Stretching 2,700km from Laverton in Western Australia to Winton in far-off Queensland, the Outback Way is a great diagonal "shortcut" across the nation that saves weeks of travel.
Known as "torfbæir", these ingeniously designed homes helped settle one of Europe's least-hospitable environments.
It's mentioned in the Bible, it been used by a succession of empires and it links some of Jordan's most important historical sites.
"Welcome to Jordan!" a group of kids shouted excitedly, as I stepped out of the car to admire the sun setting over the vast sandstone canyon of Wadi Mujib.
While I stood on the cliff's edge, awestruck by the mountain ranges stretching to the Dead Sea, a black-and-white hooded wheatear swooped down near me. I wondered how something so delicate could survive in such desolate ravines, fluttering across the arid mountains and building nests in rock crevices.
From my perch, I could see a narrow, serpentine road winding down the ridges and gorges. This route, known as the King's Highway, or Darb ar-Raseef ("paved road", in Arabic), is believed to be one of the world's oldest continuously used roads. For millennia, merchants, pilgrims, warriors and kings travelled north to south through Jordan's central highlands, and this thoroughfare served as a vital artery connecting ancient kingdoms and empires.
Stretching 185km across the mountains to the Iraq-Iran border, it's a stunning feat of engineering that nearly didn't happen.
Stretching 185km from Erbil across the imposing Zagros Mountains to the town of Haji Omeran on the Iraqi Kurdistan-Iran border, the road is not only considered one of western Asia's most spectacular routes, but one of its most audacious feats of engineering.
Thatched buildings are deeply connected to Japan's history and culture, yet few survive. However, a cluster of villages near Kyoto are keeping this ancient tradition alive.
Along a single road cutting across the heart of Iraq, you can see where people first learned to write, use maths and invent the wheel.
"This is not a scenic drive," said James Willcox, of adventure travel specialist Untamed Borders. "But what's incredible about Route 1 is where it takes you: to the birthplace of some of the world's earliest civilisations, the home of many of humankind's greatest innovations."
Willcox, who was charged with logistics and security for my journey, was briefing me before I embarked on a 530km, two-day road trip from Basra to Baghdad. My trip would be using Iraq's first and longest freeway, the 1,200km-long Route 1, as a conduit to explore the heart of ancient Mesopotamia. Though the region has experienced decades of recent conflict, it was also once home to a series of illustrious historical empires (the Babylonians, Assyrians and Sumerians to name a few), and Willcox reassured me that the journey would be unforgettable so long as I followed some simple rules: "Keep a low profile, dress conservatively and don't photograph any of the armed checkpoints," he said.
A towering cotton tree which has stood for several hundred years in Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, has been brought down by a heavy storm.
President Julius Maada Bio said the tree fell after a downpour on Wednesday night. He described it as a "great loss to the nation".
He said the tree was a symbol of liberty for early settlers. It also appears on Sierra Leone banknotes.
But some Christians hailed its demise, saying it was used for witchcraft.
A heavy rainstorm a week ago caused one of the tree's branches to fall, but it had been thought it would survive.
However, in another storm on Wednesday, the entire tree came down, leaving just part of the trunk still standing.
The city's skyline has changed dramatically as a result - some would say, for ever.
The 70m (230 ft)-high cotton tree was said to be the oldest of its kind in the country - a government statement estimated it to be 400 years old.
Just 300m away are the Freedom Steps, climbed by newly arrived freed slaves who offered prayers at the tree before making Freetown their home.
As the city grew over the years, it expanded around the ancient tree at its heart.
President Julius Maada Bio and other officials are expected to visit the site to determine what to do.
"We will have something at the same spot that bears testament to the great Cotton Tree's place in our history," he tweeted.
Laocoon
an hour ago edited
EXCELLENT post!
Paxton ran for the AG job in 2014. He eventually defeated TX Representative Dan Branch in the Republican primary. Dan Branch was a very powerful, very connected, and very wealthy member of the TX Legislature. I went to college with Dan Branch. He's a charming and outgoing guy. In some ways he kinda reminds me of Greg Marmalard from "Animal House". NTTAWWT. Branch is a senior partner in a big Dallas law firm with a nice family, most likely a cat, a faithful dog, and an immaculately manicured lawn. Branch and his friends in the TX Legislature were VERY unhappy with losing.
As soon as the primary was over, uncounted allegations on various issues immediately emerged against Paxton and more have surfaced ever since. They went after him on everything from securities fraud, to mopery with intent to loiter, to spreading the freakin' heartbreak of psoriasis, to lying, to alowing his feet to stink, to not lovin' Jesus.
As much as I dislike the slimy games being played here...the Return On Investment (ROI) with Paxton just might not provide a sufficient value with the 2024 election coming up fast. I don't like giving in to the kind of sleazy politics being played here. It's unfair and unjust. But the heavy hitters around Phelan have been working 24/7/365 since 2014 to get rid of Paxton...and it looks like Phelen has Paxton this time. Even though he just won re-election, I'm not sure Paxton is a hill worth politically dying on.
Like you say: "Texas can’t afford to have an attorney general at war with his own party. The Texas GOP can’t afford to go into the 2024 election with seriously wounded Ken Paxton on the ballot."
Tech entrepreneur David Sacks, who co-hosted the Twitter event alongside Musk, had a different theory, saying:
I think it crashed because when you multiply a half-million people in a room by an account with over 100 million followers, which is Elon’s account, I think that creates just a scalability level that was unprecedented. //
Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1
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New York Times calls the DeSantis announcement a "fiasco."
NBC News calls it a 'melt down.'
The Washington Post calls it "awkward."
Politico calls it "horrendous."
Elon Musk @elonmusk
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I call it “massive attention”
Top story on Earth today
10:03 PM · May 24, 2023
Jason • May 25, 2023 11:01 AM
This is 0th order thinking, probably not novel, and possibly GPT generated…
How long would it take for GPTs to generate the amount of text of all humans ever and basically have 50% of all language generation market share? 75%? 99%?
How would LMMs ‘know’ they are being trained on their own generative text vs human-created text?
Would LMMs suffer from copy-of-a-copy syndrome or maybe even a prion-type mad cow disorder?
Let’s say the term “American Farm” correlates 27% to “corn”, 24% to “soybeans”, 16% “wheat”. After many, many GPT cycles, with LMMs and it’s handlers unable to distiguish the source of the data, would it go to 78% corn, 18% soybeans, 3% wheat?
I don’t know if it will be poisonable, humans will not outpace GPT production for long (maybe the point has been passed). But it may be suseptible to it’s reinforcing it’s own predictions. Oh wait, it’s just like us!
Post Script • May 25, 2023 11:05 AM
Aren’t they already self-poisoned by being built on undifferentiated slop? They should have to start over with clean, inspectable data sets, curated and properly licensed and paid for, not scraped out of the worst cesspools on the internet and blended in with anything else they can steal.
If you steal indiscriminately, people are going to start defensive measures, whether it’s closing public access to sites to foil scrapers or setting out gift-wrapped boxes of poop.
TimH • May 25, 2023 11:06 AM
My concern is for the times when AI is used for evidential analysis, and the defendent asks for the algorithm, as in “confront the accuser”. There isn’t an algorithm. If courts just accept that AI gotta be correct and unbiassed, and the output can’t be challenged, then we are so stuffed as a society.
Winter • May 25, 2023 11:08 AM
@Jason
Would LMMs suffer from copy-of-a-copy syndrome or maybe even a prion-type mad cow disorder?…
Yes to all.
And this is not even joking, as much I would like to.
Anyone who wants to build LLMs will have to start with constructing filters to remove the output of other LLMs from their training data. //
Winter • May 25, 2023 2:46 PM
@Clive
“How would such a circuit be built?”
It cannot be done perfectly, or even approximately. But something has to be done to limit training on LLM output.
But, think about how much speech a child needs to learn a language? And how much reading is needed to acquire a university reading level? That is not even a rounding error of what current LLMs need. That amount can easily be created from verified human language.
So, construct an LM that can be trained on verified human language, then use that to extract knowledge from written sources that do not have to be human. Just like humans do it.
Not yet technically possible, but one has to prepare for the future.
Wickwick Ars Legatus Legionis
13y
30,072
Terakh said:
let's see the promises actually get delivered on "near" agreed upon time and cost given that some of the stuff don't even exist.
As long as Congress funds the programs on the agreed-upon schedules, I think both landers will be ready before their respective Artemis missions are flown.
Unfortunately, Congress has a history of reducing funding levels below what the delivery time requires then complaining that the programs are delayed. But those sorts of shenanigans only seem to happen to fixed-price contracts where they have no control over where and how the money is spent. The cost-plus rocket contracts seem immune to any sorts of cuts. //
EricBerger Ars Scholae Palatinae
7y
1,067
ARS STAFF
pipe13 said:
...and a large source of energy. You know, to mine the water, collect the CO2, and put the proverbial toothpaste back in the tube.
The numbers are pretty sobering: Approximately 750 kilowatts of continuous energy, for two years, to produce 1,000 tons of liquid oxygen and methane. //
RichyRoo Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
5y
113
Subscriptor
Hopefully Smarter said:
I love seeing the enthusiasm about spreading the toxic virus of humanity throughout the universe.
without us there is no point to the rest of the universe //
abie Ars Scholae Palatinae
5y
719
Hopefully Smarter said:
I love seeing the enthusiasm about spreading the toxic virus of humanity throughout the universe.
What you call a toxic virus, I call the light of consciousness. We've found no signs of life anywhere in the universe. Life might be incredibly rare, intelligent life rarer still. Taking the first hesitant steps to establishing life off Earth should be a cause for celebration, not miserable cynicism such as yours.
Last Friday, NASA awarded a $3.4 billion contract to a team led by Blue Origin for the design and construction of a second Human Landing System to fly astronauts down to the Moon.
The announcement capped a furious two-year lobbying campaign by Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos to obtain a coveted piece of NASA's Artemis program. NASA also notched a big win, gaining the competition with SpaceX it sought for landing services. But there is a more profound takeaway from this.
After losing the initial lander contract to SpaceX two years ago, Blue Origin did not just bid a lower price this time around. Instead, it radically transformed the means by which it would put humans on the Moon. The Blue Moon lander is now completely reusable; it will remain in lunar orbit, going up and down to the surface. It will be serviced by a transport vehicle that will be fueled in low-Earth orbit and then deliver propellant to the Moon. This transporter, in turn, will be refilled by multiple launches of the reusable New Glenn rocket.
To be sure, that is a lot of hardware that has yet to be built and tested. But when we step back, there is one inescapable fact. With SpaceX's fully reusable Starship, and now Blue Moon, NASA has selected two vehicles based around the concept of many launches and the capability to store and transfer propellant in space.
This is a remarkable transformation in the way humans will explore outer space—potentially the biggest change in spaceflight since the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957. It has been a long time coming. //
The German physicist Max Planck is credited with the notion that science advances only when older practitioners die off, leaving room for new ideas. The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn more pithily summarized the sentiment by writing, "Science advances one funeral at a time."
Goff offered a variation on this idea for spaceflight: "Space policy seems to progress one congressional retirement at a time," he said.
Like Sowers, he welcomed NASA's entry into an era of reusable spaceflight. But Goff noted that it is really only happening because two billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, are aggressively pushing the idea forward.
NASA has spent so much over the last decade on the development of the SLS rocket—north of $40 billion, including ground systems—that there has been little money left over for exploration payloads to fly on them. Therefore, when it came time to fund the lunar landers, NASA had to go with the least expensive options. Both Starship and Blue Moon are, roughly, at least $10 billion development programs. But because it can purchase them with fixed-price contracts, NASA is only paying about a third of the overall cost for both, $6.3 billion.
"The only way NASA could really afford to do this was by not doing business as usual," Goff said.
An independent report published Thursday had troubling findings about the money spent by the agency on propulsion for the Space Launch System rocket. Moreover, the report by NASA Inspector General Paul Martin warns that if these costs are not controlled, it could jeopardize plans to return to the Moon. //
"The agency’s reliance on cost-plus awards increases its financial risk," Martin wrote. "In our judgment, NASA has used cost-plus contracting structures for its SLS booster and engine contracts to a greater extent than warranted. Although the SLS is a new vehicle, its heritage boosters and RS-25 engines are well-established."
Cost-plus contracts pay the recipient the total amount of their costs plus a fee. This is in contrast to the fixed-price contracts NASA has given SpaceX and Blue Origin for landers, the design of which is much more experimental and cutting-edge in nature than repurposing space shuttle hardware. //
For example, the current cost of manufacturing a new RS-25 main engine—which will be used for the Artemis V mission and onward—is about $100 million. NASA and Aerojet are trying to achieve a 30 percent cost savings by the end of this decade, bringing the cost down to $70.5 million. //
Compared to the private sector, even getting the cost of an RS-25 engine down to $70.5 million is a preposterously high price. Blue Origin manufactures engines of comparable power and size, the BE-4, for less than $20 million. And SpaceX is seeking to push the similarly powerful Raptor rocket engine costs even lower, to less than $1 million per engine.
Based on all of the new data in his latest report, Martin said his office has had to revise its estimate of the total cost of a Space System Launch, inclusive of ground systems and the Orion spacecraft. It is now $4.2 billion.
Late last month, we reported on the case of 94-year-old grandmother Geraldine Tyler, whose Minneapolis condo was sold by Hennepin County in Minnesota for $40,000 to pay off a $15,000 tax debt: 94-year-old Grandmother Fights Home Equity Theft at the U.S. Supreme Court
The kicker was that instead of returning the $25,000 surplus over the amount Geraldine owed the state, Hennepin County decided to keep the whole amount! Even worse, the County’s retention of those funds was entirely in keeping with Minnesota state law, as we reported: //
in a unanimous opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court gave short shrift to the Eighth Circuit’s “state law controls” argument:
The Takings Clause does not itself define property…For that, the Court draws on ‘existing rules or understandings’ about property rights…State law is one important source…But state law cannot be the only source. Otherwise, a State could sidestep the Takings Clause by disavowing traditional property interests in assets it wishes to appropriate.
In other words, a state cannot just pass a state statute that lets them take your property without compensation, which is apparently what the County, and the federal district and appeals court thought. Or as the Supreme Court puts it: “The Takings Clause would be a dead letter if a state could simply exclude from its definition of property any interest that the state wished to take.” //
The Court then gives a history lesson, going all the way back to the Magna Carta, which said that “when [a] sheriff or bailiff came to collect any debts owed [the King] from a dead man, they could remove property ‘until the debt which is evident shall be fully paid to us; and the residue shall be left to the executors to fulfill the will of the deceased.” Blackstone, the leading legal authority in England in the 1700s, said, “[i]f a tax collector seized a taxpayer’s property, he was ‘bound by an implied contract in law to restore [the property] on payment of the debt, duty, and expenses, before the time of sale; or, when sold, to render back the overplus.'” //
The taxpayer must render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but no more.
Chuck Schumer @SenSchumer
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This MAGA Supreme Court is continuing to erode our country’s environmental laws.
Make no mistake—this ruling will mean more polluted water, and more destruction of wetlands.
We’ll keep fighting to protect our waters.
The Washington Post @washingtonpost
Breaking news: The Supreme Court on Thursday cut back the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the nation’s wetlands and waterways, another setback for the agency’s authority to combat pollution. https://wapo.st/3q9g6Nx
Readers added context
All 9 judges agreed that the EPA overstepped its authority and that the plaintiffs' property should not be subject to EPA regulation. However, 4 judges disagreed with the majority's opinion on the limits of EPA authority with respect to wetlands.
nytimes.com/2023/05/25/us/…
12:02 PM · May 25, 2023
In 1973, the innovators at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) had a time machine. The Alto computer transported computing 15 years into the future with its groundbreaking features and functions. It influenced Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and a generation of researchers. A half century later, how we live with computing is still shaped by the Alto.
On the 50th anniversary of the Alto, many of its creators and some of today’s leading inventors gathered at CHM to share the Alto’s legacy and discuss what we can expect for the future of computing research—centered today on artificial intelligence (AI).
The Palo Alto Research Center (a Xerox company) has authorized the Computer History Museum to provide public viewing of the software, documents, and other files on this web site, and to provide these same files to private individuals and non-profit institutions with the same rights granted to CHM and subject to the same obligations undertaken by CHM. For more information about these files, see this explanatory information and @CHM post.
In 1970, the well-heeled corporate behemoth Xerox, with a nearly perfect monopoly on the quintessential office technology of photocopying, cut the ribbon on a new and ambitious bet on its future: the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). PARC was a large research and development organization, comprised of distinct laboratories. Several concentrated on extending Xerox’s dominance of photocopying, like the General Science and Optical Science Laboratories. Others, specifically the Computer Science and Systems Science Laboratories, were aimed at a new goal. They would develop computer hardware and software that could plausibly form the basis for the “office of the future” some ten to fifteen years hence, giving Xerox a profound head start in this arena. //
Individual Alto users could store and back up their files in several ways. Altos could store information on removable “disk packs” the size of a medium pizza. Through the Ethernet, they could also store information on a series of IFSs, “Interim File Servers.” These were Altos outfitted with larger hard drives, running software that turned them into data stores. The researchers who developed the IFS software never anticipated that their “interim” systems would be used for some fifteen years.
With the IFSs, PARC researchers could store and share copies of their innovations, but the ancient anxiety demanded the question: “But what if something happened to an IFS?!” Here again, Ethernet held a solution. The PARC researchers created a new tape backup system, this time controlled by an Alto. Now, using Ethernet connections, files from the MAXC, the IFSs, and individuals’ Altos could be backed up to 9-track magnetic tapes. //
The nearly one hundred and fifty thousand unique files —around four gigabytes of information—in the archive cover an astonishing landscape: programming languages; graphics; printing and typography; mathematics; networking; databases; file systems; electronic mail; servers; voice; artificial intelligence; hardware design; integrated circuit design tools and simulators; and additions to the Alto archive. All of this is open for you to explore today at https://info.computerhistory.org/xerox-parc-archive Explore!
Deutsch Connector User Guide. Assembling and dis-assembling Deutsch DT, DTM and DTP Series Connectors.