The quantities of water and salt involved are not on human scales.

It's hard to overstate how bad it would be. Iceland doesn't just get glaciated in ice ages, it gets catastrophically glaciated. As in "mass kills almost all of our plant species". That's why there's currently no native conifers even though there used to be, for example - virtually the whole island ends up under an extremely thick sheet of ice.

Of course, a shorter localized ice age, in an otherwise warming world, isn't as bad as a Milankovitch Cycle ice age. But it'd be pretty awful for us. Right now, we're benefiting from a warming world (though losing our glaciers and regularly getting annoying new insect species which previously couldn't survive here :P). Our growing reason is so short, and the difference between our winter and summer temperatures so small, that even a small amount of warming drastically lengthens our growing season, and makes a vast difference to how well things can grow in it.

Palm trees kinda grow in Iceland ;) I had a windmill palm (in an area with geothermal-heated soil) last for like 4 years, though it slowly declined each winter. You can keep them alive by covering them with Christmas lights and then a blanket.

It does get overplayed though, with people acting like there was no reason to name Iceland "Ísland" and no reason to name Greenland "Grænland". There's plenty of ice here (much of the middle of the country doesn't melt until quite late in the year, and settlers approaching from the south and east sailed past the huge terminal glaciers of Vatnajökull), and the places that were settled in Greenland weren't all that different from e.g. Vestfir(th)ir. Grænland was chosen as a name to advertise it, but it's not like it was some sort of lie - most new settlements, even random villages wherever you are, are generally given pleasing names to try to attract people.

Also, Iceland got its name due to Flóki "Raven" Vilgerðarson, the viking-discoverer of Iceland (though the Irish already knew of Iceland). He had a clever trick to find islands, which was having ravens (land birds) on his boat; they'd fly up, look for land, and if they spotted it, beeline for it, but otherwise had no choice but to return to the boat. Ravens are quite large, black birds and thus easily visible to track from a boat. Anyway, his first winter at Bar(th)arströnd was abnormally cold, and there was sea ice visible offshore (something quite rare in Iceland), so he chose the name "Ísland".

It's "ís" (accented), and is pronounced "eece" :) "Eece-land" (land said like with a British accent, not an American one)

Fun fact: while ís does indeed mean "ice", it's not the colloquial word for ice - like, if you want ice at a restaurant, you ask for "klaki" (people sometimes jokingly refer to being in Iceland as "á klakanum" ("on the ice" ;) ). "Ís" these days is used as short for "rjómaís", lit. "cream-ice", aka ice cream - if you ask for "ís" at a restaurant, you'll get ice cream.

So in modern parliance, the country is "Ice Cream Land". ;) (Honestly, our ice cream is really good here - try the bilberry ice cream at Erpssta(th)ir for example :) )

Do you think it is interesting that the century during which an ice age was ending is the one used as a baseline for climate analysis?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of regional cooling, particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region.[2] It was not a true ice age of global extent.[3] "

Literally right at the top of the article.

Also, for the record, there is no single "baseline timeperiod for climate analysis".

It would drastically affect most of Northern Europe, also the Eastern US. But Iceland would probably be the most seriously affected. Greenland might refreeze, I believe that the "little ice age" was responsible for the failure of the Norse Colony on the shores of Greenland.

If you read to "popular science news", you'll get a(n oversimplified) version of the news. More exact sources are available, often all the way to the raw data. But they take more effort to read.

You seem to think all robots are the same. We've got LOTS of different kinds of robots, from robot pencil sharpeners on up. We've got robot forklifts, robot snakes, robot airplanes, etc. Humanoid robots are just another kind, but a kind that's potentially quite useful in environments shaped for humans to operate in.

Whatever, it correct anyway. The press tends to be xenophobic. They'll criticize France or Canada just as readily, though less fervently. For some reason they tend to go easy on Mexico.

You;re assuming they care whether it "musician" is an AI or not. Usually they won't. Think of it as "mood music"...it's purpose is to establish or reinforce a particular mood.

Actually, it doesn't matter much whether the "musician" can feel the emotion or not...if it did jukeboxes would never have been a thing. What matters is that it establishes a particular mood in the listeners, and note that that was a plural.

But isn't that's what popular music is reported to be already? If only a formula can win, then an AI should be able to do it.

FWIW, my tastes are "folk music" and sometimes "filk music". That's much less a formula, but possibly only because the sample size is small.

And at that point, they will be worthless.

If those are your only requirements, even the cheapest Kindle Fire is probably good enough.

GPU are retargetable (to their original use as graphic processors), but I'm not sure the same is true of TPUs and the other more specialized varieties.