Happy Saturday! Here are a few things that caught my eye recently that I thought were worth sharing with you.
First, some positive news links:
☀️ Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time – For the first time in U.S. history, solar power supplied more electricity to the national grid than coal, accounting for 12.8% of the nation's power in May compared to coal's 12.2%.
☀️💰 Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135 Million A Day – Europe's solar power fleet has saved the continent over €11 billion ($12 billion) in avoided fossil fuel import costs since March 1, shielding consumers from price spikes driven by Middle East conflict and shipping disruptions.
🦫 How British beavers help fight flooding from climate change – The deliberate reintroduction of native beavers to the British landscape is providing a natural defense against climate change by engineering wetlands that mitigate flooding and filter waterways. My favorite part of this story is how one city was able to scrap expensive plans to dig a reservoir and levee to protect a train station from flooding, because the beavers did it for them.
Concrete towers on the seabed scupper Cambodia's illegal trawling – Marine conservation groups in Cambodia are deploying large underwater concrete towers to physically block illegal bottom-trawling nets and protect vulnerable coastal fish nurseries.
🫏 Rescued donkey guards 33,600 solar panels and 50 sheep at Volkswagen factory – A manufacturing plant in Tennessee has adopted a low-impact land management strategy by using a guard donkey to naturally protect a grazing herd of lawn-mowing sheep from predators.
🦠 Pancreatic cancer halted by virus injection in three patients – A promising early-stage clinical trial has shown that a targeted oncolytic virus injection successfully halted tumor progression in three advanced pancreatic cancer patients.
☀️ Soaring solar and a surge in hydro push more coal off the US grid – The combination of aggressive solar expansion and a strong seasonal rebound in hydroelectric generation is actively squeezing remaining coal power off regional American electrical grids.
Essays Worth Reading
Here are some items from personal blogs and newsletters I thought were share-worthy:
🐷 The way we treat pigs is a sin - by Noah Smith – The practice of "crating" is torture, plain and simple. Voters want to end it, but Congress might not let them. This essay is the OPPOSITE of the kinds of good news articles that I usually send out, but I feel it’s important to share anyway on moral grounds. This article describes the horrific conditions that intelligent, sentient animals are subjected to. It also examines a controversial federal Farm Bill provision that seeks to overturn state-level animal welfare laws, such as California's ban on extreme confinement crates for pigs (another example of some conservative legislators being against "States' Rights" when it suits them.) WARNING: Many readers may find this essay upsetting and disturbing due to explicit descriptions of animal cruelty. Nevertheless, I hope it will motivate you to action, such as contacting your Congressional representatives and donating to FarmKind. The author argues that individual vegetarianism is insufficient to end the systemic cruelty of factory farming, making legislative protections and voter-led initiatives crucial. If you choose to read this essay, you will gain insight into the political battle between the factory farming lobby and animal welfare advocates, along with actionable steps to oppose the federal rollback.
🤖 Initial impressions of Claude Fable 5 – If you follow the latest AI developments, you know that Anthropic just released their most powerful publicly-available model, Claude Fable. This initial write up by prolific open-source programmer Simon Willison is worth a read to get an idea of the model’s power. Also worth reading: Simon’s follow-up essay, Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive.
The Pope appears to understand AI better than Geoffrey Hinton does. – Gary Marcus – This piece analyzes recent Vatican declarations on artificial intelligence, noting that the religious institution shows a sophisticated understanding of algorithmic bias, tech accountability, and human alignment.
All non-drone militaries are obsolete – An analytical look at contemporary conflicts illustrating a profound tactical shift in modern warfare, arguing that traditional military structures, heavy armor, and conventional doctrines have been rendered largely ineffective by cheap, ubiquitous drone swarms.
An Open Letter from the Medical Community on America’s Road Deaths – A collective of medical and trauma professionals (surgeons, emergency physicians, nurses, PAs, rehabilitation specialists, intensivists, researchers, and more) has issued an open letter calling for urgent infrastructure redesigns and federal policy overhauls – with a focus on autonomous vehicles – to address the rising crisis of preventable traffic fatalities in America.
And finally – an amusing parody of a classic science fiction story. If you’ve never read the classic 800-word short story, They're Made out of Meat, I encourage you to click that link (or this one if that one doesn’t work) and read it first. The story originally appeared in Omni magazine in April 1991, and it was nominated for the Nebula Award. Recently, developer Max Leiter wrote a parody of the story: They're Made Out of Weights, about modern large language models. I found it amusing. If you’re a certain kind of geek, you may enjoy it, too.
Image of the Week
As you can see in the chart below, global sales of combustion engine cars peaked in 2017. This is calculated based on data from the International Energy Agency. Bloomberg New Energy Finance also estimated this peak occurred around that time.
Song of the Week
Here is “Oneless” by The Junipers, a song I have listened to several times over the past 30 days. It appears on their album, The Solid and The Hollow, released in April of this year.
The Junipers are a sunny, psychedelic pop band from Leicester, UK, started as a home recording project around 2003 by Joe Wiltshire and Marc Johnston.
Throughout, the harmonies are green and lush, and the melodies are plucked out of some perfect pop songbook, and there’s baroque, jangle pop, sensational production, DIY rough-and-readiness and all-in-all, we find ourselves bathing in the whole thing, thrilled that they’ve blessed us with an invite into their universe.
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