hardware issue

at the midnight Sun Golf Course in Fairbanks, Alaska, they say you never get the same shot twice. That’s because the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the planet, and as the underground permafrost thaws, it deforms the course’s fairways. This express defrost unlocks ancient organic matter—a lot of it. (The world’s permafrost holds twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere.) Microbes feed on that liberated matter and fart out plumes of methane, a gas that’s 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide…

My personal term for the inexact nature of the messy, fuzzy world was muzzy. But then, in 1980, I acquired an Ohio Scientific desktop computer and found prompt, lasting relief. All its operations were built on a foundation of binary arithmetic, in which a 1 was always exactly a 1 and a 0 was a genuine 0, with no fractional quibbling. The 1 of existence, and the 0 of nothingness! I fell in love with the purity of digital and learned to write code, which became a lifelong refuge from muzzy math.Of course, digital values…