Kevin Drum

The New York Times has a pretty interesting piece today about Google's latest and greatest AI weather forecasting tool, GenCast, which extends reliable forecasting from 10 days to 15:

A new artificial intelligence tool from DeepMind, a Google company in London that develops A.I. applications, has smashed through the old barriers and achieved what its makers call unmatched skill and speed in devising 15-day weather forecasts.

....The world leader in atmospheric prediction is the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Comparative tests regularly show that its projections exceed all others in accuracy.... The new agent outdid the center’s forecasts 97.2 percent of time. The A.I. achievement, the authors wrote, “helps open the next chapter in operational weather forecasting.”

Generative language AIs rely on training themselves with petabytes of written internet content. This helps them learn to speak and understand the real world, but obviously doesn't allow them to forecast the weather. So how does GenCast do it?

The DeepMind agent runs on smaller machines and studies the atmospheric patterns of the past to learn the subtle dynamics that result in the planet’s weather.

The DeepMind team trained GenCast on a massive archive of weather data curated by the European center. The training period went from 1979 to 2018, or 40 years. The team then tested how well the agent could predict 2019’s weather.... Mimicking how humans learn, it spots patterns in mountains of data and then makes new, original material that has similar characteristics.

Here's a chart that shows errors in tracking tropical cyclones. GenCast is about 25 km better at every date range:

Plus GenCast eliminates the need for huge, expensive supercomputers:

Instead, the DeepMind agent runs on smaller machines and studies the atmospheric patterns of the past to learn the subtle dynamics that result in the planet’s weather.

....Dr. Price of DeepMind said, the new agent can generate a 15-day forecast in minutes compared with hours for a supercomputer. That can make its projections much timelier — an advantage in tracking fast-moving storms.

I can imagine that different training sets will allow GenCast and its successors to predict weather events of all sorts at lower cost and with greater accuracy than ever before. Next up: Earthquakes. Let's get cracking, geo-boffins.

This is the Flaming Star Nebula, aka IC 405, a combination emission/reflection nebula in the Auriga constellation.

I took this picture Sunday night after a multi-month layoff, and it was the best night of astrophotography I've ever had. Usually something goes wrong during the imaging session—it's always weird and different each time—but the sky was perfect on Sunday and everything went great. I set up the scope with no trouble, pressed Go, and it took pictures steadily for the next eight hours with no complaints. In the end, I got more than 100 subs of four minutes each, partly because it was a long winter night and partly because everything went so smoothly. This is by far my most productive session ever.

When I got home and put everything together, I once again tried the technique of extracting separate RGB images and then merging them back together. That's the top image, and it's spectacularly more detailed than a standard stack, as shown in the bottom picture. Aesthetically, the choice between the two is still a matter of taste, but technically the top picture is far superior.

I was also hoping to pull out some hints of the blue wispiness in this nebula, but didn't really have any luck. I suspect that the blue comes from the reflection part of the nebula and my narrowband filter just knocked it out completely. I still need some more practice with this, since it involves a lot of personal choice about combining the colors and producing a good end result.

Are you wondering how your county did last year? I'm here to help. Here is real GDP growth for the 20 biggest counties in the US:

Silicon Valley did well, with all of its component parts in the top ten (Santa Clara, San Mateo, and San Francisco counties). My hometown of Orange County did the worst. Here's a map of all 3,114 counties:

The central Midwest, from Nebraska down to Texas, had the strongest regional growth. The upper Midwest, from Minnesota to Illinois, seems to have done the worst.

Among all counties, the highest growth was in Throckmorton County, TX (+125.8%). The worst growth was in Lincoln County, WA (–39.6%).

Throckmorton County is a tiny speck near the Texas panhandle that's been losing what small population it had for the past century:

How does a county like this double its GDP in a single year? Did they discover oil? Become home to a libertarian free city? Play a trick on the BEA? Some enterprising reporter needs to parachute in and figure out what the story is. It might be fascinating.

UPDATE: A reader suggests the answer can be found here:

As electricity demand rises across Texas, Enel Green Power has installed a new wind farm and battery storage project in Throckmorton County. The wind farm was first up and running in March, but now the county is benefiting from the project as well. Clark Bixler, senior development manager at Enel Green Power, said it’s providing over $57 million in tax revenue over its lifetime along with around 20 long-term jobs.

Ah. Throckmorton's GDP rose from $71 million to $160 million, and presumably it was the wind farm that generated the additional $89 million. That money all goes to Enel Green Power, headquarters Rome, but by the rules it counts as output from Throckmorton County. I guess.

Anyway, cancel the parachute drop.

Another nomination from Donald Trump:

President-elect Donald J. Trump will nominate Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who led two private missions to orbit on SpaceX rockets, as the next NASA administrator.

Mr. Isaacman, the chief executive of the payment processing company Shift4 Payments, is a close associate of Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, and, if confirmed to the post by the Senate, would bring the perspective of an outsider to the space agency and its $25 billion budget.

This doesn't rate up there with the likes of Tulsi Gabbard or Pete Hegseth, but it's yet another meme pick. I hardly need to point out that being rich enough to afford vanity trips to space hardly qualifies you to lead NASA. And being a buddy of Elon Musk is a massive conflict of interest for running an agency that Elon Musk does a lot of business with.

On the other hand, at least Isaacman is actually enthusiastic about space. He's not a typical Trump nominee who hates the very fabric of the agency he's going to run. And he also has legit experience managing a large organization.

In other words, all things considered, thumbs up!

Matt Stieb writes today about the food freedom movement:

How Raw Milk Went From Hippie to MAGA

This seems right, but it's not. Raw milk certainly had a MAGA moment earlier this year—completely unrelated to RFK Jr.—but its conservative roots go back well over a decade. Here's a Politico piece from 2014:

As buying local has become all the rage and concerns about industrialized agriculture more widespread, the right-leaning food freedom cause is gaining steam and increasingly finding allies on the left.

....Supporters of the movement, including Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who sponsored the two raw milk-related bills and is looking to take a leadership role in the food freedom movement...plans to introduce more food freedom bills in the coming months. He hopes Democrats are willing to go along for the ride. “I sit two or three seats from the aisle in the House of Representatives because I’m always looking for Democratic co-sponsors,” he quipped.

Let's go further back. Here's the description of a book written in 2009:

The Raw Milk Revolution takes readers behind the scenes of the government's tough and occasionally brutal intimidation tactics, as seen through the eyes of milk producers, government regulators, scientists, prosecutors, and consumers. It is a disturbing story involving marginally legal police tactics and investigation techniques, with young children used as political pawns in a highly charged atmosphere of fear and retribution.

It received a positive review in The American Conservative. The author, David Gumpert, later wrote an obituary for Michael Hartmann:

Hartmann became a folk hero in the Minneapolis area for standing up to state public health regulators who raided his delivery truck and farm on numerous occasions between 2010 and 2014 to halt his raw milk deliveries.

....Hartmann is one of a number of dairy farmers around the country who stood up for their right to sell their farms’ raw dairy products.... Farmers like Hartmann made it work, by studying the law and standing up to the powerful biases in our system. There was no whining about liberal judges or elites or conspiracies or vote fraud or any of the other staples of our current perverted and polarized politics.

Now let's go back even farther. The godfather of the raw milk movement is libertarian Christian farmer Joel Salatin, who wrote Everything I Want to Do is Illegal in 2007. Here's what he says about it:

If this country allowed an opt-out spot for consenting adults to take personal responsibility for the food ingestion, it would unleash an entrepreneurial cottage-based localized tsunami on the marketplace. Wal-Mart would never know what hit it. If the foodies and greenies could only imagine what bottom-up freedom could create, they'd forget their demands for more inspections, more regulations, and more food police and instead campaign for true free markets.

The strongest and longest congressional crusader for raw milk was libertarian Republican Ron Paul, who first introduced a bill to legalize raw milk in 2007 and received standing ovations for promoting raw milk during his 2012 presidential campaign.

The raw milk movement didn't start with leftist hippies. It started with cranky individualist farmers and their conservative customers, who fought against government regulators for their right to do as they pleased. From there it spread on both left and right, but even now it's mostly a right-wing cause. The MAGA embrace of raw milk (and later RFK Jr.) is its natural end point, not a sudden embrace of crunchy hippiedom.

Looks like maybe the jig is up for Pete Hegseth, who possesses the unique combination of being both the biggest asshole and the most aggressively unqualified nominee in history to run the Defense Department:

Any port in a storm, but it's telling that Trump's gripe appears to be only that Hegseth might have misled him, not that Hegseth is an unqualified asshole. But I guess Trump knew that all along and considered it a plus.

I'm not the world's biggest fan of "both sides" criticism—i.e., that reporters constantly bend over backward to show that Democrats are just as bad as Republicans—but holy shit:

Justice Dept.’s Apolitical Tradition Is Challenged by 2 Presidents

The special counsel named to lead the inquiry into Hunter Biden, the president’s son, has just seen the two convictions he secured wiped away by a presidential pardon.

Mr. Trump, whose election victory last month has done nothing to blunt his desire for retribution against those who pursued or opposed him, is trying to install a new F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, dedicated to turning the nation’s premier law enforcement agency upside down.

....Over a few days, the American justice system was buffeted by raw exercises of power from the current Democratic president and the incoming Republican president. Now, current and former officials as well as legal experts say they are worried about whether the post-Watergate tradition that criminal investigations remain largely outside the reach of political leaders can survive an era in which the system is engulfed by partisanship.

You've got to be kidding. Dodgy pardons, whatever their crassness, have been part of politics forever and do nothing to subvert the Justice Department. Trump, by contrast, has literally promised to take over both DOJ and the FBI and bend them to his personal will in order to take revenge on his enemies. There is nothing even remotely comparable about these two things.

And that's not even counting the fact that Trump pardoned a dozen Republican cronies during his first term and nobody thought it was the end of the world.

C'mon, man.

A friend and I were discussing California's infamous high-speed rail to nowhere today, wondering why Gov. Gavin Newsom continues to support this boondoggle. The answer turns out to be fairly simple:

After passing in 2008 by a margin of 53-47%, the project has remained moderately popular. In fact, it's gained a bit of popularity: Even after excluding the latest poll, which seems like a bit of an outlier, it's trended up over the past decade. And support is far higher among Democrats, which explains why a Democratic governor continues to back it.

The 2022 poll is the most recent I could find. PPIC got bored with the question after 2020 and hasn't polled it since.

Anyway, we've spent $11 billion so far and continue to build the 200-mile segment between the bustling metropolises of Bakersfield and Merced. However, even this will require another $20 billion or so, and no one has a clue where the money will come from. Nevertheless, we have persisted.

Just to keep everyone up to date, here's what Donald Trump's scam social media company looks like a few weeks after the election:

There was a big spike for some reason at the end of October, but it only lasted a few days. Aside from that, DJT stock has been hovering around $30 for a month and a half.

Why? That's still a mystery since the company continues to have virtually no revenue and no real prospects of ever getting any. But the faithful keep the faith regardless.

This is a Julia butterfly at the Schmetterling Haus in Vienna.