Rachel Carson in Silent Spring depicts such a chilling scene – the sound of birdsong that once echoed in the […]
The Soundscape of Nature (TEST) Continue reading »
Which generates more energy, your body or a 60-watt light bulb? You may be surprised to learn that the answer is your body. While sleeping or resting, a human body generates about one hundred watts of power just to stay alive. During exercise, that amount can jump as high as three hundred to four hundred watts. If you do nothing for an entire day, your body will churn through about 2.3 kWh of energy. (An average US home uses 30 kWh per day).
What do a DVD player, supermarket scanner, printer, fiber optic internet connection, and industrial metal cutter have in common? They
激光的特性、原理和用途 Continue reading »
Tick Tock . Tick Tock . The sounds of clocks and timepieces surround me . I’m standing inside the Willard House & Clock Museum in North Grafton, Massachusetts .
Mountains form some of the most spectacular landscapes in the world. In the highest mountains, huge peaks with steep sides are separated by deep valleys, cut by ice or fast-flowing rivers. Mountainous areas make up around a quarter of the land surface and are found across all continents.
Emily Hanley rubs her face, then takes a breath. “I recently lost my job to AI,” she says, in a video she shared on TikTok. She was a copywriter, or someone who writes the text for brands’ webpages, online articles, email campaigns, and other marketing materials. New generative AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, or Baidu’s Ernie excel at generating text for all sorts of purposes, including this one. Generative AI can also write code. And it’s far cheaper than hiring a person to do the same thing. In an article for Business Insider about the ordeal, Hanley wrote, “While I and countless other out-of-work copywriters are the first wave of AI collateral, the collapse of my profession is probably just the tip of the AI iceberg. ”
人工智能会抢走所有工作吗 Continue reading »
The rule of law demands that similar cases have similar outcomes. Otherwise, the law won’t be equitable and fair. And the public won’t accept arbitrary court rulings that lack sound reasoning. So, lawyers use reasoning when they urge juries and judges to rule for their clients. And judges must use logic to explain their decisions.
法庭控、辩中的逻辑推理 Continue reading »
Aging is a fact of life. Even if you avoid bad accidents, injuries, and infections, you won’t stay healthy forever. Your body will break down as you get older. You’ll get wrinkles and achy joints. Your vision and hearing will fade. Your chance of developing cancer, heart disease, and many other ailments will greatly increase. Aging “bedevils us all,” writes Steven N. Austad in his book, Methuselah’s Zoo. He defines aging as “the progressive deterioration over time of bodily functions and defenses along with increasing susceptibility to diseases.”
关于衰老，动物教会了我们什么 Continue reading »
No stars . No planets . Not even any atoms . At the moment of its birth, the universe was emptiness. Then, in a burst of inflation—a bit like a balloon blowing up—a very tiny area grew much, much larger. This happened when the age of the universe was just “a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second”, says Alexei Filippenko. He’s an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. The dramatic period is extremely brief. During inflation, the universe’s size doubled around at least 100 times.
