The commander of Nasa's next mission to the Moon said that he and his crew would see things that no human has ever seen. Reid Wiseman told a news conference that it was likely that his spacecraft would fly over large areas of the Moon that previous Apollo missions had never mapped. Yesterday, Nasa announced it hoped it would be able to launch the first crewed Moon mission in 50 years as early as February 2026 . Mission specialist Christina Koch explained that the astronauts would be able to study the lunar surface in exquisite detail for a full three hours. Believe it or not, human eyes are one of the best scientific instruments that we have, she said.

The AI data center also promises to transform the state's energy future. Stretching in length for more than a mile, it will be Meta's largest in the world, and it will have an enormous appetite for electricity, requiring two gigawatts for computation alone (the electricity for cooling and other building needs will add to that). When it's up and running, it will be the equivalent of suddenly adding a decent-size city to the region's grid--one that never sleeps and needs a steady, uninterrupted flow of electricity. To power the data center, Entergy aims to spend 3.2 billion to build three large natural-gas power plants with a total capacity of 2.3 gigawatts and upgrade the grid to accommodate the huge jump in anticipated demand. In its filing to the state's power regulatory agency, Entergy acknowledged that natural-gas plants "emit significant amounts of CO2" but said the energy source was the only affordable choice given the need to quickly meet the 24-7 electricity demand from the huge data center.

Please read it and send me comments, objections, etc. 1) Victor [Yu] has assigned certainty factors to his rules based on the relative strengths of the evidence in these rules. While trying to find a numerical scale that would work as he wanted it to with the system's 0.2 cutoff and combining functions, he had to adjust certainty factors of various rules. Now that this scale has been established, however, he assigns certainty factors using this scale, and does NOT adjust certainty factors of rules if he doesn't like the system's performance. Furthermore, he does NO combinatorial analysis before determining what CF to use; he is satisfied that using the scale he has devised, the system's combining function, and the 0.2 cutoff, the program will arrive at the right results for any combination of factors, and if it doesn't, he looks for missing information to add. 2) Assuming that the parameters IDENT and COVERFOR are disambiguated in Victor's set of rules, Ted [Shortliffe] believes the CF's that Victor uses in his rules, and approves of the idea of using a cutoff for COVERFOR since this is what we've been doing with bacteremia (since it is a binary decision, a cutoff makes sense for COVERFOR). Furthermore, this is quite similar to what clinicians do: they accumulate lots of small bits of clinical evidence, then decide if the total is enough to make them cover [or a particular organism--independent of what the microbiological evidence suggests.