Google has ended its mass purchase of cheap carbon offsets and thus stopped claiming that its operations are carbon neutral, according to the tech giant’s latest environmental report. The company now aims to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.
The Alphabet Inc. unit has claimed that it’s been carbon neutral in its operations since 2007. The status was based on purchasing carbon offsets to match the volume of emissions that were generated from its buildings, data centers and business travel. But in its latest report, the company states: “Starting in 2023, we’re no longer maintaining operational carbon neutrality.”
[…]
The changes to its carbon credits purchase strategy have coincided with Google and Big Tech’s push on artificial intelligence, which a Bloomberg News investigation has shown is extremely resource intensive. As a result, Google’s total planet-warming emissions in 2023 are 48% higher than 2019. In that period, its total energy consumption has doubled. It’s a similar story for Microsoft, which has seen primarily its AI activities cause emissions to rise by 30% relative to 2020, even as it still aims to be carbon negative by 2030.
Wait while we’re all being unhinged about, like, stew. We all obsessed over the Joy of Cooking as children right. Right
The Joy of Cooking is a cookbook written by a committee of midcentury American goofballs who weren’t sure if your life circumstances were going to call for cooking woodchuck, wedding cake, or both at the same time. But the one thing they could arm you with? Unshakeable confidence and a wine pairing. Absolutely demented manual for living, 100% recommend imprinting on it as a child.
YES our first stop will be the Backpacking menu. We find it incidentally next to THE weirdest vintage things to do with bacon. Hello, bacon and rice custard. Why are you, somehow, a small act of violence in our day. We then see the actual menu with its genuinely extremely useful information including “welcome extra munch items.”
Referencing here also, useful information about building fires, which leads you to the Ritual Psychic Incantation of Massachusetts to determine what setting an open fire is on. This spell is to be performed nonverbally. and Mississippi will also do if you are a coward. Do NOT use anything except a US state!!!! Memorise this fact diligently as you may need it later
finally what other menus do we have, you ask? Normal ones of course
Lots of people asking “is this the one with the squirrel/rabbit diagrams” of COURSE it is that one
“Does it really have woodchuck”
Yes of course. Take one (1) woodchuck
Shout out to @arthurwilde for pointing out this is the one with the recipe for opossum that starts by first keeping the opossum as a lil pet.
File that under recipes you don’t need to make tiktokers try
A collaborative team of researchers has made a cracking discovery with the potential to make a significant impact in the sustainable recovery of rare earth elements (REEs), which are in increasing demand for use in green energy technologies. The team found that humble eggshell waste could recover REES from water, offering a new, environmentally friendly method for their extraction.
The researchers, from Trinity College Dublin’s School of Natural Sciences, and iCRAG, the Ireland Research Centre in Applied Geosciences, have just published their findings in the journal
ACS Omega.
REEs, which are essential for the technologies used in electric cars and wind turbines, for example, are in increasing demand but in relatively short supply. As a result, scientists must find new ways of extracting them from the environment—and in sustainable ways, with current methods often harmful.
Los Caracoles Pass — or “The Snail’s Pass” — is a twisting mountain road located in a remote section of the Andes Mountains on the Chilean side of the border with Argentina. The path climbs to an elevation of 10,419 feet (3,175 m), has no roadside safety barriers, and is frequented by large trucks.
The research found there has been a 412% increase in jobs at 13 major rewilding projects covering almost 60,000 hectares, including sites owned or managed by charities, communities, private landowners, and public bodies.
Full-time equivalent jobs across the sites increased from 24 before rewilding to 123, across sectors including hospitality, estate management, ecology, environmental monitoring, rewilding interventions, recreation, and education.
The largest recorded rise in jobs was at Trees for Life’s 4,000-hectare Dundreggan estate near Loch Ness in the Highlands, a former deer stalking estate.
Since 2008, some 35 jobs have been created in addition to the sole previous position, while volunteer numbers have risen from zero to 100.
A rewilding centre was opened at the site last year and an open invitation has been extended to Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio to visit it after he backed a campaign for Scotland to become the world’s first “rewilding nation”.
All the sites are more than 100 hectares in size and are part of the Rewilding Network managed by Rewilding Britain.
The research found combined volunteer numbers at the sites increased from zero to 435…
The Scottish Government has been urged to commit to nature recovery across 30% of land by restoring habitats including peatlands, native woodlands, wetlands, rivers and seas, with no loss of productive farmland.
Kevin Cumming, rewilding director at Rewilding Britain and deputy convener of the Scottish Rewilding Alliance, said:
“These remarkable job creation figures show how rewilding can turbo-charge social and economic benefits, while offering hope for reversing biodiversity loss and tackling climate breakdown.
“This is yet another powerful illustration of why the Scottish Government should declare Scotland a rewilding nation.
“The opportunity is huge – for jobs and local economies, better health, food production, access to fresh water and clean air.”
The alliance’s Rewilding Nation Charter – including representations from more than 20 organisations – has been signed by thousands of people since it launched in the spring.
A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “Restoring Scotland’s natural environment is a key way that we can help address the twin challenges of nature loss and climate change, including many of the interventions championed by the Scottish Rewilding Alliance.
“We welcome this evidence of employment in rural communities and will consider this research as we continue to work towards our commitment to protect and restore 30% of Scotland’s land and seas for nature.
“Our £65 million Nature Restoration Fund has committed nearly £40 million since 2021 to unlock the full potential that nature restoration projects can bring to communities.
“The fund has supported local businesses, helped landowners with pollinator projects to boost food production and supported improved access to green spaces throughout Scotland, alongside restoration of our marine environment.”
“At HarperCollins, a lot of attention and thought is given to deciding exactly what combinations of margin measurements, font, and layout feel most appropriate for the genre, and writing style.
But in a case of do-your-part environmentalism,
designers at the publishing house have now standardized a series of subtle and imperceptible alterations to normal font style, layouts, and ink that have so far removed the need for 245 million book pages, totaling 5,618 trees.
Telling the story in Fast Company, representatives from
HarperCollins, one of the four largest publishing houses in the world,explained that the idea first arose in Zondervan Bibles, HarperCollins’ Christian publishing division. Being that the Bible is 2,500 pages or sometimes more, saving ink and pages was not just an environmental consideration, but one of production costs.
A new typeface called NIV Comfort Print allowed Zondervan to shave 350 pages off of every Bible,
which by 2017 had amounted to 100 million pages, and which, as Fast Company points out, would be
four times higher than the Empire State Building if stacked.
The production and design teams then
wondered how much they could save if they applied the same concepts to other genres like romance and fiction. Aside from the invention of the eBook, publishing hasn’t changed much in the last 100 years, and the challenge was a totally novel one for the teams—to alter all their preconceived ideas and try and find a font and typeface that resulted in fewer pages without being harder to read.
They eventually standardized 14 different combinations their tests determined were the most environmentally friendly, and which delivered an unchanged reading experience.
But the challenge didn’t stop there. Printed books, one might not know, are printed in large sheets which are then folded into sections of sixteen pages, meaning that Leah Carlson-Stanisic, associate director of design at HarperCollins, has to calculate the savings of space, words, and ultimately pages with the help of her team to fall in multiples of sixteen.
Nevertheless, they have been successful with it so far, and i
n the recent print run of one popular book, 1 million pages (or a number near 1 million that coincides with the 16 times tables) were saved.
“We want to make sure our big titles, by prominent authors, are using these eco-fonts,” Carlson-Stanisic said.
“It adds up a little bit at a time, saving more and more trees.””
-via Good News Network, April 4, 2024
–
Note:Great! Waiting to see this on the rest of their books and at the other big publishers!
Actually, though, it’s worth noting that this may not come quickly to the other large publishers, because Harper Collins almost certainly owns that font - meaning that other publishers would have to pay HarperCollins in order to use it, on an ongoing basis.
More on publishing shit and more realistic solutions here below the cut!
A female paper nautilus octopus riding a jellyfish-like medusa hydroid creates a fascinating sight, where two species appear to merge into a symbiotic relationship.
As we know, this octopus utilizes the jelly for transportation, protection, and even as a snack! This remarkable image was captured in Anilao, Philippines.
I referred to something as a “real Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra moment” in conversation with someone who has never seen TNG, and let me tell you, that was a real Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra moment
Author Ryan Starkey accompanies the map with a great article:
I’ve spent the last few years pooling together every study, survey, map, and database I can find, and then subjecting my image to several rounds of peer feedback. […] The end result is an image which is, to my knowledge, the most detailed map of British dialects ever made.
He also discusses “Why this map is wrong, and always will be”, and just how difficult it is to create a precise map of dialect regions.
Why is there so much dialect diversity in the U.K.? Because the longer a language is in a region, the more it tends to diversify. This is partly why, for example, there is a much larger variety of dialects spoken in the Eastern U.S. than the Western U.S.
This is the perfect book to read if you want to know more about the history of dialect diversity in English, because the entire focus of the book is to show that English is not just
one unified language (hence the plural “stories” in the title). It’s one of my favorite popular language books.
A Red-Faced Sun Rises above a City; Stunted Trees Stand in the Foreground; Representing Either the Culmination of the Alchemical Work or the Star of Hope That Inspires the Alchemist through His Tribulations (after Salomon Trismosin)
Edith Annie Ibbs (1863–1937) and Salomon Trismosin (after)
Wellcome Collection
Mount Kailash in Asia, the Black Hills in North America, Uluru in Australia: around the globe there are numerous mountains that have been and continue to be attributed sacredness. Worship of these mountains involves prayer, meditation and pilgrimage. Christianity, which for a long time showed little interest in nature, provides a foil to these practices and was one factor in the tensions that arose in the age of colonialism. Decolonisation and the ‘ecological turn’ changed the religious power of interpretation and gave discourses about sacred mountains new meaning.
When Parliament passed a law last month banning misleading or false environmental claims in advertising, or “greenwashing,” the reaction from an alliance of six oil sands companies was swift. The website for their Pathways Alliance, pushing a carbon capture and storage plan for oil sands emissions, more or less vanished. Most of the companies scrubbed their own websites and social media pages of everything related to environmental issues.
Once vigorously promoted by the oil industry, the Pathways Alliance website offered on Friday only a note explaining that its online presence was gone because the new law created “significant uncertainty for Canadian companies that want to communicate publicly about the work they are doing to improve their environmental performance, including to address climate change.”
But the statement also insisted that the site was not an example of greenwashing.
“This is a direct consequence of the new legislation and is not related to our belief in the truth and accuracy of our environmental communications,” the group said.
Jupiter’s south pole, captured by NASA’s Juno Spacecraft from about 2,175 miles (3,500 kilometers) above the planet’s cloud tops. This image, taken during the 22nd flyby of the solar-powered spacecraft, revealed a new, massive cyclone on the gas giant’s surface. Juno was launched in 2011 and entered Jupiter’s orbit in 2016, where it is expected to stay until 2025.
[id: screenshots of a news article from iNews (published 16 May 2024)
Title: ‘It’s destroyed us’: Parents of children with long Covid accused of making it up
Doctors and parents say children are being threatened with being taken into care as medics struggle to diagnose their conditions and families are placed under suspicion
Parents of children with long Covid claim they have been accused of faking or exaggerating their child’s illness, leading to social services’ involvement and, in some instances, court cases and the threat of the child’s removal from the home.
Doctors struggle to diagnose the condition due to its complex range of symptoms and often treat it as a psychological rather than physical disease, with parents telling i they have been accused of Chile abuse and of fabricating the illness as a result.
One in five parents of children with ME are referred to social services, according to Tymes Trust, an ME charity. Families and doctors warn this is now increasingly occurring with long Covid.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics show an estimated 62,000 children aged two to 16 years have reported suffering from long COVID.
Ruby was diagnosed with functional neurological disorder (FND), previously known as hysteria, and her family was reported to social services under suspicion of FII.
“[The local consultant] said: ‘This child is in danger, we need to get her out of the home,’ and that we were harming our Ruby and wanted her to be disabled,” says Ms Rowley, 46. “When she kept saying she was in pain, they said, ‘You’re not in pain, you don’t need pain relief.’”
Dr Speight has been assisting families with ME—and now long Covid— pro bono for three decades. He says he’s seen some 2000 patients in that time, 200 in “real difficulty” where specialized practitioners have stepped in to stop children being separated from their families.
Dr Kane warns that long Covid provisions are set to worsen as the existing Government-funded long Covid clinics are being scaled back and become “optional” for NHS trusts.
Systemic kidnapping now. That’s what we’re doing. Because Black and brown communities haven’t had the government take our kids away from us enough times yet, right?
The Italian police raided some of LVMH’s Dior suppliers that make luxury handbags.
Italian prosecutors found Dior paid $57 to produce bags retailing for $2,780.
Italian prosecutors in Milan
investigated the LVMH subsidiary Dior’s use of third-party suppliers in recent months. Prosecutors said these companies exploited workers to pump out bags for a small fraction of their store price. Citing documents examined by authorities, Reuters reported last month that Dior paid a supplier $57 to produce bags that retailed for about $2,780.
In probes through March and April, investigators found evidence that workers were sleeping in the facility so bags could be produced around the clock, Reuters reported. The probe also said safety devices on gluing and brushing machines were removed so workers could operate them faster.
The probe also extended to Giorgio Armani contractors. Armani paid contractors $99 per bag for products that sold for more than $1,900 in stores, according to documents seen by Reuters.
The prosecution said violating labor rules
was a common industry practice that luxury giants relied on for higher profits.
I cannot leave Bell Labs without mentioning one more device which I saw there, and which haunts me as it haunts everyone else who has ever seen it in action.
It is the Ultimate Machine–the End of the Line. Beyond it there is Nothing. It sits on Claude Shannon’s desk driving’ people mad. (Or sat, as Shannon is now at MIT.)
Nothing could look simpler. It is merely a small wooden casket the size and shape of a cigar-box, with a single switch on one face.
When you throw the switch, there is an angry, purposeful buzzing. The lid slowly rises, and from beneath it emerges a hand. The hand reaches down, turns the switch off, and retreats into the box. With the finality of a closing coffin, the lid snaps shut, the buzzing ceases, and peace reigns once more.
The psychological effect, if you do not know what to expect, is devastating.
There is something unspeakably sinister about a machine that does nothing–absolutely nothing – except switch itself off.
—Arthur C. Clarke, The Ultimate Machine, Harper’s, Aug. 1958.
Hurricane Beryl, as seen from the International Space Station, entered the Caribbean as a Category 4 storm on Monday. It has caused significant damage to the Windward Islands — including Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines — and is currently threatening Jamaica on its path across the Caribbean Sea. Beryl briefly reached Category 5 status with sustained winds of 165 mph on Monday evening, making it the earliest Category 5 hurricane on record.
Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
Hey. Hey. Tumblr. Ides of March ppl. We can do this
Hell yeah moon holiday
Ooh coming up we should celebrate
PITCH: We call it Moon Day, and then every 7 years when it falls on a Monday, that’s an even BIGGER deal and we call that Moon Day Monday and go absolutely apeshit about it (the next Moon Day Monday is in 2026 so we have a couple trial runs first)
*ChatGPT has certain words it favors that humans rarely use, especially the word “delve.” But there are plenty of other such words, so I prompted OpenAI Dalle3, aka Microsoft Bing Copilot, to generate a text with an entire list of Ai-favorite AI-words.
*This result becomes a kind of limpid, poetic delven folk-tale of the delven-folk; it’s the way AIs would always talk, if there were no humans in the room.
Bruce Sterling:
Please write a brief narrative that includes all of the following words, in any order: “adventurous and relaxing’, Nestled, azure, blend, charm, charming, cuisine, culinary delights, delightful, delve, dramatic, haven, history buffs, indulge, plethora, relish, renowned , rugged, seeking, transition, transitions, treasure, unique blend, vibrant, abound, abundant, allure, beckons, charming, comprehensive, convenience, cultural, dive into, diverse, ensuring, furry friends, gem, iconic, immerse, numerous, numerous benefits, option, recreational opportunities, rich, treasure trove, vibrant”
Copilot
Nestled in the rugged cliffs of the azure coast, the charming village of Azura beckons to those seeking an adventurous and relaxing escape. With its unique blend of dramatic landscapes and vibrant culture, it’s a haven for both history buffs and culinary enthusiasts.
As you delve into the treasure trove of Azura’s past, you’ll indulge in stories of transition and treasure, where the charm of yesteryears transitions seamlessly into modern convenience. The allure of the old world abounds, ensuring a comprehensive experience for every visitor.
The cuisine here is a delightful blend of traditional recipes and culinary delights, offering a plethora of options to relish and indulge in. From iconic dishes to diverse culinary experiences, the abundant flavors are a gem for those eager to dive into the local cultural scene.
For the adventurous, recreational opportunities are abundant. You can immerse yourself in the vibrant life of Azura, where numerous benefits await. Whether you’re seeking to explore the rugged terrain with your furry friends or delve into the rich history, there’s an option for every treasure hunter.
Azura is not just a place; it’s a transition into a world where charm and adventure abound. It’s a unique blend of the delightful and the dramatic, a vibrant gem that continues to treasure its rich past while ensuring a charming future. So come and relish the abundant allure of Azura, a true haven for those seeking a unique blend of adventurous and relaxing experiences.
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
