Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:https://www.sciencealert.com/icelands-volcanic-eruptions-could-continue-for-decades-study-finds
Bemidji MN (about 3-1/2 hours drive north of Minneapolis) is hosting what looks to be a fun week of unicycling. As reported by https://www.bemidjipioneer.com/news/local/tickets-on-sale-for-unicon-21-events-in-bemidji There will be events over nearly two weeks from July 14 - July 26. Some free and others $15. They are expecting 1200+ unicyclists from all over the world.
pkrasimirov writes:The 6-ton (13,000 pounds) high-resolution observation satellite Resurs P1 was launched in 2013 and decommissioned in 2022 due to 'equipment malfunction'. Between 26 June 13:05 UTC and 27 June 00:51 UTC it 'released a number of fragments' where number is > 100.
tekk writes:The 2024 Old Computer Challenge has been announced. The challenge started 4 years ago with the challenge to use a computer with 1 core at a max of 1 GHz and 512MB of RAM for a week and grew a small community surrounding them with 34 entrants for 2023. This year's theme, however, is no theme at all. The announcement post includes suggestions however there's no set of official rules this time around.Anyone interested in participating can take a look at Headcrash's OCC Site to look at previous years' entries and find instructions for how to get listed this year.Personally I'm planning on running a classic Clamshell Mac with OS9 as my daily driver :)Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
Last Post writes:Climate models are numerical simulations of the climate system, which are used to for predicting climate change from emissions scenarios and many other applications. Let's take a closer look at how they work.Why do we need climate models?The climate system and its components like the atmosphere and hydrosphere are driven by many processes that interact with each other to produce the climate we observe. We understand some of these processes very well, such as many atmospheric circulations that drive the weather. Others like the role of aerosols and deep ocean circulations are more uncertain. Even when individual processes are well understood, the interaction between these processes makes the system more complex and produces emergent properties like feedbacks and tipping points. We can't rely on simple extrapolation to generate accurate predictions, which is why we need models to simulate the dynamics of the climate system. Global climate models simulate the entire planet at a coarse resolution. Regional climate models simulate smaller areas at a higher resolution, relying on global climate models for their initial and lateral boundary conditions (the edges of the domain).How do climate models work?A climate model is a combination of several components, each of which typically simulates one aspect of the climate system such as the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, or biosphere. These components are coupled together, meaning that what happens in one component of the climate system affects all of the other components. The most advanced climate models are large software tools that use parallel computing to run across hundreds or thousands of processors. Climate models are a close cousin of the models we use for weather forecasting and even use a lot of the same source code.The atmospheric component of the model, for example, has a fluid dynamics simulation at its core. The model numerically integrates a set of primitive equations such as the Navier-Stokes equation, the first law of thermodynamics, the continuity equation, the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, and the equation of state. Global climate models generally assume the atmosphere is in hydrostatic balance at all times, but that is not necessarily the case for regional models. Hydrostatic balance means that the force of gravity completely balances with the upward pressure gradient force, meaning that the air never accelerates upward or downward, which does occur in some instances like inside thunderstorms.Not all atmospheric processes can be described by these equations, and we also need to predict things like aerosols (particulates suspended in the atmosphere), radiation (incoming solar radiation, and heat radiated upward), microphysics (e.g., cloud dropets. rain drops, ice crystals, etc...), and deep convection like thunderstorms (in models with coarse resolutions) to accurately simulate the atmosphere. Instead, these processes are parameterized to simulate their effects as accurately as possible in the absence of governing equations.The atmospheric simulations are generally more complex and run at a higher resolution for weather models than in climate models. However, weather models do not simulate the oceans, land surface, or the biosphere with the same level of complexity because it's not necessary to get accurate forecasts. For example, the deep oceans don't change enough on weather time scales to impact the forecast, but they do change in important ways on climate time scales. A weather model also probably isn't going to directly simulate how temperature and precipitation affect the type of vegetation growing in a particular location, or if there's just bare soil. Instead, a weather model might have data sets for land use and land cover during the summer and winter, use the appropriate data depending on the time of year being simulated, and then use that information to estimate things like albedo and evapotranspiration.The main difference between climate models and weather models is that weather models are solving an initial condition problem whereas climate modeling is a boundary condition problem. Weather is highly sensitive to the initial state of the atmosphere, meaning that small changes in the atmosphere at the current time might result in large differences a week from now. Climate models depend on factors that occur and are predictable on much longer time scales like greenhouse gas concentrations, land use and land cover, and the temperature and salinity of the deep ocean. Climate models are also not concerned with accurately predicting the weather at a specific point in time, only its statistical moments like the mean and standard deviation over a period of time. We intuitively understand that these statistical moments are predictable on far longer time scales, which is why you could confidently insist that I'm wrong if I claimed that there would be heavy snow in Miami, Florida on June 20, 2050.Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
canopic jug writes:Dr Andy Farnell at The Cyber Show writes about the effects of the "splinternet" and division in standards in general on overall computing security. He sees the Internet, as it was less than ten years ago, as an ideal, but one which has been intentionally divided and made captive. While governments talk out of one side of their mouth about cybersecurity they are rushing breathlessly to actually make systems and services less secure or outright insecure.
canopic jug writes:Doug Muir, at his blog Crooked Timber, discusses a paper about symbiotic fungal networks loaning glucose to seedlings and saplings. Of note, fungi do not produce glucose themselves, so they are extracting and storing it. The fungi connect to new seedlings and help them get started by feeding the roots micronutrients, which for some of them compensates for sunlight which they can't yet reach. Then after some time, the network cuts off the supply. If the sapling dies, the network rots it. If the sapling survives, the network extracts and caches nutrients from it.
hubie writes:A Fermat's Library featured paper of the week chosen a month or so ago was Richard Wexelblat's 1981 paper, The Consequences of One's First Programming Language. The abstract of which says:
An Anonymous Coward writes:Biden to ban U.S. sales of Kaspersky software over ties to Russia, source says --https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/20/biden-to-ban-us-sales-of-kaspersky-software-over-ties-to-russia.html