These seemingly large-scale installations take natural phenomena and installation art to a whole new level. By paying attention to small detail, composition, placing a few humans for scale and taking low angle photographs DiMichele is able to capture larger-than-life artworks that resonates the viewer so they are forced to pay attention to detail all while subliminally tricked to the perceptual full-scale models.
MASTER POST: The Milano TRIENNALE, 1989. What is there not to love? 80s experimentation of spatial use, technology, and art. Note how casually the furniture is set up?
Illustrations from an imaginary book teaching spellcasting to newly married couples. Titled “Marriage Magic: New Spells for Newlyweds,” these books described how a couple could form a cult of two. Long-term practitioners of magic made fun of the book, but after the Toledo, Ohio, PTA Zombie Incident of 1968, the publisher withdrew the book.
Agribusiness employs an army of lobbyists in Brussels. It makes sure policymakers are hearing these five core messages over and over in response to the European Green Deal, the Farm to Fork Strategy, and corresponding legislation ranging from the Sustainable Use of Pesticides Regulation (SUR) to the Biodiversity Strategy.
The four largest pesticide firms employed over 40 lobbyists last year. Companies also use their vast resources to employ multiple “lobby outfits”, Nina Holland from Corporate Europe Observatory told DeSmog.
One of these is public relations firm Hume Brophy, which previously lobbied for Peabody Energy – a coal company linked to climate science denial – and the World Coal Association. Hume Brophy has lobbied on various elements of the green farming strategy for clients that include Bayer and Euroseeds.
Members of the industry also club together through trade bodies and associations. Groups like CropLife Europe, Fertilizers Europe, Euroseeds, and Cefic enjoy significant clout in EU spaces, and are regularly invited to speak at major conferences and provide their expertise as part of advisory groups that guide the commission on everything from fertiliser products to its soil strategy for 2030.
US academic Jacquet told DeSmog that arms-length trade bodies help companies create multiple and contradictory narratives – allowing them to support green reforms, while simultaneously opposing action. “The companies say ‘we are pro-science, we are pro-policy, we are pro-public health’, but then they fund the trade groups to do the dirty work,” she said.
With just a handful of the same companies dominating the seed, fertiliser and pesticide sectors, the membership of these trade bodies overlap. That means that the preferred messages of a few companies are heard many times over in a decision making process. For example, members of advisory bodies that assist the European Commission to draft and implement legislation – called “Expert Groups” – sometimes represent a much smaller range of voices than it appears.
Earlier this month, DeSmog revealed that 80 percent of the members and observers of the “Expert Group on the European Food Security Crisis Preparedness and Response Mechanism” – a multi-stakeholder group convened by the European Commission – were from industry. Four of the trade associations in this group represent BASF, three represent Bayer, and two represent Syngenta and Corteva. Members of the Expert Group have repeatedly advocated for “slower” implementation of the EU’s green farming plans during advisory meetings.
“The Kuleshov effect is a film editing (montage) effect demonstrated by Russian film-maker Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s and 1920s. It is a mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation.”
Every time I see companies selling “”“punk”“” jewellery or clothing I become apoplectic with rage. Just saw a £65 padlock necklace advertised to me bitch Fuck you go to your nearest weird little shop that sells everything in the world including fake Rolexes and bongs the size of a toddler. Buy a thing of chain and a padlock. Borrow some bolt cutters someone you know will probably own some and if not get some cheap ones or borrow from a local tool library. Slap em together. Maximum cost £30 and that’s MAXIMUM that’s assuming you bought over a metre of expensive heavy chain AND bought the bolt cutters. You can do it for under a fiver with a wallet chain and pliers. I still wear a necklace I made when I was 15 out of a wallet chain and pliers and a padlock I got in a set of 3 from poundland. If the issue is dexterity or otherwise disability related then find a friend and swap a favour with them it’ll still be cheaper than these scamming poser companies and will help you build community and share resources. Something which is actually punk. Fuckin. Capitalist posers
Important to keep in mind there’s a distinction here between ‘someone who paints and sells patches in their own small business’ (cool, craftsmanship, usually very fairly priced for materials and labour while still affordable for punks who don’t have that skillset to buy, honestly not a category far removed from 'if you buy me lunch I can paint your jacket’ exchanges) and big companies who charge extortionate prices for something that’s supposed to be counterculture, paying staff minimum wage and making huge profits the workers will never see a penny of (cunts)
the
most most punk way to make a padlock chain necklace is to cut the chain off a door or gate or piece of equipment that has been locked to the public, especially if it is something the public should have access to, or if it is something that belongs to an entity that is profiting at the cost of the public good, most specifically if that cost is disproportionately paid by disadvantaged segments of said public that are being oppressed
like, a super punk way to source your padlock chain necklace would be to cut it off the back of a Nestle truck, or from the gate blocking a construction road for an oil pipeline, or from a dumpster full of usable food behind some grocery store or something.
I only explain this so people can understand why buying some fake ass padlock chain necklace from some corporation automatically makes it NOT punk at all, it is literally the opposite of punk, which is a fashion strongly rooted in a social ideology
“Thus the most conspicuous feature of the Divine Names is their double structure, that is, their having each two designations. Each Name designates, and points to, the unique Essence, while pointing to a meaning or reality which is not shared by any other Name.”
— Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts
Learning about plants has made my biopunk novel much more complicated like damn now I have to think about all the species and stuff
Generically vague settings are ruined for me forever. do y'all have any idea how specific the plant life in an area gets???
*Stares at the plants in novel set in fictional place with suspicion and criticism*
actually, i wanna talk about nature tropes in fantasy/otherwise “speculative” media because fiction has these stock tropes about nature that are so universal throughout everything from books to video games, and it turns out that they have nothing to do with reality
For starters, did y'all know that
(with the exception of one species) cacti are ONLY native to the Americas, and deserts on all other continents have NO CACTI?
Does that mean that Africa, in similar situations, mostly has spiky shrubs (without those water-consuming green things called leaves) and yams-like storage roots?
Or are there further concepts?
What does Australia do?
I know about succulents, and that they’re also fairly common in the Alps (I don’t know if they’re native there, but the local name, “Hauswurz” - literally “house root” or “home root” - indicates as much).
Which aren’t deserts in the narrower sense, but also not exactly known for rich flora, due to the altitude, low amount of topsoil, and cold.
Have you reached a level that permits you to see
patterns that shape plant life in an area? It sounds a bit like you’re in an area of frequent enlightenment…
Well the thing about plants is that they are
much, MUCH weirder than animals are about radically altering and reshuffling their basic body forms and plans over the course of evolution, even within the same genus.
If you saw this plant, what would you assume its closest relatives are?
If you answered “violets,” good job! This is
Viola atropurpurea, from the same genus as your common backyard violets.
This is weird. Can we talk about how weird this is? This is like if tigers and lions shared the genus
Panthera with some kind of tiny aquatic salamander-like thing.
Cacti are a specific plant family. Succulent plants have convergently evolved approximately a billion times and come from (almost) every corner of the plant family tree. The universality of cacti as the iconic Desert Plant has much to do with the average person not knowing the great variety of desert adapted plants, and mentally categorizing unrelated succulent plants as cacti because “cactus” is the closest word they have.
Desert plants are weird y'all. A ton of them look like weird mushroom- or barrel-like bulges and tubes. Like, just look at this thing.
This is called “Sand Food” and it’s edible
This is Yareta and there are no photos of it that are like “Yeah that is a normal, real thing.” (It’s not moss! It’s a flowering plant!)
“Craftsmen take pride most in skills that mature. This is why simple imitation is not a sustaining satisfaction; the skill has to evolve. The slowness of craft time serves as a source of satisfaction; practice beds in, making the skill one’s own. Slow craft time also enables the work of reflection and imagination–which the push for quick results cannot. Mature means long; one takes lasting ownership of the skill.”
Reveil (2014—) is a collective production by streamers at listening points around the earth. Starting on the morning of Saturday 6 May in South London near the Greenwich Meridian, the broadcast will pick up feeds one by one, tracking the sunrise west from microphone to microphone, following the wave of intensified sound that loops the earth every 24 hours at first light.
Streams come from a variety of locations, at a time of day when human sounds are relatively low, even in dense urban areas. This tends to open the sound field to a more diverse ecology than usual. The Reveil broadcast makes room by largely avoiding speech and music, gravitating to places where human and non human communities meet and soundworlds overlap.
Each stream brings something different to the loop.
Reveil 10 goes back to its starting point, giving attention to live sounds of places as first light reaches them.
The Reveil broadcast will be played out at Stave Hill Ecological Park in a portable auditorium by sound artist Michael Speers and architects Public Works.
Swapping, streaming, assembling a collectively produced long radio form, REVEIL is a chance to gather tools and recipes for ecological radio, and listen together to acoustic commons in the making.
Reveil celebrates International Dawn Chorus Day, which has been celebrated annually on the first Sunday of May since the Urban Wildlife Trust organized the first such event in Moseley Bog, Birmingham, in 1984. Since then, it has become a global event, celebrated all over the planet.
The Reveil broadcast will be played out at Stave Hill Ecological Park in a portable auditorium by sound artist Michael Speers and architects Public Works.
Reveil 10 is produced in collaboration with the Locus Sonus soundmap, the Acoustic Commons network, the Cyberforest programme, BIOM Open Microphones, radio.earth, and others.
The Reveil 10 stream will be live mixed by Mixed by Fernando Godoy (Tsonami), Leah Barclay (Biosphere Soundscapes) and the Soundcamp cooperative, and it will be relayed by over 20 radio stations, including Wave Farm and Resonance FM/Extra.
It is being hailed as a sea change in scientific understanding of the global ocean circulation system and how it will respond as the world heats up. A doomsday scenario involving the collapse of the circulation—previously portrayed in both peer-reviewed research and the climate disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow—came a lot closer in the last month. But rather than playing out in the far North Atlantic, as previously assumed, it now seems much more likely at the opposite end of the planet.
A new analysis by Australian and American researchers, using new and more detailed modeling of the oceans, predicts that the long-feared turn-off of the circulation will likely occur in the Southern Ocean, as billions of tons of ice melt on the land mass of Antarctica. And rather than being more than a century away, as models predict for the North Atlantic, it could happen within the next three decades.
Meanwhile the long-standing concern about a shutdown of the ocean circulation in the North Atlantic sometime in the 21th century appears to be subsiding. A Swiss study published this month found that, contrary to past belief, the circulation did not fail at the end of the last ice age, suggesting, the researchers say, that it was more stable than previously supposed, and less likely to collapse.
Taken together the two studies bring a dramatically new perspective to the likely impact of planetary heating on ocean circulation, which is one of the great stabilizing forces of the planet’s climate system.
The ocean circulation system, often called the global conveyor, follows a regular path through the Earth’s oceans and stirs their waters from top to bottom. It starts with water plunging from the surface and disappearing to the depths, from where it travels the world and does not surface for centuries. By capturing heat and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and burying both deep in the ocean, it is currently moderating global warming.
The conveyor is driven by the descent of cold, salty water to the ocean floor in just two places: in the far North Atlantic near Greenland and in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. In both regions, the mechanism is the same. In cold polar conditions, large volumes of water freeze. The salt in the water is not incorporated into the ice. It remains in the residual liquid water, which grows ever saltier. The saltier water becomes, the denser it becomes. So the residue is heavier than surrounding water and eventually sinks to the ocean floor.
About 250 trillion tons of salty water sinks in this way around Antarctica each year, subsequently spreading north along the ocean floor into the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific oceans. Similar volumes spread south from Greenland. The process is known as deep-water formation or ocean overturning, and it has continued largely unchanged for thousands of years.
But for how much longer? As the world warms, less ice is forming in the oceans at the ends of the Earth each year. At the same time, more ice on the nearby great ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland is melting and releasing fresh water into the ocean.
Indeed, if people see a machine do something amazing, albeit in a narrow area, they often assume the field is that much further along toward general AI. The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus (using a term coined by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel) called this a “first-step fallacy.” As Dreyfus characterized it, “The first-step fallacy is the claim that, ever since our first work on computer intelligence we have been inching along a continuum at the end of which is AI so that any improvement in our programs no matter how trivial counts as progress.” Dreyfus quotes an analogy made by his brother, the engineer Stuart Dreyfus: “It was like claiming that the first monkey that climbed a tree was making progress towards landing on the moon”.
Melanie Mitchell, 2021.
Why AI is Harder Than We Think. arXiv:2104.12871.
This paper introduces VR Haptics at Home, a method of repurposing everyday objects in the home to provide casual and on-demand haptic experiences. Current VR haptic devices are often expensive, complex, and unreliable, which limits the opportunities for rich haptic experiences outside research labs. In contrast, we envision that, by repurposing everyday objects as passive haptics props, we can create engaging VR experiences for casual uses with minimal cost and setup. To explore and evaluate this idea, we conducted an in-the-wild study with eight participants, in which they used our proof-of-concept system to turn their surrounding objects such as chairs, tables, and pillows at their own homes into haptic props. The study results show that our method can be adapted to different homes and environments, enabling more engaging VR experiences without the need for complex setup process. Based on our findings, we propose a possible design space to showcase the potential for future investigation.
An aerial view of the glass-bubble-covered ice, at left, and the bare ice. Photograph by Doug Johnson.
Excerpt from this story from the
New Yorker:
Starting in the winter of 2012, working with a colleague named Leslie Field, they had covered some of the ice with glass microspheres, or tiny, hollow bubbles. Through the course of several winters, they demonstrated that the coated ice melted much more slowly than bare ice. An array of scientific instruments explained why: the spheres increase the ice’s albedo, or the portion of the sun’s light that the ice bounces back toward the sky. (Bright surfaces tend to reflect light; we take advantage of albedo, which is Latin for “whiteness,” when we wear white clothes in summer.)
Manzara, Johnson, and Field want to prove that a thin coating of reflective materials, in the right places, could help to save some of the world’s most important ice. Climate scientists report that polar ice is shrinking, thinning, and weakening year by year. Models predict that the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer by the year 2035. The melting ice wouldn’t just be a victim of climate change—it would drive further warming. The physics seem almost sinister: compared with bright ice, which serves as a cool topcoat that insulates the ocean from solar radiation, a dark, ice-free ocean would absorb far more heat. All of this happens underneath the Arctic summer’s twenty-four-hour sun. But the fragility of the Arctic cuts both ways: as much as the region needs help, its ecosystems are sensitive enough that large-scale interventions could have unintended consequences.
Last year, Johnson, Manzara, Field, and other collaborators published a paper about their work at the test pond in Earth’s Future, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. It described how they segmented the pond, applied a thin layer of glass bubbles on one side, and set up instruments to measure water temperature, ice thickness, weather, and long-wave and short-wave radiation. Albedo measurements range from zero, for perfect absorption, to one, for mirrorlike reflection; the bubbles raised the albedo of late-winter pond ice from 0.1-0.2 to 0.3-0.4. After a February snowfall, they wrote, it was impossible to see any difference between the sections. But in March the snow thinned to reveal two distinct regions of ice, which melted at different rates as the days warmed. When the bare ice was gone, nine inches remained under the glass bubbles.
No amount of glass spheres or roofing granules will reverse climate change. Only a rapid global shift away from fossil fuels is likely to achieve that. But in a place like the Arctic, which is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, and where the end-of-ice tipping point hangs like the Sword of Damocles, such an intervention could offer a precious lifeline: time. What kind of progress could the world make if the emergency receded by a few years? “You only need to treat a small portion of the Arctic to get a big impact on the global climate. That’s the big picture,” Johnson said, describing his group’s modelling. “You can get twenty-five years longer to keep the ice.”
Trigoniophthalmus alternatus, a non-native jumping bristletail common in humid areas where I live. unlike almost all insects most people are familiar with, jumping bristletails are ancestrally wingless—a very old lineage! they don’t seem to be too disappointed with their lot in life though, grazing on algae in the same old way as ever and also firing themselves a good foot in the air when startled.
A new analysis from Greenpeace has found that in just the first three months of this year, China has already approved about 20.45 gigawatts of coal projects, more than the country approved in all of 2021.
In 2022, China saw a surge in coal project approvals, amounting to the approval of about two projects per week, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Yet this year’s figures for the first quarter of the year are already substantially higher than the same time frame of 2022, when China approved 8.63 gigawatts. In 2021, a total of about 18.55 gigawatts of new coal projects were greenlit, as reported by Al Jazeera.
Greenpeace analyzed figures in official approval documents and found multiple mentions of energy security concerns as justification for the new coal plants. Other concerns mentioned in the documents included “meeting heating demand,” “meeting growing energy demand,” and “stimulating local economic development.”
But Greenpeace noted that investing more for coal is actually less impactful at improving the grid and meeting high energy demands.
“The 2022 coal boom has clearly continued into this year. Summer is around the corner, and there’s a long list of energy infrastructure fixes needed all around China,” Xie Wenwen, climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace East Asia, said in a statement. “But throwing more coal at the wall isn’t one of them. China’s electric grid doesn’t lack generation capacity. The grid lacks adequate flexibility and responsiveness. These problems will continue to inhibit electricity transfer and storage until we face them head on.”
MS World Discoverer was a German expedition cruise ship. It hit an uncharted reef in the Sandfly Passage 29. April 2000. The hole was too big to get it repaired on the spot, so all the guests were taken ashore. A few hours later the captain ran the ship full speed on ground in Rodrick bay. (via sv_manjana)
According to DN, Firefly Entertainment is doing a roaring trade in what some would call “fake artists” on Spotify.
These are the now-well-known pseudonymous artists on the streaming platform – artists with no discernible online footprint – whose music fills up many of Spotify’s own key mood and chillout playlists.
For a long time, music industry figures have wondered aloud whether Spotify has deals in place that see it pay less in royalties for streams of music from “fake artists” – whose cumulative streams now sit in the billions – than streams of artists signed to major record companies.
In its report (available here) DN obtained a list of 830 ‘fake artist’ names linked to Firefly, and discovered that at least 495 of these artists have music on first-party Spotify playlists.
This figure probably under-estimates the scope of Firefly’s artists on Spotify-run playlists, suggests DN, as the newspaper only examined 100 playlists out of the “several thousand [playlists] that Spotify is responsible for”.
A Technological Antisolution is a product that attempts to replace boring but solvable political or social problems with a much sexier technological one that probably won’t work. This does not mean that we should stop doing R&D, a technology that is worth pursuing can become a technological antisolution depending on its social and political context.
In October 1989, Shell researchers wrote a confidential report warning that climate-fuelled migration could swamp borders in the United States, Soviet Union, Europe, and Australia. “Conflict would abound,” the document said. “Civilisation could prove a fragile thing.”
Now, that memo — first reported by DeSmog and Dutch investigative journalism platform Follow The Money — features in a new court brief alleging that Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and BP knowingly concealed the climate hazards of their fossil fuel products for decades.
A group of climate disinformation researchers and nonprofits filed the brief on April 7 in support of a 2020 lawsuit brought by the District of Columbia, part of awave of litigation by at least 20 U.S. states and cities seeking to hold the oil industry to account for climate damages.
The 50-page brief cites academic studies and media reports to show how the oil industry was warned about the risks posed by a build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels in the late 1950s. Companies such as Shell and ExxonMobil went on to develop detailed internal knowledge of the problem, while backing industry associations waging sophisticated campaigns to cast doubt on climate science, the brief argues.
“While their tactics have changed, Defendants’ overall strategy of deception continues to this day,” the brief said. “Defendants now acknowledge that the climate is changing and claim to be leaders in efforts to combat climate change. However, they continue to run marketing and lobbying campaigns intended to mislead policymakers and the public about climate change and Defendants’ role in causing it.”
Titled “SCENARIOS 1989 – 2010,” the Shell memo outlines a high-emissions “global mercantilism” scenario in which average global temperatures rise by “considerably more” than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The report warned that “many species of trees, plants, animals and insects would not be able to move and adapt.”
It also projected a grim future for people: “The changes would, however, most impact on humans [sic]. In earlier times, man was able to respond with his feet. Today, there is no place to go because people already stand there. Perhaps those in industrial countries could cope with a rise in sea level (the Dutch example) but for poor countries such defences are not possible. The potential refugee problem in GLOBAL MERCANTILISM could be unprecedented. Africans would push into Europe, Chinese into the Soviet Union, Latins into the United States, Indonesians into Australia. Boundaries would count for little – overwhelmed by the numbers. Conflicts would abound. Civilisation could prove a fragile thing.”
Kata Tjuṯa is a group of large, domed rock formations (also called bornhardts) in the southern part of Northern Territory, Australia. It consists of 36 domes over an area of 22 square kilometers (8.5 sq mi), the highest of which is Mount Olga at 1,066 meters (3,497 ft) above sea level. Kata Tjuṯa is 25 kilometers (16 mi) east of the famous Australian landmark Uluṟu.
Excerpt from this essay by Bill McKibben from his Substack blog. This particular essay is sobering, because Bill McKibben is connecting the effects of climate change with normally occurring variations to tell us we’re going to be in for a particularly evil period of high temperatures once El Niño settles in, as it seems to be doing right now.
This week’s Fort Lauderdale rainstorm was, on the one hand, an utter freak of nature (storms ‘trained’ on the same small geography for hours on end, dropping 25 inches of rain in seven hours; the previous record for all of April was 19 inches) and on the other hand utterly predictable. Every degree Celsius that we warm the planet means the atmosphere holds more water vapor; as native Floridian and ace environmental reporter Dinah Voyles Pulver pointed out, “with temperatures in the Gulf running 3 to 4 degrees above normal recently, that’s at least 15% more rainfall piled up on top of a ‘normal’ storm.”
Get ready for far more of it; there are myriad scattered signs that we’re about to go into a phase of particularly steep climbs in global temperature. They’re likely to reach impressive new global records—and that’s certain to produce havoc we’ve not seen before.
Climate change is, of course, an inexorable and grinding process; every year we pour more carbon and methane into the air, and eventually this inevitably results in higher temperatures. The real damage goes on without cease, month after month—see, for instance, our recent discussion about the ongoing collapse of the Antarctic ocean current that cycles nutrients across the earth’s seas. But our planet is not a simple test-tube, and its particular dynamics mean sometimes that warming is slower and sometimes faster. The last global record temperature came in 2016, and coincided with the peak of an El Nino warm cycle in the Pacific.
For much of the time since then we’ve been in a La Nina cool phase in the Pacific, and that’s depressed global temperatures—just a little. Every year has been in the top ten all time, but the global temperature has only matched, not exceeded, that record. Every time this cycle happens, climate deniers claim that the planet has begun to cool—but of course with the next El Nino the planet sets a new record, pushed higher by all the greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the meantime.
The fact that we’ve seen the most extreme heat waves and rainfalls in human history during this period of slightly depressed global temperatures is scary—when it hit 121 Fahrenheit in Canada the year before last, or when Chinese weather stations recorded all 30 of the hottest days in their history last summer, or when parts of Pakistan saw 700% of annual rainfall in one month last autumn, it was as if the beast that is global warming was snarling at the end of a very threadbare rope.
And now that rope is about to snap. Here are the latest odds from the Yale climate watchers Bob Henson and Jeff Masters:
“Most of the El Niño models are predicting a weak to moderate strength El Niño event forming by late summer, with the dynamical model consensus favoring a borderline weak/moderate event for the peak of hurricane season. Toward the end of the year, the odds of a strong El Niño will be as high as 40%, according to the NOAA discussion.”
And here’s the scary part. Even before that El Nino officially forms, we’re already seeing global ocean temperatures setting a new all-time record, breaking the one set in 2016. The next jump in temperature will start from such a high base that Jim Hansen, the world’s most renowned climatologist, recently predicted that not only will we see a new global record air temperature in 2024 (“even a little futz of an El Niño should be sufficient for record global temperature”), but that it could, at least temporarily, bust through the 1.5 degree mark that the world swore to avoid in Paris just eight years ago. Hansen’s not alone in the prediction
“It’s very likely that the next big El Niño could take us over 1.5C,” said Prof Adam Scaife, the head of long-range prediction at the UK Met Office. “The probability of having the first year at 1.5C in the next five-year period is now about 50:50.”
As this happens, novel forms of chaos will ensue. No human has ever left us a shred of evidence about what life is like on a globe with these average temperatures. I imagine the phrase “on steroids” will get a regular workout, but it’s not quite right, since pharmaceutical enhancements work on the existing body. A planet at 420 parts per million co2 is a different planet than one at 275 parts per million. If Captain Kirk was landing on it, the first thing his tricorder would register is the composition of the atmosphere; when you’re talking planets, it’s a pretty basic data point. So we don’t really know what surprises are in store—though that news that the Antarctic current was starting to slow like a hose with a crimp is fair warning.
I don’t say all this in the service of despair, but of preparation. We need to be psychologically prepared for the fact that, for all we’ve tried to do together, this crisis is about to worsen. Forewarned is, to some small extent, forearmed. I suppose some might need to prepare themselves individually too, though that’s not my focus.
But we really need to be prepared politically. Each of these surges in warming unleashed by the next El Nino comes with new political possibilities, as people see and feel more clearly our peril. At the moment, our climate politics, like our climate itself, is a little stalled. The surge of change that came from Greta’s school strikes, the Paris accords, the Green New Deal has waned; we’re in a new stalemate where the oil industry has learned to rely on delay instead of denial. It often takes them a few years, but eventually they get good at working the politics—for the moment, for instance, they’ve got their captive state treasurers locking banks and asset managers in place with the charged that worrying about the fiscal implications of the climate crisis represents ‘woke capitalism.’
As the next round of savage heatwaves proceeds, it will come with new pressure for action from our governments and corporations. We need to be able to channel that pressure effectively, with key goals in mind: the absolute end to new fossil fuel development and exploration, the quick weaning from existing supplies of coal and gas and oil and with it the equally rapid buildout of cleaner sources of energy, the unwavering support for the places and people hardest hit. There will be all sorts of emotions; I hope that the anger people will rightly feel is channeled toward the corporate and legal destruction of the companies that have lied for three decades and still represent the largest barrier to change.
It’s just the right moment for Not Too Late, a new anthology compiled by two old friends who are also among the most stalwart leaders of the climate fight. Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young-Latunatabua have managed something important: an alternative to doomism that isn’t sentimental or treacly, but absolutely serious. “Hope is not the guarantee that things will be okay,” Young-Lutunatabua says. “It’s the recognition that there’s spaciousness for action, that the future is uncertain, and in that uncertainty, we have space to step into and make the future we want.” I agree with that—with the caveat that the spaciousness doesn’t last forever. I have the strong instinct that this El Nino may be the last of these moments that the earth offers us in a time frame still relevant to making coherent and savvy civilization-scale change. We dare not misuse it.
The latest levellised cost of energy assessment has been released by global investment bank Lazard, confirming – as CSIRO and the market operator have done in Australia – that wind and solar, even “firmed” by battery storage, still beat the fossil fuel competition.
In fact, the Lazard assessment shows that on pretty much any assessment – cost of energy, cost of energy and firming, marginal cost of energy, and cost of capital – wind and solar win easily. And that’s without counting the carbon cost of their competitors, and the impact of the Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
“The central findings show, among other things, that even in the face of inflation and supply chain challenges the LCOE (levellised cost of energy) of best-in-class renewables continues to decline,” Lazard notes.
It also says the IRA will have a dramatic impact on the market and will boost more investment in renewables, that storage will grow in scope and importance, and that even hydrogen could play a significant role.
It has no doubt where this will lead: The continued retirement of conventional generation “at pace” – an assessment that is supported by the US Energy Information Administration which predicts
The Shiveluch volcano, located on Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, erupted Tuesday, sending an enormous ash cloud 12 miles (20 km) into the atmosphere. Nearby towns and villages were blanketed with a thick layer of brown volcanic ash. No injuries or deaths have occurred, but aircraft are being warned to avoid the area due to the large ash cloud.
Shoplifters who spoke to Novara Media said the cost of living crisis had pushed them to steal more of life’s essentials. “A couple of times I’ve been on the verge of crying when I go to buy Sainsbury’s Basics apple and blackcurrant squash and realise the price has doubled in the past three months,” said John.
Lara, a culture worker from London, has started shoplifting groceries more frequently; she said it has become more socially acceptable in her circles. “I know that other people do it, and I’ve seen how other people do it, and that really helped,” she said. Previously, she avoided stealing because her upbringing and wider moralism had convinced her it was “a shameful thing” to do.
“Before, I would have described stealing as this really anti-Islamic thing to do,” she said. Shoplifting is also especially frowned-upon by “parents who come from a working-class or lower middle-class background,” she said, because of how classist ‘scrounger’ stereotypes “trickle down to how we surveil and shame each other.”
Nowadays however, Lara sees shoplifting as “one of the few guerrilla tactics we have available to us.”
Alan, a construction worker from London, who, like John and Anna, has been shoplifting around half his groceries in recent months, has “no moral qualms” about stealing from supermarkets. “I just think that the stuff in the world is ours, all of ours,” he said, “and that we’ve invented a really stupid system for the distribution of resources which doesn’t treat them as ours, and treats them as things that can be used for capitalists to make profit.”
He wouldn’t steal things if it meant that “someone’s labour went unrewarded”, he said, but all shoplifting affects is “the profits of shareholders” he said. “[I have] no concerns about that at all.”
[…]
While, for many, shoplifting feels like a form of resistance to untenable living conditions, no one who spoke to Novara Media was sure how to build solidarity between shoplifters. Alan shoplifts food for rough sleepers, but wishes there were more organised approaches to shoplifting – like the mass stealing and redistribution of food that occurred in Greece following the 2008 financial crisis.
Lara believes shoplifting could be “revolutionary” if it could be “more of an organised operation” that involved “getting workers on side”.
“I think it would be really radical if there would be a widespread recognition and acceptance of stealing as a necessary mechanism for resistance,” she says. “If you can’t afford the things that you have to buy, then the logic should be that you just take them.”
A superbloom of wildflowers blankets the Carrizo Plain in Southern California. This phenomenon, which follows an unusually wet season in California, occurs when a high proportion of wildflower seeds that have lain dormant in desert soil germinate and blossom at roughly the same time. Common plant species involved are brittlebush (yellow flowers), California poppies (bright orange), and lupine (purple).
A complete Rainbow… photo was taken at around 30k ft above the Earth. On the ground, we usually only see the arc half of the circle.
I’ve never seen that. had to reblog.
in the interests of correct information, but in no way throwing shade due to the many times i myself have been corrected over similar things, i feel i should let folks know that
the above image is not real, it’s just an image shared by a pilot named Lloyd J. Ferraro because he thought it was cool, and people assumed it was a photo he took, but he later clarified that it was not. It isn’t actually even a photograph.
at some point some tldr of a NASA caption on an actual photo got paired with the above image and went semi viral or whatever
What’s true:
Swiss photographer Lucas Moesch
did use a drone to take a photo featuring a circular rainbow, and here it is
Beautiful, right? NASA later featured this same photo on their website with this caption:
Have you ever seen an entire rainbow? From the ground, typically, only the top portion of a rainbow is visible because directions toward the ground have fewer raindrops. From the air, though, the entire 360-degree circle of a rainbow is more commonly visible. Pictured here, a full-circle rainbow was captured over the Lofoten Islands of Norway in September by a drone passing through a rain shower. An observer-dependent phenomenon primarily caused by the internal reflection of sunlight by raindrops, the rainbow has a full diameter of 84 degrees. The Sun is in the exact opposite direction from the rainbow’s center. As a bonus, a second rainbow that was more faint and color-reversed was visible outside the first.
but see up there in the NASA blurb where it says “
observer-dependent phenomenon”?
That just means you can only see it from a specific point of view/situation. But also, you can
always see it from that POV/sitch. No matter where you are, if your point of view is “backlit by the sun at the right angle with sufficient water droplets dispersed in the air” you will see a circular rainbow… even standing 10 toes deep right here on Planet Dirt.
which is why you can create one for yourself with a garden hose and a spray attachment on a sunny day
The replies on this are hilarious, here’s a small sample:
(Alt text is included in all images in this reply)
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The illustrator is Satoshi Kawasaki, and this is an example of why it’s very important to give artists credit because if that information had been included then you would discover this penguin wrestling is like…the least weird thing he has gone viral for.
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I adore this guy. It’s so powerful to be able to provide a succinct visualization of science while unsettling people on such a visceral level. Sciart icon.
Record executives didn’t just shoot themselves in the foot, they shot themselves in the face, over and over again. They got (nominally) advanceddemocracies to pass laws that would permanently terminate your whole family’s internet connection if anyone in your household was accused of illegal downloading.
And more than anything, they sued music fans. They sued and sued and sued. At one point, one in fifty federal cases in the USA was a record company suing a fan. They weren’t just looking for money, either. The RIAA wanted to send a message — which is why they demanded that one of their targets drop out of his Computer Science major as a condition of the settlement: people like you shouldn’t learn how to program computers.
A gallery of Australian Overviews. At nearly 3 million square miles (7.7 square km), Australia is the world’s sixth-largest country. It contains a variety of landscapes, with tropical rainforests in the northeast, mountain ranges in the southeast, southwest and east, and desert in the center. Overviews featured here include:
Out of the ~320k new npm packages or versions that Sandworm has scanned over the past week, at least ~185k were labeled as SEO spam.
Just in the last hour as of writing this article, 1583 new e-book spam packages have been published.
All the identified spam packages are currently live on npmjs.com.
Here’s a breakdown of the main attacker profiles for the week’s worth of data we’re sampling in this article (22-29 Mar 2023)
a superior mirage caused by warm air resting on patches of colder air in an atmospheric duct that acts like a refracting lens. Objects on the horizon could appear to be mirrored, distorted, or float. This form of mirage could be the reason for the Flying Dutchman Legend.
Indonesian fiber artist Mulyana has taken over the Fisher Museum of Art with colorful, hand-knitted and crocheted aquatic life.
With the duality of life and death as a recurring theme, Mulyana crafts a tactile, mystical world in which fish, whales, and coral reefs coexist with sea monsters and slow states of decay.
Obround. this is a rectangle with two of the edges replaced with semicircles. or i guess two semicircles connected with parallel lines. the 3d version of this is a spherocylinder or a capsule if you’re boring. actually i lied this is called a stadium not an obround but that’s such a terrible name.
Lemniscate. theres a few different equations that make this sort of shape, but basically a general name for a figure 8/infinity type shape.
Octothorpe. A general name for a shape made with 2 sets of 2 parallel lines to make 9 sections. (the eight, comes from how many “ends” of the lines there are. it’s dumb). Also called a pound symbol/hashtag/sharp/tictactoe grid theres too many names for this.
Polyominos. Shapes made with a bunch of squares put together at the edges. goes monomino, domino, tromino, tetromino(these are tetris peices!), pentomino and so on. If made with equlateral triangles, it’s a “Polyiamond”, hexagons are “polyhexes”, with cubes connected at the face, it’s “polycubes”
Annulus. dont make a joke. it’s a circle with a hole. kind of like a 2d version of a torus.
Caternary. A shape that represents a rope or chain effected by gravity, and how it hangs depending on it’s length and the location of its two ends.
Caustic. general name for shapes formed by light hitting a tranmissive or reflective object that is not flat.
Tendril Perversion. That’s right. the name of a helix with this thing happening to it. (the helix goes from spinning one way to another). is called Tendril Perversion. it’s not a shape but more of a “geometric phenomenon” wikipedia said. it was named by charles darwin.
Hosohedron. Basically like slicing a cake. but with spheres. it doesnt refer to the inside. only the surface. it’s like a beach ball.
im out of shapes. post more shapes that are of things that u see a lot but dont know the name of
The stellated octahedron is the only stellation of the octahedron. It is also called the stella octangula (Latin for “eight-pointed star”), a name given to it by Johannes Kepler in 1609, though it was known to earlier geometers.
It is the simplest of five regular polyhedral compounds, and the only regular compound of two tetrahedra. It is also the least dense of the regular polyhedral compounds, having a density of 2.
It can be seen as a 3D extension of the hexagram: the hexagram is a two-dimensional shape formed from two overlapping equilateral triangles, centrally symmetric to each other, and in the same way the stellated octahedron can be formed from two centrally symmetric overlapping tetrahedra. This can be generalized to any desired amount of higher dimensions; the four-dimensional equivalent construction is the compound of two 5-cells. It can also be seen as one of the stages in the construction of a 3D Koch snowflake, a fractal shape formed by repeated attachment of smaller tetrahedra to each triangular face of a larger figure. The first stage of the construction of the Koch Snowflake is a single central tetrahedron, and the second stage, formed by adding four smaller tetrahedra to the faces of the central tetrahedron, is the stellated octahedron.
[Copied from Wikipedia:]
Rotation of the stellated octahedron - gif animation:
An aperiodic monotile, sometimes called an “einstein”, is a shape that tiles the plane, but never periodically. In this paper we present the first true aperiodic monotile, a shape that forces aperiodicity through geometry alone, with no additional constraints applied via matching conditions. We prove that this shape, a polykite that we call “the hat”, must assemble into tilings based on a substitution system. The drawing above shows a patch of hats produced using a few rounds of substitution.
Speculative Tectonics : A Poetic of Construction by Russell Moreton Via Flickr: Tectonics in architecture is defined as “the science or art of construction, both in relation to use and artistic design.” It refers not just to the “activity of making the materially requisite construction that answers certain needs, but rather to the activity that raises this construction to an art form.” It is concerned with the modeling of material to bring the material into presence: from the physical into the meta-physical world. dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/78804 Situate them in such a way that useful space for life may form itself amidst them. Kazimar Malevich 1924 Zaha Hadid on Malevich • BBC CH/4 www.youtube.com/watch?v=In9Hg_qIYZ0upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Longshore_i18…
Rather than being a nostalgic collection of “dead media” of the past, assembled in a curiosity cabinet, media archaeology is an analytical tool, a method of analyzing and presenting aspects of media that would otherwise escape the discourse of cultural history. As ling as media are not mistaken for their mass-media content, they turn out to be non-discursive entities, belonging to a different temporal regime that, to be analyzed, requires an alternative means of description.
Wolfgang Ernst, 2011. “Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media.” In
Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, 239-255. Berkeley: University of California Press.
“And why shouldn’t there be a wound of fear that never manifests in the form of a dream but lodges forever in a dark and indistinct place with no possibility of catharsis?”
The context of this quote has much to do with a photograph of Yukio Mishima’s severed head and the imprint it left on the mind of the narrator’s eldest son.
We might look at the history of sound recording, with its decoupling layers of technologies, practices, and situations, as a history of control of these surplus sounds formerly known as noises.
Paul DeMarinis, 2011. “Erased Dots and Rotten Dashes, or How to Wire Your Head for a Preservation.” In
Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, 211-238. Berkeley: University of California Press.
At this point the computer could modify, or not, the data and send them back to the start of the delay line again. This cycle of eternal return was mandatory, or the data were lost.
Paul DeMarinis, 2011. “Erased Dots and Rotten Dashes, or How to Wire Your Head for a Preservation.” In
Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, 211-238. Berkeley: University of California Press.
“Google is “trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews,” and other bureaucratic processes, and while the employees are capable, they “get very little done quarter over quarter, year over year.”
Hunter was an American journalist and author who founded the gonzo journalism movement. He rose to prominence with the publication of
Hell’s Angels (1967), a book for which he spent a year living and riding with the Hells Angels motorcycle gang to write a first-hand account of their lives and experiences.
His notable works include,
Hell’s Angels (1967)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 (1973)
The Curse of Lono (1983)
The Rum Diary (1998)
He was born Hunter Stockton Thompson on July 18, 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky and died on February 20, 2005 in Woody Creek, Colorado at the age of 67.
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