Articles from THE BLOT REPORT
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The tide is rising
Back at the end of October 2017, within the first year of starting this blog, I wrote a piece on how climate change deniers were trying to tell people that climate scientists are exaggerating the amount of sea-level rise. At that point, the rate of global mean sea-level (GMSL) rise was 3.3 +/- 0.4mm per annum and the trend was roughly linear1.
Dead wrong
After mucking about with ChatGPT some days ago for a piece I wrote about the origin of the myth of opals being unlucky1, I decided to have a crack at asking some more detailed geological questions. One of the first was about the Wiso Basin. This sedimentary basin underlies an area of about 160,000 sq km in the central western Northern Territory, to the west and southwest of the town of Tennant Creek.
Mass extinctions and temperature
I missed a paper from a couple of years ago; but it is a bit disturbing nonetheless. It deals with the relationship between extinctions and the past heating of the planet1.
The opal myth
In a piece I wrote almost two weeks ago on the saving of the Trove online resource, I mentioned that I was using it to look up newspaper and magazine articles to check the text of a manuscript I was editing1. That manuscript was on the development of the opal industry in Queensland, and was all done and dusted last week. However, now I am editing a similar, longer manuscript on the development of the opal industry in New South Wales.
Having a chat
ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool driven by Artificial Intelligence that allows a human to have human-like conversations and much more with the “chatbot”. The language model can answer questions and assist you with tasks like composing emails, essays, and code. Usage is currently open to the public free of charge because ChatGPT is in its research and feedback-collection phase. Since February 1st, 2023, there is also a paid subscription version called ChatGPT Plus1.
Many knew this was coming
Ever since Peter Dutton kept rabbiting on about needing more detail on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament1, many know he has been simply looking for an excuse to oppose the Voice after the National Party decided to oppose it, despite some members indicating they will support it2.
Saving Trove
I have just finished editing a manuscript on the development of the Opal industry in Queensland and apart from annual reports from the state’s Mines Department, much of the content came from newspaper and magazine articles, all of which were retrieved from Trove, which is operated by the National Library of Australia (NLA)1.