There's a letter in Science today from a bunch of well known remote sensing researchers that make the unusual point that modern satellite resolution is getting too good to be accurate for forest carbon estimation. The lead author Laura Duncanson is a remote sensing scientist at Maryland who works on the incredible GEDI instrument on the International Space Station.

The terms carbon credits and carbon offsets are often used interchangeably, but are in fact two distinct concepts. I've spent a nice Sunday morning reading up on some recent articles that Bhaskar Vira sent me which introduce a third term, known as "carbon contributions" . Rather than this adding confusion, I found it helped me clarify my own thoughts on the matter, which I note down here in draft form.

Youko Marian Horiuchi Beltrán, DR © Ilustración digital Ciudad de México, octubre 2021 Sitio de la autora Redes sociales de la artista Instagram Esta es una reproducción digital, con fines de divulgación, de una obra original proporcionada por su autor o propietario. Todos los derechos están reservados por la artista.

Any list of 100 best anything is going to be riddled with biases, flaws and omissions, but here’s a list of albums you might enjoy listening to from 100best.music.apple.com.

Derek Lowe tells the story of “carbyne”, a potential further allotrope of carbon, comprising linear chains of carbon atoms, C-C≡C-C≡C-C. Whether such a molecule can exist on its own has long been the the topic of speculation. Now a report has appeared of a “pseudocarbyne”, stabilised by gold atoms.

Matt Boyd with Dr Simon Blouin On 26 February 2025 Islands for the Future of Humanity will host a Webinar and international panel discussion on Managing the Risk of Catastrophic Electricity Failure in New Zealand. Ahead of this event Matt Boyd talks with Dr Simon Blouin about his research on catastrophic electricity loss, supply chain, and food security.

Srinivasan Keshav posted a link to this excellent deepdive by Prasad Raje of Udemy into the advances that DeepSeek R1 has made from a perspective of the core technology.

Affordable digitisation of insect collections using photogrammetry This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a Cambridge Computer Science Part III or MPhil project, and is currently being worked on by Beatrice Spence, Arissa-Elena Rotunjanu and Anna Yiu. It is co-supervised with Tiffany Ki and Edgar Turner.

Using computational SSDs for vector databases This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a Cambridge Computer Science Part III or MPhil project, and is available for being worked on. It may be co-supervised with Sadiq Jaffer. Large pre-trained models can be used to embed media/documents into concise vector representations with the property that vectors that are "close" to each other are semantically related.

Here I was, super happy with my return to blogging in 2024. I wasn't crazy prolific or anything, but I did manage to post something every month except for April. What happened in April? Kind of a lot. But nothing compared with January. Someday I hope to have the time and space necessary to write about at least part of it, but that day is not today.

In this essay, I take a deep dive into the history of American plutocracy and its conspicuously Republican roots.

The post Partisan Politics and the Road to Plutocracy appeared first on Economics from the Top Down.