As the car with the blacked-out windows came to a halt in a sidestreet near Tübingen’s botanical gardens, keen-eyed passersby may have noticed something unusual about its number plate. In Germany, the first few letters usually denote the municipality where a vehicle is registered. The letter Y, however, is reserved for members of the armed forces.
Military men are a rare, not to say unwelcome, sight in Tübingen. A picturesque 15th-century university town that brought forth great German minds including the philosopher Hegel and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, it is also a modern stronghold of the German Green party, thanks to its left-leaning academic population. In 2018, there was growing resistance on campus against plans to establish Europe’s leading artificial intelligence research hub in the surrounding area: the involvement of arms manufacturers in Tübingen’s “cyber valley”, argued students who occupied a lecture hall that year, brought shame to the university’s intellectual tradition.
Yet the two high-ranking officials in field-grey Bundeswehr uniforms who stepped out of the Y-plated vehicle on 1 February 2018 had traveled into hostile territory to shake hands on a collaboration with academia, the like of which the world had never seen before.
The name of the initiative was Project Cassandra: for the next two years, university researchers would use their expertise to help the German defense ministry predict the future.
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Jürgen Wertheimer, who set up Project Cassandra: ‘Writers operate on a plane that is both objective and subjective.’ Photograph: Dominik Gigler/The Guardian
Like many people during COVID, I reevaluated what I really want my quality of life to be. I’ve lived in big cities making a high salary, but I’m single and have been intimidated by homeownership only having one income source (my job).
I’m 52, a renter, and have around $230,000 in retirement, brokerage, and savings accounts. I pared back my lifestyle, and I’m now saving $5,000 a month to play a bit of catch-up. I’ve been advised to consider real estate as part of my investment strategy. I have little debt beyond a car note ($300 a month) and a 750 credit score. Should I buy a home or invest in a property like a condo near a resort?
I am yearning for a more stable lifestyle as I age, and my family all own homes, so they are pressuring me to buy something near them in a lower-cost market. With remote working, this is now a feasible option. I would look at a 15- or a 20-year mortgage either way given my age.
Sincerely,
Too old to buy?
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Buying a home later in life involves different calculations. Getty Images
Located in Costa Rica’s southeastern Talmanca region is the large Gandoca-Manzanillo Refuge, a collection of rainforest and wetland habitat complete with a coral reef.At 23,348 total acres (9,450 ha), this vast refuge begins south of Punta Uva-3 miles south of Puerto Viejo-until it runs into the Sixaola River at the Panamanian border. Besides Cahuita, this park is the only other place in the country with a coral reef.
The giant tech companies with their power-hungry, football-field-size data centers are not the environmental villains they are sometimes portrayed to be on social media and elsewhere.
Shutting off your Zoom camera or throttling your Netflix service to lower-definition viewing does not yield a big saving in energy use, contrary to what some people have claimed.
Even the predicted environmental impact of Bitcoin, which does require lots of computing firepower, has been considerably exaggerated by some researchers.
Those are the conclusions of a new analysis by Jonathan Koomey and Eric Masanet, two leading scientists in the field of technology, energy use and the environment. Both are former researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Mr. Koomey is now an independent analyst, and Mr. Masanet is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. (Mr. Masanet receives research funding from Amazon.)
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An analysis published on Thursday suggests technology is not an environmental villain. One of the authors is Eric Masanet, a former researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.Credit…Erica Urech for The New York Times
The Delta variant, the highly transmissible version of the coronavirus that now makes up almost all new cases in the United States, continues to drive a surge throughout the country, with average new cases topping 100,000 for the past week.
Some of those infections have been reported in fully vaccinated people in so-called breakthrough cases. As the sheer number of those vaccinated increases, so will the raw number of breakthrough cases, especially with the Delta variant circulating. But experts say breakthrough cases do not mean the vaccine is ineffective.
The Delta variant’s dominance is new enough that authoritative data does not yet exist, but the available data shows that unvaccinated people are still much more likely to contract Covid-19 and far more likely to experience symptomatic disease, while vaccines drastically reduce the risk of hospitalization and death from the virus.
The Brecon Beacons National Park is one of three national parks in Wales and is centered on the Brecon Beacons range of hills in southern Wales. It includes the Black Mountain in the west, Fforest Fawr (Great Forest) and the Brecon Beacons in the center, and the Black Mountains in the east.
The Brecon Beacons National Park was established in 1957, the third of the three Welsh parks after Snowdonia in 1951, and the Pembrokeshire Coast in 1952. It stretches from Llandeilo in the west to Hay-on-Wye in the northeast and Pontypool in the southeast, covering 519 square miles (1,340 km2) and encompassing four main regions – the Black Mountain in the west, reaching 802 meters (2631 feet) at Fan Brycheiniog, Fforest Fawr and the Brecon Beacons in the center, including the highest summit in the park and in South Wales at Pen y Fan 886 meters (2,907 feet) and the confusingly named Black Mountains in the east, where the highest point is Waun Fach 811 meters (2,661 feet). The western half gained European and global status in 2005 as Fforest Fawr Geopark. This includes the Black Mountain, the historic extent of Fforest Fawr, and much of the Brecon Beacons and surrounding lowlands.
The Black Mountains in the east are clearly separated from the central Beacons by the Usk valley between Brecon and Abergavenny. The other three regions form a continuous massif of high ground above 300 meters (1000′), and the divisions are less clear; the A470 road forms the approximate boundary between the central Beacons and Fforest Fawr, while a minor road from Sennybridge to Ystradgynlais divides Fforest Fawr from the Black Mountain range to the west. Wikipedia
Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying objects — traffic lights, staircases, palm trees, and buses — just so I can finish a web search. I also don’t like being forced to donate free labor to AI companies to help train their visual-recognition systems.
But a while ago, while numbly clicking on grainy images of fire hydrants, I was struck by another reason:
The images are deeply, overwhelmingly depressing.
CAPTCHA images are never joyful vistas of human activity, full of Whitmanesque vigor. No, they’re blurry, anonymous landscapes that possess positively Soviet anomie.
Even iPhone users with nothing to hide could be forgiven for being a little creeped out that Apple will scan their photos and see if they match existing databases of known illegal pornographic images. Privacy experts called the idea a potential back door for governments to request or demand scans for other images or files. Some of Apple’s own employees are reportedly pushing back on the idea.
It’s a good indication that things are headed in the wrong direction when your company’s anti-child-pornography initiative gets panned.
A major reason for the failure of Apple’s defense is that the photo-scanning program confirms a fear many users already harbor: Personal data, even the most sensitive, is effectively out of users’ control, accessible at the flip of a switch.
Apple says, relentlessly, that privacy is the central feature of its iPhones. But as the photo scanning demonstrates, that’s true only until the company changes its mind about its policies.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Jürgen Wertheimer, who set up Project Cassandra: ‘Writers operate on a plane that is both objective and subjective.’ Photograph: Dominik Gigler/The Guardian
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James' World 2 