Three Books for a More Honest View of Mother

Life Among the Savages, Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson, author of one of the most wonderful novels of all time, The Haunting of Hill House, and of the short story The Lottery, also wrote two charming autobiographical (自传的) novels about raising her four children in a farmhouse in rural Vermont. In my favorite, Life Among the Savages, Jackson’s humor is as smart as her horror is scaring and her children seem never to inspire in her anything worse than a fond anger.

A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, Amy Bloom

A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You contains one of the most absolute expressions of a mother’s love in fiction. Much of it takes place in the waiting room of a gender-reassignment surgeon. It’s about a woman who is determined to be the mother her child needs her to be. In this book, ordinary women rise to the occasion demanded by motherhood, they make mistakes but they generally succeed in making up for them.

Family Man, Calvin Trillin

My last recommendation is not about mothers at all, but rather about fathers, or rather one father in particular. In Family Man, Calvin Trillin writes about his wife and daughters. He gives what I think is the most useful piece of parenting advice: “Getting advice on the best way to bring up children is like getting advice on the best way to breathe. Sooner or later you’re probably going to forget it and go back to your regular old in-and-out.” Trillin gives the impression of being the best kind of husband.

It is Britain’s most brutal running race—268 miles non-stop along the Pennine Way. Jasmin Paris, who is still breastfeeding her daughter, beat 136 other competitors from 15 countries, 125 men included, to win the Montane Spine Race.She broke the men’s record by over 12 hours.

To train for the race, Paris had to get up at 4, when she would head out for runs in the hills around her home while her family were still in bed. She also went on plenty of long hikes with her baby.

She was on the course for 83 hours and 12 minutes, pausing to power nap and eat for only seven hours. She had to carry everything she needed and had to navigate using a map and compass, mostly alone and in the dark. But she was relentless（坚韧的). Almost 20 hours after she had finished, only two men had completed the race, with everyone else either still on the course or retired.

Top British ultra runner and former Spine Race finisher Damian Hall says: “Her performance was extraordinary—one of the great British ultra-running performances.” Olympian Jo Pavey says Paris’s performance was “awesome and inspiring.”

Since finishing, Paris has caught lots of attention, with television appearances and Chelsea Clinton tweeting about her victory. “This has been harder than the race,” she says. “At least then I just had one job to do: keep putting one foot in front of the other.” All she craves now is a good night’s sleep.

The earth is warming. The past years are the warmest on record. Greenhouse gases from human activities are responsible for 1.1°C of average warming since 1900. What we’re experiencing is different from the global average. We experience extreme weather — historic droughts, serious heatwaves, violent storms and catastrophic (灾难性的) floods.

We won’t feel the impact of our efforts for decades. But we must know our future today so we can act now. To develop the best strategies for adaptation, we need climate models to predict the climate in different regions over decades. Unlike predicting the weather, climate models are multi-decade simulations (模拟) modeling the physics chemistry and biology of the atmosphere, waters, ice, land and human activities.

Greater resolution is needed to model changes in the global climate. Scientists estimate that these resolutions will demand billions of times more computing power than what’s currently available. It would take decades to achieve that through the ordinary course of computing advances.

For the first time, we have the technology to do that. We can achieve million-x speedups by combining three technologies: GPU-accelerated computing; breakthroughs in physics-informed neural (神经的) networks and AI supercomputers, along with vast quantities of data to learn from.

With these techniques, we may have within our grasp the billion-x leap needed to do ultra-high-resolution (超高分辨率) climate modeling. And with more accurate predictions people and nations will act with more urgency.

NVIDIA this week announced plans to build the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer used to predict climate change Named Earth-2, the system would create a digital twin of the Earth. The system would be the climate change to Cambridge-1 the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer for healthcare research.