The Last Humans Alive

I asked Grok: Create an image of the last group of humans alive on Earth after global warming and climate change have killed everyone else.

It created this. A little harsher than I expected, but OK.

Link.

El Nino region's amazing SST

Here's a chart (thanks Grok) showing the sea surface temperature of the Nino3.4 region in the central Pacific Ocean. The SST is going off the chart. 

The high bulge to the right of 2026's line is 2015, which peaked on Nov 18, 2015 at 29.81°C, an anomaly of 3.26°C relative to a baseline of 1982-2010. 

Here's a time series of the same region. If El Ninos' strength is increasing over time, I wouldn't say it's obvious from this graph? What do you think?

Of course someone should do a calculation.

Ocean Heat Content Clearly Accelerating

Here are the latest ocean heat content numbers from NOAA, through 1Q2026. Eyeballing, it looks clear that OHC is accelerating for both regions. 

0-700 m region: linear slope = 0.22 W/m² = 0.035°C/decade

                           acceleration = 0.0089 (W/m²)/yr = 8.9 (mW/m²)/yr

where "mW" is milliwatts. 

0-2000 m region: linear slope = 0.68 W/m² = 0.037°C/decade

                             acceleration = 0.0079 (W/m²)/yr = 7.9 (mW/m²)/yr

The R² numbers are all high, > 0.90.

All this bother over milliwatts!   :-)

PS: corrections welcome, especially on the unit conversions.

Island Boy

This lively woman, Brooke Eby, said she was finally diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, or, she says, the same disease that Stephen Hawking had, "before he became an island boy." 

I hope you know what that means. 

I wonder if that will be his lasting impression in the public sphere.

Don't know if any of you care. Probably not.

-=-=-

Her name is Brooke Eby. She had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., at 33. She died yesterday at the age of 37. 

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Why I Love Rainy Days (Apparently)

Oregon's rainy season--it's really rainy season--is coming up in November and December. It's the only part of winter here I enjoy anymore. (Yes, I realize technically it's autumn. But it feels like winter.) I used to love nor'easters in New England. (Like today's.)

I'm already missing summer.

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Weird Eddington Quotes

Arthur Eddington, physicist and mathematician, wrote:

“The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness”

He also wrote:

“It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference.”

Both of these are in his book The Nature of the Physical World, published in 1928. 

Eddington made his name in astronomy and especially by traipsing off to Príncipe in 1919 to attempt to measure the bending of light around the sun predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. The island is inside the underarm of Africa, and the eclipse occurred on May 29th. At only 1.5° N of the equator it was probably miserable at the time, especially wearing the heaps of clothing expected of English men back then. Eddington said he had confirmed Einstein's prediction, which made Einstein famous. I once read that Eddington cherry picked his data, but Wikipedia says 

The results were argued by some to have been plagued by systematic error and possibly confirmation bias, although modern reanalysis of the dataset suggests that Eddington's analysis was accurate.

Maybe he just got lucky or had a sixth sense for his experiment. Maybe he knew what he was doing.

Anyway, back to these quotes. Eddington didn't accomplish much in the field of physics or the new quantum mechanics, as far as I know, but he did have a few crazy ideas. He claimed the number of hydrogen atoms in the universe was exactly 136*2²⁵⁶, approximately 1.57e79.

The "136" looks suspicious.... Eddington claimed the fine structure constant α was 1/136, which was about the value being measured back then. But better measurements found it to be a little less than 1/137, so Eddington cooked up a way to find one more degree of freedom, thus 136+1=137. For this he was ridiculed and some people started calling him "Arthur Adding-one," and the episode detracted from his scientific credibility.

 
So back to these quotes, made as the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics were being established by Born and Heisenberg and Pauli and a bunch of guys at Göttingen in Germany. Eddington must have been impressed with QM and it triggered his curiosity but didn't get into the meat of it so played around at the [far] edges. 

Anyway, back to the quotes. They seem influenced by QM, but they're really quite astonishing and, well, kooky for any actual scientist to say. Nothing was known about consciousness back then, just as nothing about it is known today. To say that there is no external world and it all springs from consciousness is way, way, way out there, too soon even for science fiction, which was then sending goofy rockets to be planted into the lunar surface and there were canals on Mars built by Martians (first described in 1877). Eddington said it all depends on "mental character." 

Eddington took the red pill. He believed that consciousness could not be explained by physics. (Then by what?) I knew about the eclipse of course, and his adding one to 136 to get 137, but I never knew he was this far out there. He was probably a fascinating guy to have a conversation with, in front of a large fireplace with port and cigars, and I suspect he had even weirder ideas than he wrote about. He would certainly be worth a time travel trip, when they finally figure out time travel and built the necessary infrastructure. I don't know, depends on the cost. If Einstein would be there at the same time, I'd pay a lot for that ticket. Just might stay, too.

Big Fossil Fuel Ad Money for the New York Times

A big dilemma:

#NotACoincidence

[image or embed]

— Michael E. Mann (@michaelemann.bsky.social) September 5, 2026 at 8:25 AM

Looks like the NYT takes in about $500 M/yr in advertising money. So about 4% comes from fossil fuels. If the loaded salary of an employee is $200,000, the FF money pays for a hundred of them. Or, as they have 163 M shares outstanding, that's 12 cents more dividend per share. Their annual dividend is $0.92 per share per year, they could raise it by about 13%. 

Or have an amazing annual Hanukkah party.

Arctic Sea Ice Extent Only 10th Lowest

NSIDC says that the Arctic's sea ice extent minimum has been reached for the year, 4.60 million square kilometers on Sept 12th. That's about the area of the European Union, and only tenth lowest since satellite records began back in November 1978. 

"This year’s minimum is yet another low extent in a changed Arctic," said senior scientist Walt Meier. "While this year’s minimum is in line with recent years, it is far lower than anything we saw in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s.”

Here's a quick reminder of what "extent" means versus "area":

Sea ice area is the total region covered by ice. Extent is the total region with at least 15 percent sea ice cover. NSIDC usually reports extent, which gives higher values than area.

And the Antarctic has likely reached its maximum for the winter down there:

In the Antarctic, sea ice extent has been tracking near record low levels for most of this growth season, most likely reaching its maximum extent on September 14 at 17.59 million square kilometers (6.79 million square miles). If this maximum date holds, this will be the third lowest Antarctic sea ice maximum on record. 

Here's NSIDC's own story and an animation for the Arctic. Here's an image I asked Perplexity AI to generate: "an image of vanishing sea ice."

Image by Perplexity AI

About the Equal-Area Map Debate

Surprising (to me):

Kluth says of the Mercator map, "Greenland is especially exaggerated: It appears to be 14 times larger than all of Africa, when in fact, it is smaller than Algeria.

How a bogus map exposes 'one reason for Trump's obsession with Greenland,' Alternet, 11-Sept-2026

Data centers in Oregon use 71% of electricity of households

There are 111 data centers in the state of Oregon, as of 2025, consuming 14 TW-hr of electricity last year. That's an hour power consumption of 1.6 GW. It's equal to 71% of household use of electricity. 

32 more data centers are planned.

That's a lot of AI slop. Maybe a few more unproven conjectures in mathematics. More ridiculous crap from Trump. 

Via KPTV.com

https://youtu.be/dezHhFjj16A?si=x4ph7vVA-BbqG_zc

It's not clear if dolphins or humans have the better lives

The End of "American Exceptionalism"

Here's an op-ed in today's New York Times, by Charles A. Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Free link.

We are in a worldwide battle for hearts and minds. The future of republican government in the United States, and globally, hangs in the balance. As Mr. Trump oversteps executive authority, weaponizes the Justice Department and tries to cow the media, private sector and universities, the citizens of China, Iran, Russia and other autocracies are watching America’s democratic beacon flicker. The stumbling of the American experiment, alongside the favoritism Washington is showering on far-right parties worldwide (even in a Germany haunted by its Nazi past), is blurring the ideals that long inspired repressed peoples to strain for the dignity and autonomy that only representative government can provide.

The United States is squandering its ability to bend the arc of history toward more freedom.

If Vance is elected president in 2028, I don't think he's capable of stopping this decline. He doesn't exactly seem the sharpest tool in the national shed.

-=-=-

IMO, "American exceptionalism" was always a stupid and thoughtless claim. There has always been plenty wrong with this country, and there is even more now--much more. I don't feel like getting too far into it--there's our racism, homophobia, now transphobia, antipathy to unions, antipathy to universal health care, militarism, foreign meddling, unregulated or self-regulated capitalism, the Second Amendment, "money is speech," the electoral college, and on and on. I can't imagine what this country will be in 20 years.  

Feynman's Heart-breaking Letter to His Deceased Wife

This is a letter the physicist Richard Feynman wrote to his wife 17 months after she passed. 

Feynman was a young physicist at Los Alamos, New Mexico during the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. He was a junior scientist put in charge of the calculating division, the "human calculators" doing all the arithmetic that needed done, especially complicated integrals. 

(Sothebys confirms)

A little about his marriage, from Wikipedia:

One of the conditions of Feynman's scholarship to Princeton was that he could not be married; nevertheless, he continued to see his high school sweetheart, Arline Greenbaum, and was determined to marry her once he had been awarded his PhD despite the knowledge that she was seriously ill with tuberculosis. This was an incurable disease at the time, and she was not expected to live more than two years. On June 29, 1942, they took the ferry to Staten Island, where they were married in the city office. The ceremony was attended by neither family nor friends and was witnessed by a pair of strangers. Feynman could kiss Arline only on the cheek. After the ceremony he took her to Deborah Hospital, where he visited her on weekends.

Oppenheimer recruited Feynman for Los Alamos. He was there by late March 1943.

Oppenheimer recruited many young physicists, including Feynman, whom he telephoned long distance from Chicago to inform that he had found a Presbyterian sanatorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico for Arline. They were among the first to depart for New Mexico, leaving on a train on March 28, 1943. The railroad supplied Arline with a wheelchair, and Feynman paid extra for a private room for her. There they spent their wedding anniversary.

Feynman visited his wife in Albuquerque every weekend. Even today it's a two-hour drive from Los Alamos to Albuquerque. Back then, when the roads weren't nearly as good, especially from Los Alamos to Santa Fe, it must have taken him several hours to travel to see his wife. 

She died in June 1945. 

The Trinity test at White Sands, New Mexico was July 16, 1945, and of course the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

[BTW, I once met and talked with the guy who set off the Trinity bomb--Joseph McKibben, who was in charge of the detonation electronics. Another time.]

Talk about a love story!! Feynman couldn't have been more devoted to his sweetheart and wife, despite all the difficulties and turmoil in both their lives at the time. 

Here's a picture of them:

As I was writing this I thought, wow, this would make a great screenplay, but then I though I had once seen such a movie, and sure enough there is one, from 1996:

But Matthew Broderick as Richard Feynman? Eh.

Sagan

"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

– Carl Sagan

Via: "Why Boltzmann Brains are Bad," Sean Carroll 2017. 

Indonesian Keyboard Player

I'm a little obsessed with this clip:

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