“These simulation engines and the data and everything that goes into them are incredibly important for us to act in these complex environments when it’s not just one crisis but it’s a set of compounding crises,”

“Destination Earth,” will draw on a host of environmental, socioeconomic and satellite data to develop digital “twins” of the planet that aim to help policymakers — and eventually the public — better understand and respond to rising temperatures.

GANs are deep learning models that use two neural networks working against each other—a generator that creates synthetic data, and a discriminator that distinguishes between real and synthetic data—to generate synthetic images that are almost indistinguishable from real ones. GANs are popular for generating images and videos, including deepfakes.

I recently learned that uppercase and lowercase letters got their names from actual wooden cases of lead that were used by compositors for printing.

It began as a term from French railroad engineering referring to the layers of material that go beneath (“infra”) the tracks. Its meaning expanded to include roads, bridges, sewers and power lines, and very recently expanded again to include people, specifically caregivers, as in this fact sheet from the Biden White House

I.C.E. is short for internal combustion engine, a modifier that was superfluous until electric cars came on the scene.

It refers simply to the physical world, where we have tangible bodies made of … meat. “Meatspace” is a word that didn’t need to exist until the invention of cyberspace. Technological progress gives us a new perspective on things we once took for granted, in this case reality itself.