei ole omissa käsissä, vaan isojen toimijoiden - jota hillitsee vain siirtolinjojen kapasiteetti. Eräs ruotsalainen ystävä sanoi, että hän ymmärtää integroitujen järjestelmien tarpeen ja hyödyt, mutta jos Saksan tapainen iso gorilla tietoisesti ampuu energiapolitiikassa itseään sarjatulella jalkaan ja luodit osuvat gorillan koon vuoksi myös naapureihin ja näiden naapureihin niin hän on valmis ottamaan kirveen ja katkaisemaan siirtokaapelin.

Money is important to academics too

After publishing Better Angels and Enlightenment Now, I learned that many academic historians become enraged if one notes anything bad that non-Western civilizations did (e.g., slavery, raiding and feuding, harems, human sacrifice, theocratic despots, suicide terrorism), or anything good that Western civilization did (e.g., The Enlightenment), despite the obvious fact that all civilizations did good and bad things, and everything has to come from somewhere. | Does Western Civilisation Exist? James Kierstead on Ancient Greece, Christianity, and the West | Quillette Cetera Ep. 63 open.substack.com/pub/quillette/…

Strange argument: “Russia feels threatened” while invading neighbors.

@DAMendelsohnNYC Dictionary entry for Norwegian: norsk-ordbok.no/no/272388 wiktionary has the Icelandic one: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/margslung… Would be surprised if the other Scandy languages and German don't have something similar

@DAMendelsohnNYC In Norwegian and Icelandic, we seem to have a direct part-by-part translation of polytropos: mangslungen / margslunginn.

Night thoughts on “polytropos”, 2: 1/2: Polytropos is an *extremely* rare word in Greek, occurring only a handful of times in extant Gk lit: 2x in #Odyssey (vs 60+ for “polymetis”, “of great cunning”), a couple of times in Thucydides (the “shifting” fortunes of war), & Plutarch.

Hva skal man si. Ukraina var nøytrale, Ukraina hadde for lengst oppgitt sine atomvåpen. Rotete…

A six-year-old Norwegian schoolboy has found a well-preserved 1,300-year-old sword 🗡 The boy, named Henrik, was on a class trip to Brandbu, Innlandet, when he saw the handle protruding from the ground. 📰 Read all about it in A Whole Lot of History! open.substack.com/pub/historyhit…

This is so good. I love Derek's essays.