DeepMind’s program AlphaGo beat Fan Hui, the European Go champion, five times out of five in tournament conditions, the firm reveals in research published in Nature on 27 January. It also defeated its silicon-based rivals, winning 99.8% of games against the current best programs. The program has yet to play the Go equivalent of a world champion, but a match against South Korean professional Lee Sedol, considered by many to be the world’s strongest player, is scheduled for March. “We’re pretty confident,” says DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis.
The technique is deep recurrent learning with neural networks.

Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- Mike Bloomberg, 2020 He can get progress on climate done, has the means and experts to counter the Trump and Republican digital disinformation machine, and has the experience, knowledge, and depth of experience to achieve and unify.
- Pat's blog While it is described as “The mathematical (and other) thoughts of a (now retired) math teacher”, this is false humility, as it chronicles the present and past life and times of mathematicians in their context. Recommended.
- Earth Family Alpha Michael Osborne’s blog (former Executive at Austin Energy, now Chairman of the Electric Utility Commission for Austin, Texas)
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
- Karl Broman
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- Team Andrew Weinberg Walking September 8th for the Jimmy Fund!
- Gabriel's staircase
- "Impacts of Green New Deal energy plans on grid stability, costs, jobs, health, and climate in 143 countries" (Jacobson, Delucchi, Cameron, et al) Global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity are three of the greatest problems facing humanity. To address these problems, we develop Green New Deal energy roadmaps for 143 countries.
- Logistic curves in market disruption From DollarsPerBBL, about logistic or S-curves as models of product take-up rather than exponentials, with notes on EVs
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
- Carl Safina's blog One of the wisest on Earth
- OOI Data Nuggets OOI Ocean Data Lab: The Data Nuggets
- Darren Wilkinson's introduction to ABC Darren Wilkinson’s introduction to approximate Bayesian computation (“ABC”). See also his post about summary statistics for ABC https://darrenjw.wordpress.com/2013/09/01/summary-stats-for-abc/
- Slice Sampling
- Brendon Brewer on Overfitting Important and insightful presentation by Brendon Brewer on overfitting
- Peter Congdon's Bayesian statistical modeling Peter Congdon’s collection of links pertaining to his several books on Bayesian modeling
- Musings on Quantitative Paleoecology Quantitative methods and palaeoenvironments.
- Risk and Well-Being
- Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation
- Simon Wood's must-read paper on dynamic modeling of complex systems I highlighted Professor Wood’s paper in https://hypergeometric.wordpress.com/2014/12/26/struggling-with-problems-already-attacked/
- The Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
- Lenny Smith's CHAOS: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION This is a PDF version of Lenny Smith’s book of the same title, also available from Amazon.com
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- Quotes by Nikola Tesla Quotes by Nikola Tesla, including some of others he greatly liked.
- Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard on how businesses can help our collective environmental mess Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard set the standard for how a business can mitigate the ravages of capitalism on earth’s environment. At 81 years old, he’s just getting started.
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- NCAR AtmosNews
- Professor David Draper
- The Plastic Pick-Up: Discovering new sources of marine plastic pollution
- Why It’s So Freaking Hard To Make A Good COVID-19 Model Five Thirty Eight’s take on why pandemic modeling is so difficult
- SASB Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
- AP Statistics: Sampling, by Michael Porinchak Twin City Schools
- Harvard's Project Implicit
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- All about Sankey diagrams
- All about ENSO, and lunar tides (Paul Pukite) Historically, ENSO has been explained in terms of winds. But recently — and Dr Paul Pukite has insisted upon this for a long time — the oscillation of ENSO has been explained as a large-scale slosh due to lunar tidal forcing.
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION, reviews Reviews of Cathy O’Neil’s new book
- Awkward Botany
- Number Cruncher Politics
- London Review of Books
- What If
- Earle Wilson
- James' Empty Blog
- Busting Myths About Heat Pumps Heat pumps are perhaps the most efficient heating and cooling systems available. Recent literature distributed by utilities hawking natural gas and other sources use performance figures from heat pumps as they were available 15 years ago. See today’s.
climate change
- An open letter to Steve Levitt
- "A field guide to the climate clowns"
- Reanalyses.org
- Équiterre Equiterre helps build a social movement by encouraging individuals, organizations and governments to make ecological and equitable choices, in a spirit of solidarity.
- The great Michael Osborne's latest opinions Michael Osborne is a genius operative and champion of solar energy. I have learned never to disregard ANYTHING he says. He is mentor of Karl Ragabo, and the genius instigator of the Texas renewable energy miracle.
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- Mathematics and Climate Research Network The Mathematics and Climate Research Network (MCRN) engages mathematicians to collaborating on the cryosphere, conceptual model validation, data assimilation, the electric grid, food systems, nonsmooth systems, paleoclimate, resilience, tipping points.
- "Getting to the Energy Future We Want," Dr Steven Chu
- "Climate science is setttled enough"
- The beach boondoggle Prof Rob Young on how owners of beach property are socializing their risks at costs to all of us, not the least being it seems coastal damage is less than it actually is
- Tuft's Professor Kenneth Lang on the physical chemistry of the Greenhouse Effect
- Climate Change: A health emergency … New England Journal of Medicine Caren G. Solomon, M.D., M.P.H., and Regina C. LaRocque, M.D., M.P.H., January 17, 2019 N Engl J Med 2019; 380:209-211 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1817067
- MIT's Climate Primer
- Tell Utilities Solar Won't Be Killed Barry Goldwater, Jr’s campaign to push for solar expansion against monopolistic utilities, as a Republican
- Climate Change Denying Organizations
- Agendaists Eli Rabett’s coining of a phrase
- Steve Easterbrook's excellent climate blog: See his "The Internet: Saving Civilization or Trashing the Planet?" for example Heavy on data and computation, Easterbrook is a CS prof at UToronto, but is clearly familiar with climate science. I like his “The Internet: Saving Civilization or Trashing the Planet” very much.
- Exxon-Mobil statement on UNFCCC COP21
- "Impacts of Green New Deal energy plans on grid stability, costs, jobs, health, and climate in 143 countries" (Jacobson, Delucchi, Cameron, et al) Global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity are three of the greatest problems facing humanity. To address these problems, we develop Green New Deal energy roadmaps for 143 countries.
- Updating the Climate Science: What path is the real world following? From Professors Makiko Sato & James Hansen of Columbia University
- Dessler's 6 minute Greenhouse Effect video
- Skeptical Science
- "Warming Slowdown?" (part 1 of 2) The idea of a global warming slowdown or hiatus is critically examined, emphasizing the literature, the datasets, and means and methods for telling such. In two parts.
- `Who to believe on climate change': Simple checks By Bart Verheggen
- Model state level energy policy for New Englad Bob Massie’s proposed energy policy for Massachusetts, an admirable model for energy policy anywhere in New England
- Social Cost of Carbon
- History of discovering Global Warming From the American Institute of Physics.
- Documenting the Climate Deniarati at work
- Transitioning to fully renewable energy Professor Saul Griffiths talks to transitioning the customer journey, from a dependency upon fossil fuels to an electrified future
- NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index report The annual assessment by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the radiative forcing from constituent atmospheric greenhouse gases
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- HotWhopper: It's excellent. Global warming and climate change. Eavesdropping on the deniosphere, its weird pseudo-science and crazy conspiracy whoppers.
- Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature
- The Sunlight Economy
- Ellenbogen: There is no Such Thing as Wind Turbine Syndrome
- Interview with Wally Broecker Interview with Wally Broecker
- Tamino's Open Mind Open Mind: A statistical look at climate, its science, and at science denial
- Bloomberg interactive graph on “What's warming the world''
- Thriving on Low Carbon
- The Carbon Cycle The Carbon Cycle, monitored by The Carbon Project
- US$165/tonne CO2: Sweden Sweden has a Carbon Dioxide tax of US$165 per tonne at present. CO2 tax was imposed in 1991. GDP has grown 60%.
- And Then There's Physics
- "Warming Slowdown?" (part 2 of 2) The idea of a global warming slowdown or hiatus is critically examined, emphasizing the literature, the datasets, and means and methods for telling such. The second part.
- Klaus Lackner (ASU), Silicon Kingdom Holdings (SKH) Capturing CO2 from air at scale
- Ice and Snow
- "Betting strategies on fluctuations in the transient response of greenhouse warming" By Risbey, Lewandowsky, Hunter, Monselesan: Betting against climate change on durations of 15+ years is no longer a rational proposition.
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- The Keeling Curve The first, and one of the best programs for creating a spatially significant long term time series of atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Started amongst great obstacles by one, smart determined guy, Charles David Keeling.
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
Archives
Jan Galkowski

