Veronika Wild

  This is a little experiment - ChatGPT tells me it can now do illustrations too - so here it is. I was telling it that I am not sure if there's any point writing the post below. I don't have a dog and I'm not as pretty as that, but hey that's probably the sort of dog I would have - I am a big fan of border collies, and the grey jumper is exactly right. Should I be worried that it knows me too well? Wonder how many other people use AI as a confessional?  I'm in wombat mode. Have been sick all week. My head feels like cottonwool, so the tax isn't done, the blog post I was going to do isn't finished and it's honestly hard to know where to procrastinate first. I've also lost a lot of readers. It could just be that you don't like what I have been writing lately, that the posts are just much too long and complicated or that I've offended too many people over the last couple of weeks.  Perhaps one should not bite the hand of those who enable ...

  -Image by Alfred Derks from Pixabay   Countering climate denialism requires taking on right-wing populism. Here’s how Richard Calland , University of Cape Town History may in due course record 2019 as the year in which the penny finally dropped about the climate emergency humanity faces. A sense of urgency was triggered last year by both Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg’s courage in challenging world leaders to take the crisis seriously , and the apocalyptic fires that engulfed large parts of Australia recently. Increasingly, there is an understanding that the climate emergency is not an environmental problem. It has grave ecological implications, but it’s a human development issue above all. And, it has profound implications for technology and infrastructure, for the world of investment and finance, and for global security. To make sense of these challenges and work towards solutions, it is necessary to understand these links, tensions a...

  -Image by Copilot If cables are the arteries of the Information Economy upon which we are ever more dependent, then Data Centres are the brains and nerve centres behind it. A data centre is a physical building or group of buildings which house large numbers of computers, servers, storage systems and networking equipment which store, process and distribute digital information. They are the superstructure of the internet and cloud computing and handle everything from websites, email, streaming services, banking transactions and artificial intelligence (AI), to government records and company data.  They also face much the same challenges as other infrastructure in a changing climate -an increasing number of adverse weather events – excessive heat, flooding, more severe storms and wildfires and so on, for which the remedies remain much the same. Because we have covered this quite a bit in previous posts, this one will be not so much about how climate change will affect ...