On Jan. 20, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to “Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” calling for a return to neoclassical architecture in federal construction. To some, this may seem like mere aesthetic preference. But a look back at the history of American architecture reveals that there is a lot more to modern art than meets the eye.  Trump’s order is a rebuke of the architectural mediocrity that has overtaken our nation’s capital. It draws a line in the sand: Neoclassical architecture, meant to reflect the ancient ideals of symmetry and proportion, should be the default for our civic spaces—as opposed to the soulless glass and concrete blocks of “brutalism” that permeate Washington today.  Neoclassical architecture is not outdated; it is timeless, rooted in the principles of harmony, proportion, and human scale. It endures because it reflects the things we inherently long for: order, dignity, meaning. In our increasingly fragmented age, it reconnects us with something permanent. Beauty is not a luxury, but a civic necessity.  The mere title of Trump’s order invokes the question: When did we shift from the neoclassical to the progressive style of modern art?  To answer this question, architectural historians point to the early 20th century and the trio of modernism’s founding fathers: Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. Their sleek geometric boxes of glass and steel became synonymous with “progress.” But their vision didn’t arise in a vacuum. It was the culmination of a deeper philosophical shift long in the making. The Industrial Revolution, beginning in 18th-century Britain and arriving in the U.S. by the 19th century, brought new materials—iron, steel, and, eventually, reinforced concrete—that allowed buildings to rise higher and span wider. Even as late as the mid-19th century, these innovations were dressed in traditional forms: Gothic facades, neoclassical orders, familiar silhouettes. Function had not yet eclipsed form.   Then came London’s Crystal Palace in 1851, a revelation in cast iron and glass. Its vast transparency and towering scale stunned the world. Traditional columns and ornamentation were gone. Instead, it inverted the rules of classicism, appearing top-heavy and weightless, a cathedral of industry.   In the following decades, engineers and architects, specifically in America, embraced steel-frame construction. The 1880s post-Chicago fire building boom made clear that the future belonged to those who could build fast, tall, and efficiently. Aesthetic considerations became secondary.   Then, the ideology arrived. In 1896, American architect Louis Sullivan famously declared that “form follows function,” a maxim that reverberated across continents. Walter Gropius took it to heart when he founded the Bauhaus School in 1919. Le Corbusier followed by founding L’Esprit Nouveau, a magazine declaring ornament a “crime” and tradition a “shackle.” Architecture, once the art of a building, became a theory of abstraction. At its core, modernism rejects inherited wisdom, seeking to sever architecture from the past—and from the people. The real turning point came after World War II, when cities around the globe faced an urgent need to rebuild. Modernism offered simplicity, affordability, and speed. Governments embraced it through zoning, permits, and other means. Universities institutionalized it. Public housing projects adopted its uniformity. By the 1960s, American urban skylines were overtaken by glass monoliths and concrete bunkers.  Sequentially, the suburb was born. Real estate engineer William Levitt pioneered a model for mass-producing homes which became the blueprint for postwar domestic life: standardized, affordable, and automobile-oriented. The goal was scale, and soul was lost.  Many of our cities today, especially Washington, are speckled with boxy, concrete buildings of brutalism. The architectural degradation can be seen on a short walk around Capitol Hill. At the top of the Hill, just past the Capitol building, sits the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. Finished at the height of the Gilded Era in 1897, that building provides a magnificent example of the Beaux-Arts style, adorned with reminders of our history and leading literary and philosophical figures.  As you descend the Hill, you’ll see the three U.S. House office buildings in order of construction, which visually represent the shift from neoclassical to modernist architecture.  Then, finally, you’ll be confronted with the brutalist Department of Health and Human Services building. These two bookend buildings—the Jefferson Building and the HHS building—were opened and dedicated only 80 years apart.  Standing there, on the south corner of the Capitol, I find myself afraid we have taken for granted the beauty of the ancient, time-tested styles of old. But thankfully, the American people are beginning to realize this as well. We’re rediscovering what earlier generations took for granted – architecture is more than utility. It shapes how we feel and how we live. Take Winston Churchill’s word for it: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”  Trump’s executive order may not reverse a century of architectural ideology overnight. But it marks a turning point—a moment to ask what kind of nation we want to be. The answer? We want to be the one that we were designed to be and the one that we want to leave behind.  America’s environment should reflect its ideals, not reject its heritage. Perhaps, with the stroke of a pen, we’ve taken the first step toward building beautifully once again.  The post Making America Great Means Making Buildings Beautiful appeared first on The Daily Signal.

This paleoclimatic time capsule is 1.5 million years old, making it the oldest continuous ice sample we have to date.

The tiny little red dot is us.

A new study has found that scientists have misinterpreted data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which found that Earth-sized planets are actually larger. Scientists have reanalyzed data from the TESS space telescope, which is searching for planets outside the solar system. It turned out that nearly 200 planets that were considered similar in size to Earth look different. This may affect the search for extraterrestrial life. Although some of these worlds may be large ocean planets. But this does not mean that there are conditions for life to emerge there. The study was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, writes Space. The TESS space telescope detects planets using the transit method. When a planet flies in front of a star, the brightness of the star decreases and the planet creates a shadow. Scientists say that the planet’s shadow is measured and thus an idea of its size can be obtained. Thanks to the light of the star that is reflected from the planet, scientists can conclude about the composition of this world. Scientists have re-analyzed data on planets that have a similar composition to Earth, as well as a size. But it turns out that light from nearby stars can distort the TESS data, based on which scientists draw conclusions about the size of a planet. The study showed that in most cases, planets that were thought to be similar in size to Earth are actually larger than our planet. Astronomers say that, judging by the new data, Earth-like planets are less common in our galaxy than previously thought. Scientists believe that previously thought to be Earth-like worlds may be either gas giants, such as Neptune and Uranus, or large ocean planets or hycians. The latter have a composition similar to Earth, and water is known to be the basis for life. But it is not known for sure whether the oceans covering the entire rocky planet have all the conditions for life to emerge. Scientists say the new discovery could impact the search for potential extraterrestrial life, as the number of habitable planets is smaller than previously thought. On the other hand, scientists are currently debating how common the life-supporting Geekeans are. Now scientists are set to conduct a new study of planets previously thought to be unsuitable for life due to their size. They may also turn out to be a completely different size. The post Are We Alone? Fewer Earth-Sized Planets Than Thought, Says New Research appeared first on Anomalien.com.

Despite a vocal commitment to safety and public good – seemingly more genuine than other top-level players in the AI sector – Anthropic keeps coming under legal fire. Already, the leading AI firm has been caught red-handed pirating thousands of copyrighted books and, in a separate-but-related incident, destroying millions of physical books used to train its AI models. Further court proceedings later this year will determine exact fines for the violation, potentially $100,000 per incident.It matters, not just for the sake of those authors, but because Anthropic is one of the main four or five companies positioned to make decisive plays with national consequences over the next 12 months and beyond. It is tier-one, pushing an upper-echelon valuation, and like too many companies in the space, its palliative verbiage on ethical considerations hasn’t translated into action.Anthropic's LLM was caught faking data and ratting on perceived user 'wrongdoing,' and it even resorted to user blackmail.Led by the Amodei siblings, Dario and Daniela, Anthropic emerged out of the high-profile breakup of OpenAI and has gone on to simultaneously rake in massive heaps of cash based on a rather overweening advertising and PR focus on human safety and “safe AI.” The “public benefit” organization strategy does indeed seem to retain some of the quasi-nonprofit and public-good corporate structuring ethos carried over from Musk’s original OpenAI vision. Nonetheless, when we consider we’re dealing with potentially the most powerful and transformative (destructive?) technologies yet imagined, the company’s early track record leaves a bit to be desired. From safety to blackmailAnthropic strategy has targeted enterprise and B2B, and along the way, it has secured an impressive set of tech-heavy allies and business partners, including Google and Amazon Web Services. The company of “safety, steerability, and interpretability” may have larger designs that include clawing back, or perhaps sharing, some of Palantir’s government market share. In June of this year, its Claude Gov product was launched through the Fed Start program in a process involving both Palantir and Google Public Sector. Anthropic product quality and market penetration are strong. The flagship, Claude, is a set of large language models in direct competition with Grok, Chat-GPT, and Gemini. Comprised of Claude 3 Opus, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Haiku, the whole package is underwritten (in theory) by so-called Constitutional AI, which is essentially an experimental training method to guide software toward explicit rules – as opposed to relying solely on human feedback or implicit reward systems, which have been used by other AI organizations with equally mixed results. Also on offer are Artifacts, a coding assistant; Computer Use, a sort of bridge between Claude models and physical desktops; and AI Fluency Framework, which purports to be an educational initiative for human users of AI. Various sub-variants and custom creations seem to have been built for the aforementioned partnerships, as well. In terms of missteps and the usual upheaval we see in the AI industry, Anthropic’s Constitutional AI, while designed to “embed” ethical guidelines and minimize toxic output, hasn’t managed to screen out the toxic and ethically ambiguous. In a recent episode, when placed in fictional settings for tests, Anthropic's LLM was caught faking data and ratting on perceived user “wrongdoing,” and it even resorted somehow to user blackmail as it scrambled to locate “right and wrong.” RELATED: Tech elites warn ‘reality itself’ may not survive the AI revolution sankai via iStock/Getty ImagesOne wonders if this sort of acting out, as is often seen with children, is somehow related to those very restrictions placed into an LLM to restrict action. If the LLM by nature cannot ever grasp embodied human morality, why pretend otherwise, especially when misbehavior is the result? In and out of courtAnthropic has faced numerous legal challenges for its commandeering of intellectual property and copyrighted material. In 2023, Universal Music and other publishers sued Anthropic for allegedly infringing copyright of song lyrics while training Claude. A March ruling sided with Anthropic. This year saw another lawsuit from Reddit wherein it was alleged Anthropic had “scraped the site upwards of 100,000 times.” In another illustrative episode, the Anthropic legal team was caught out in court when it was determined that a Claude-derived citation deployed to bolster the company’s copyright defense was fake — it was rather the product of so-called “AI hallucination,” a phenomenon whereby an LLM simply invests, fabricates, or alters material for evidently unknown reasons. It’s all, as the kids say, not a good look. With a valuation upwards of $60 billion, why not work out a bulk purchase deal with distributors?Most curious and potentially dangerous (aside from the insistence on ethics as the correct framing for an LLM that lacks human morality or spirituality), is the interwoven nature of the Anthropic funding structure – which suggests mixed economic objectives may quickly override any high-minded claims of human-first product. Amazon ($8 billion), Google ($2 to $3 billion), and a host of other Silicon Valley venture firms whose allocations aren’t entirely transparent are all committed. To its credit, Anthropic has made the humiliating results of its hallucinating AI public and open to comment, which lends credence to its stated principles. Still, some have suggested this rather overly attentive response may be little more than advertising for the company’s favorite virtues. It’s well known that Anthropic is among the more woke-friendly AI companies on the block – a recipe for a quasi-spiritural form of censorship-driven safetyism, where the AI treats the user with kid gloves while the humans in the C-suite run amok.

By doing so, Trump can position himself not only as a corrector of Biden’s failure but as a defender of American honor and global credibility.

Bunker Hill, a sundered church, and Patriot graves convey the Revolution’s tumult, plus lessons in Puritan design.

There’s probably no prosecutable federal case, since the statute of limitations has expired.

Until the university decides to take on viewpoint diversity seriously, the faculty’s concerns about external pressure will continue to ring hollow.

There was no reason for the feds to pour good money after bad supporting a preposterous project that doesn’t have any national significance.