James' World 2

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In 1953, at the dawn of modern computing, Nils Aall Barricelli played God. Clutching a deck of playing cards in one hand and a stack of punched cards in the other, Barricelli hovered over one of the world’s earliest and most influential computers, the IAS machine, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. During the day the computer was used to make weather forecasting calculations; at night it was commandeered by the Los Alamos group to calculate ballistics for nuclear weaponry. Barricelli, a maverick mathematician, part Italian and part Norwegian, had finagled time on the computer to model the origins and evolution of life.

Inside a simple red brick building at the northern corner of the Institute’s wooded wilds, Barricelli ran models of evolution on a digital computer. His artificial universes, which he fed with numbers drawn from shuffled playing cards, teemed with creatures of code—morphing, mutating, melting, maintaining. He created laws that determined, independent of any foreknowledge on his part, which assemblages of binary digits lived, which died, and which adapted. As he put it in a 1961 paper, in which he speculated on the prospects and conditions for life on other planets, “The author has developed numerical organisms, with properties startlingly similar to living organisms, in the memory of a high-speed computer.” For these coded critters, Barricelli became a maker of worlds.

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My favorite book of 2018 was Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier’s The Enigma of Reason. I covered it in my book club as a podcast, but the ideas are so interesting that I wanted to take a second chance to explain them.

The basic puzzle is this:

1. If reason is so useful, why do human beings seem to be the only animals to possess it? Surely, a lion who had excellent reasoning abilities would catch more gazelles? Yet human beings seem to be alone in the ability to reason about things.

2. If reason is so powerful, why are we so bad at it? Why do we have tons of cognitive biases? Reasoned thinking is supposed to be good, but we seem to use it fairly little as a species.

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Ivan Afonso checked his computer one last time before picking up the phone. It was April 2020, and like most of Spain, Afonso was stuck at home under a strict Covid lockdown. But his mind was in the mountains.

An environmental scientist, Afonso also served as head of the environmental division in the Aran Valley, a tiny area of the Pyrenees mountain range that forms a dent along Spain’s border with France. For the past three years, his duties had included monitoring the movements of Cachou, a 6-year-old, 130-kilo (287-pound) brown bear. The bear was a local celebrity, one of the few males born in the wild in the Pyrenees and living proof that conservationists’ efforts to rejuvenate the region’s struggling brown bear colony were working.

The task had been a nightmare from the start. Cachou was young and fiery, and—to the dismay of conservationists and farmers—prone to wreaking havoc. Like most bears, Cachou had a sweet tooth. He’d started with assaulting bee farms, but by 2019, he’d learned to hunt horses many times his size. Eventually, authorities put a tracker on him, but even that didn’t work. At one point he was blamed for four attacks within two weeks.

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Eric Richins looked out from his pontoon boat to the shallows on the lake’s western edge. He squinted and paused as if he had come upon a foreign shore. For the first time in a career navigating the waters of the American West, he didn’t know where he was.

“I could have sworn I was here just six weeks ago catching smallmouth and bigmouth bass,” said the 35-year-old fisherman who runs tours on this 247-square-mile basin where the Colorado River meets the Hoover Dam to form the nation’s largest reservoir.

He pointed ahead to what looked like dozens of tiny steps made from successive layers of dried mud now covered in tall grass and weeds — the effect of rapidly creeping vegetation over a shoreline that has been dropping by nearly a foot a week.

“Now it looks like a lawn. I knew the drought was bad. I didn’t realize it was this bad,” he said. “This place is unrecognizable.”

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Lake Mead

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The weather, often derided as a mundane conversation topic of last resort, has actually been a prolific source of entertainment. Natural disasters drive big-budget blockbusters. Solar power fuels Lorde’s latest single. Double rainbows produced a lasting meme. But is the weather worthy of an entire streaming service?

Fox certainly thinks so. This fall, the network is set to launch Fox Weather, a platform for meteorology programming 24/7, rain or shine.* So does the Weather Channel, which is starting a streaming service it hopes will have 30 million subscribers by 2026—a far cry from Netflix’s more than 200 million subscribers, but on par with smaller streamers such as HBO Max and Hulu. According to The New York Times, these impending launches have led to bidding wars over star TV meteorologists, the building of posh new high-tech studios, and debates over the potential influence on public opinion: The prospect of Fox Weather is already worrying many, given the network’s history of climate-change denial.

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H. Armstrong Roberts / ClassicStock / Getty; Josh Edelson / AFP /Getty; The Atlantic

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