Science writer. Working on a book about the night sky for Random House. Raleigh, NC.
(joshuasokol.com)
Joshua Sokol
Loading...
Let's try to wrap our heads around these numbers again, shall we.
One million seconds from now it will be a week from Tuesday.
One billion seconds from now it will be February... in 2058.
One trillion seconds from now won't arrive for almost 32,000 years.
Brooke Jarvis
Elon Musk’s net worth of $1.1 trillion is five million times as large as that of the typical family. The median American household had a net worth of just under $200,000 in 2022, the year with the most recent data available from the Federal Reserve. nyti.ms/4aL8sNH
In hindsight maybe we should have let them do this same game when they tried a few years ago with the metaverse, or with crypto/blockchain/NFTs, and that would have been enough? That's how it works, right, they get the money and feel it's enough?
Maybe the real root assumption in the case for space data centers is that some people decided investments doubling is boring but 10x, 100x, 1000x is cool and can be wished into being *if* enough rich people play along and *if* you can even vaguely gesture at paths to scaling up by these multiples.
Cool story on Cara's newsletter this week on nightjars in Spain. Their foraging life, even their weight, ramps up and down dramatically with the lunar cycle. Wheels within wheels of annual, circa-lunar, and circadian patterns out there in nature!
The New York Times
Joshua Sokol
Joshua Sokol
Joshua Sokol
This week on the @science.org podcast, Joshua Sokol talks about the intense discussion happening in the astrophysics community as AI and ML become increasingly powerful
www.science.org/content/podc...
This is an amazingly well-reported story by @joshuasokol.bsky.social. And a wonderful use of "synecdoche".
www.science.org/content/arti...
Video
Researchers see enormous power in new tools—but also the potential end of astrophysics as a human endeavor
What is the value of human beings studying the cosmos? For @michaelgreshko.bsky.social at Science, I dug into how practitioners of humanity's oldest exact science are metabolizing the latest developments in AI...and how it seems to be forcing them to wrestle with philosophical questions.
in the interest of using all parts of the tech hype buffalo, let's get the blockchain people back so they can sell us proof-of-work verification for non-AI writing?
Okay so if in March there was a globe-spanning, globally-visible, Low Earth Orbit-changing 10 thousand Starlink satellites and 10 million subscribers, either I'm going crazy or that's just one thousand paying humans per satellite... which seems, financially and otherwise, not enough justification?
Jonathan O'Callaghan
Sar Crespi
Congrats to the Taylor-Blakeslee fellows.. winners of $ for #graduate school in #science writing.
We need you more than ever.
Emely Bonilla, Cameron Glymph, Sruthi Gurudev, Jenna Lang, Jesse Steinmetz, Aspen Stuart-Cunningham + Kelsey Woody.
@sciencewriting.bsky.social
casw.org/news/seven-j...
Researchers see enormous power in new tools—but also the potential end of astrophysics as a human endeavor
