Things I learned lately 7 Apr

• On April 1st 1991, Rod Stewart was performing at Wembley Stadium when he decided to call his then wife, Rachel Hunter, out onto the stage so he could serenade her with his song "You're In My Heart (The Final Acclaim)". Rachel had other ideas though, and sent Sir Elton John out on stage dressed in drag, for Rod to serenade, which he did.
  
  
  
• We’re sending a Canadian astronaut to the moon! Well, around the moon anyway.
• It’s been 50 years since the first ‘cell phone’ call. The phone itself was not available to buy.
• When tested against professional benchmarks like the bar exam, ChatGPT-4 scored within the top 10% of human test takers.
• The lab development version of ChatGPT-4 demonstrated that if it was given a task that required a human to complete (like a captcha), it was able to enlist a service like TaskRabbit to hire a human to do it.
• Microsoft is adding an AI assistant to its Microsoft 365 apps this year and what it will be able to do for us seems pretty wild. For example, in Excel, Copilot could analyze all the data in a spreadsheet and then be ready to answer any question you have about the data without you having to figure out a formula, function or chart.
• Our civilization produces a lot of waste heat. Like the accumulation of CO2, it affects our climate, but on a slower scale. Using more existing ‘free energy’ such as wind and solar reduces the amount of waste heat we produce, buying us a lot more time. Geothermal and nuclear production generates a lot of waste heat and we need to find ways to reduce it. 
• The people of Paris voted to ban rented electric scooters.