Alan Andrews

So, jokes aside, to understand why the heat is worse in the UK than say Arizona for example, the answer is quite long... First it's the Humidity, it's far higher here. The UK's island location and prevailing south-westerly winds bring moist sea air, so heatwaves are often humid rather than dry. In contrast, many of the hottest US states (e.g., Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico) have dry desert heat where sweat evaporates quickly, so you actually feel cooler despite higher temperatures. Even humid US regions (like the Southeast) usually have widespread air conditioning to offset it. Second, the buildings and Infrastructure that we have all are designed to Trap Heat, not Release It. UK homes are built for cold, damp winters: thick brick/stone walls, heavy insulation, small windows, and designs that retain warmth. During a heatwave, they turn into ovens, solar gain through windows builds up, and there is poor ventilation or passive cooling features like overhangs, shutters, or light-coloured roofs. Plus, poor air conditioning: Only about 5% of UK homes have AC (vs. ~90% in the US). It's not standard because it's rarely needed most of the year, but during spikes it's a nightmare. Also, retrofitting is expensive and tricky in old terraced houses or listed buildings. This extended to public transport, schools, offices, and even hospitals as they often lack cooling. Finally, most importantly, we have zero acclimatisation. Meaning it's just as hot at night as it is during the day. Britons aren't physiologically or culturally used to sustained heat. We're properly white! So, a sudden jump from typical UK summer temps feels extreme, and the body struggles more without gradual adaptation. Heatwaves often bring "tropical nights" (temps staying above 20 °C), so homes don't cool down overnight. You can't sleep, recover, or anything which just compounds fatigue, dehydration, etc. Drier US heat often cools significantly at night. That is all topped up with the fact that we have longer summer daylight at the UK's higher latitude meaning more hours of solar heating. Hope this long explanation that no one wanted clears this right up...

🇺🇸 SCOTT BESSENT: "If you're on public assistance, you can no longer wire money out of the country!"

In April, a website that has been sued, blocked, deplatformed, and chased across thirty-seven domains over fifteen years quietly launched its own AI. Sci-Hub is the largest unauthorized library of scientific papers in human history. Ninety-five million academic papers. Tens of millions of books. Built and maintained by a single Kazakhstani neuroscientist named Alexandra Elbakyan since 2011, funded by donations, hosted on whatever country's registrar will tolerate it that year, mirrored across torrents and IPFS and Telegram bots. Elsevier sued. Sci-Hub stayed up. The American Chemical Society sued. Sci-Hub stayed up. India sued. Sci-Hub stayed up. Swedish registrar Njalla cut the .se domain in January. Sci-Hub stayed up at .al, .ru, .ee, .box, and a half-dozen .onion addresses the registrars cannot reach. Now the library has built its own intelligence. Sci-Bot launched in alpha in April. You ask it a research question. It answers, and it cites real papers from inside the corpus, with links that actually open the actual papers. The bot does not hallucinate citations. It cannot, because it only draws from papers it actually holds. The same property that the venture-funded labs have spent four years and forty billion dollars trying to engineer back into their products is a free side effect of training the model on a library that contains the books. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Meta have all been sued in the past eighteen months for training their models on the same shadow libraries that Sci-Hub assembled. Meanwhile the corpus those scripts were pointed at, the corpus those models were trained on, the corpus the entire generative AI industry is built on, sat right there the whole time, free, with a search box on top. The pirates beat them to it. Sci-Bot was built on a corpus that was already free, by a team that asked no permission, charging no one, with the explicit position that the right to read scientific research is older than the cartel that decided to charge for it. The same arithmetic the medieval guilds used to keep the printing trade in approved hands. The same arithmetic Pope Paul IV used in 1559 to publish the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The same arithmetic the Stationers' Company used in seventeenth-century London. Knowledge has always had a fence around it. The fence has always been guarded by men who did not write the books. The library answers. We never asked permission. We never had to.

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