Wednesday, February 1, 2023

And another day of launching investigations, DeSantis attacking higher education, the Tyre Nichols police report, NY investors snapping up CO River water rights, a dire forecast for climate change, and more on AI comes to a close:

“When a not for profit institution like The College Board surrenders to Ron DeSantis' demands to whitewash history so students don't learn a full picture of Black history we are in a dangerous place. The politicization of education by GOP to brainwash students is upon us.” — Dean Obeidallah 

House Republicans are launching their first investigations into Democrats. House Republicans are launching an investigation into Democrats with a series of hearings on border policy, pandemic spending and Biden's family dealings. Democrats say it's about politics — not legitimate oversight.

House GOP readies vote to oust Rep. Omar from Foreign Affairs Committee. House Republicans are planning to vote as soon as Wednesday to oust Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., from the Foreign Affairs Committee over what they say are her anti-Semitic remarks in the past — marking an escalation in a long-running battle between the parties over committee assignments.

“I happen to embody multiple marginal identities. I’m a woman, I’m black, I’m a refugee, an immigrant, a Muslim and I wear a hijab. And all of those are identities that have been vilified by the right." — Rep. Ilhan Omar

Flashback: The Right has been vilifying Omar for years. And yet even in a time of national crisis, when many cannot see beyond the doom of the moment, when democracy is at stake, Omar is remarkably hopeful about its future.

DeSantis targets ‘ideological’ programs in proposed university changes. The Republican governor is asking the Legislature in the upcoming session to eliminate all state funding toward those programs, which he deems “ideological,” and pass a measure that would give university officials the power to launch a tenure review at any time. -- The right-wing authoritarian takeover of higher education begins its march.

Tyre Nichols police report at odds with video of brutal traffic stop before his death. A Memphis police report into the traffic stop of Tyre Nichols portrays him as violent and aggressive and states that he tried to grab an officer's gun, allegations that are contradicted by multiple videos released by authorities.

New York investors snapping up Colorado River water rights, betting big on an increasingly scarce resource. With the federal government poised to force Western states to change how they manage the alarming shortfall in Colorado River water, there is one constituency with a growing interest in the river's fate that's little known to some: Wall Street investors. Private investment firms are showing a growing interest in an increasingly scarce natural resource in the American West: water in the Colorado River. — There are so many horrible people on the planet.

US Emissions of the World’s Most Potent Greenhouse Gas Are 56 Percent Higher Than EPA Estimates, a New Study Shows. Electric utilities are likely responsible for the nation’s higher than expected emissions of sulfur hexafluoride, a greenhouse gas 25,000 times worse for the climate than carbon dioxide.

Large glacier near Seattle has ‘completely disappeared,’ says researcher who has tracked it for years. In this swath of mountain range in the Washington Cascades east of Seattle, the climate crisis dealt the final blow to the Hinman Glacier, the largest in the region, according to Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist with Nichols College. It’s not just the Northern Cascades that’s losing ice. Researchers recently found that up to half of the planet’s glaciers could be lost by the end of the century, even if the world’s ambitious global climate targets, including phasing out fossil fuels, are met.

A dire forecast: Scientists used AI to find planet could cross critical warming threshold sooner than expected. The study estimates that the planet could reach 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels in a decade, and found a “substantial possibility” of global temperature rises crossing the 2-degree threshold by mid-century, even with significant global efforts to bring down planet-warming pollution.

Here’s what the Fed interest rate hike means for you. The Federal Reserve raised its key rate by a quarter point Wednesday, bringing it to the highest level in 15 years as part of an ongoing effort to ease inflation by making borrowing more expensive.

Google has the next move as Microsoft embraces OpenAI buzz. Another company might have released the experiment into the wild anyway, as the startup OpenAI did with its ChatGPT tool late last year. But Google has been more cautious about who gets to play with its AI advancements despite growing pressure for the internet giant to compete more aggressively with rival Microsoft, which is pouring billions of dollars into OpenAI and fusing its technology into Microsoft products.

A college student built an AI to help look for alien radio signals. The program already spotted potential evidence while combing through 150TB of data from 820 nearby stars. Over the past few years, Peter Ma, a third-year math and physics student at the University of Toronto, has worked alongside mentors at SETI and Breakthrough Listen—an initiative tasked with finding “technosignatures” of extraterrestrial intelligence—to develop a new neural network technique capable of parsing through massive troves of galactic radio signals in the pursuit of alien life. Narrowband radio frequencies have been hypothesized as a potential indicator for ETs, given they require a “purposely built transmitter,” according to SETI’s FAQ. While prior search algorithms only identified anomalies as exactly defined by humans, Ma’s deep machine learning system allows for alternative modes of thinking that human-dictated algorithms often can’t replicate.

Ozzy Osbourne cancels all shows, says his touring career is over. Ozzy Osbourne announced the cancellation of his upcoming shows, and said his touring career is over because he “is not physically capable (of it).” In a statement released on Wednesday, the 74-year-old said he had a major accident four years ago in which he damaged his spine and that he can no longer cope with the travel required for a tour.

Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.

Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.