The political storm over hyphens in early 20th century America.
Interesting obituary for American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, who died on April 5.
Digital visualizations of The House of Four Gardens by Marc Thorpe, an unrealized neo-Moorish design for a house separated from its garden only by glass walls, stunning if (I suspect) ultimately unlivable.
The scissor-cut art of Joanna Koerten and the female artists of the Dutch Golden Age.
Six-minute video of a mother bear trying to control a cub who refuses to stay with her. I empathize with the mother.
African American roots music with Rhiannon Giddens: Shake Sugaree, Wayfaring Stranger, and an original song, Julie. By the way, "Wayfaring Stranger" is an actual folk song, author unknown, probably written in the early 1800s.
Benin's contemporary bronze casters, trying to continue their ancient tradition in a very different world.
This web site calculates the duration and cost of journeys between cities in the Roman Empire. Eboracum to Sirmium is 54 days and costs 2300 denarii.
A new robot can swim, walk on land, and cross ice with ease, thanks to a strange undulating propulsion system.
Mike Tyson says psilocybin cured him of depression and violent tendencies.
And Zoe Boyer says her depression was cured by Ketamine: "When my brother got his first pair of glasses, he marveled that he could see individual leaves on trees. Ketamine felt a lot like that. To be in awe of simple pleasures felt like reason enough to live, and I was overcome with a quiet revelation: this is what it means to be content." (New York Times)
From the Library of Congress Cartography blog, a fascinating Russian map of the military road over the Caucasus, c. 1900.
Reconstructing shattered jade artifacts from the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza.
Students who sue their high schools for "miscalculating" their GPAs and naming someone else valedictorian (New York Times).
Provincial legislators demand that Quebec have its own emoji.
Italy is staging a new "maxi trial" of organized criminals, this time targeting the 'ndrangheta of Calabria, which has supplanted the Sicilian mafia as the largest and richest criminal organization in Europe.
Terrible sandstorms in Mongolia have killed at least nine people and many thousands of livestock.
The Plant List: I accidentally discovered this week that the most up-to-date list of all the plant species in the world is kept online at theplantlist.org. From this I learn that there are 242,000 "unresolved" plant names, that is, there is no agreement if they are species or not.
Intelligent discussion of gerrymandering and the impact on redistricting of the way the census bureau is trying to keep our data private.
Between the political turmoil, the riots, the pandemic, the rise in violent crime, and whatever else, Americans are buying guns like never before; in one week in April, the federal system processed 1.2 million background checks. Half the purchases are by women. In 2016, 32% of American households owned a gun; now 39% do. (New York Times)
When it achieved independence in 1971, Bangladesh was so poor some people said it couldn't be a viable country; I remember reading that it was nothing but a "vast rural slum." Now it is substantially richer per capita than Pakistan, and seems to have just passed India.
TerraPower, a company founded by Bill Gates, just received approval from Wyoming to build its first new design nuclear reactor in the state. Details of how the system works at the company web site. For Gates this is all about fighting climate change, but for that to work the reactor will have to be built on budget or at least close, something that has been very difficult to do in the US.
Infrastructure: the two rail tunnels under the Hudson river opened in 1910. A plan for new rail tunnels was first mooted in the 1950s, got serious attention and preliminary studies in the 1990s, and became critical in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy flooded the existing tunnels. But then Chris Christie killed the plan because he said the funding scheme was unfair to New Jersey, and then Trump refused to issue a go-ahead. Now Biden has. But even if that sticks the tunnels won't be open until at least 2026, and Amtrak says they will have to shut down one of the existing tunnels for repairs by 2024. And NYC transportation planners say even this $11.6 billion plan is inadequate and are calling for more.
Digital visualizations of The House of Four Gardens by Marc Thorpe, an unrealized neo-Moorish design for a house separated from its garden only by glass walls, stunning if (I suspect) ultimately unlivable.
ReplyDeleteI imagine having windows for walls is something one could adapt to if you lived in enough seclusion, as anyone with enough money to consider this design likely would. What need is there for the privacy of opaque walls if there's no one around to see anything? This design is something you'd see a Bond film - some vacation home for the ultra rich on a remote island, where one might spend a few weekends a year in opulent absurdity by yourself, or perhaps with a paramour.
The real unlivable quality is the location - Savannah, Georgia is not a place you'd want to live without air conditioning, and I see no accommodations whatsoever in the design for that. You can cool any building with enough money and stubbornness, but you still need vents and ducts to deliver cool air from a central system.
Mike Tyson says psilocybin cured him of depression and violent tendencies.
ReplyDeleteAlright, but what does Mike Tyson's psychiatrist say? Or better yet, what would a competent psychiatrist NOT in his employ, with no conflict of interests, say?
Terrible sandstorms in Mongolia have killed at least nine people and many thousands of livestock.
ReplyDeleteSome truly sobering details in here.
Mongolian climate experts say an unusually dry year for precipitation created huge amounts of loose sand. "Almost no snow fell last winter, and some provinces had no rain last summer," says Dulamsuren Daskhuu, a senior researcher at Mongolia's Meteorology and Environmental Monitoring Research Institute, a ministry.
The Gobi desert is also growing bigger. Desertification is creeping up into northern Mongolia at an average rate of 75 miles a year, according to Dulamsuren's institute.Part of the reason is climate change.
Temperatures in Mongolia have increased about 4 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 70 years, according to the Mongolian Ministry of Environment, about twice the rate of the recorded global average increase.
Growth of 75 miles per year is insane. A 4 degree temperature rise, though it "sounds" small to many ears, is equally insane.
Another big factor in promoting sandstorms is overgrazing. The number of Mongolian livestock animals has nearly tripled in the last 30 years, according to Mongolia's national statistics office. The number of goats has grown the fastest, from 5 million heads to 27 million heads. Mongolian goats produce an estimated 40% of the world's cashmere. They also eat twice the amount of grass that sheep do, destroying pastureland at an unsustainable rate.
"If no measures are taken now, Mongolia will be all desert in 30 to 40 years," says Dulamsuren. "There will be many more sandstorms in the future."
So once again, greed and unsustainable practices are at the forefront of our human-made slow-rolling apocalypse. I somehow don't feel like cheap cashmere sweaters are a good tradeoff for this level of environmental destruction.
When it achieved independence in 1971, Bangladesh was so poor some people said it couldn't be a viable country; I remember reading that it was nothing but a "vast rural slum." Now it is substantially richer per capita than Pakistan, and seems to have just passed India.
ReplyDeleteIt also now substantially more polluted than Pakistan and India. It has the most polluted air in the world, its rivers are bloated corpses stuffed with rotting garbage and toxic waste, and the local northern extent of the Bay of Bengal is an oceanic nightmare. India and Pakistan have their own problems with pollution, but Bangladesh is on an entirely different level - huge swathes of the country quite literally resemble a landfill, and often that's quite literally what you are looking at.
TerraPower, a company founded by Bill Gates, just received approval from Wyoming to build its first new design nuclear reactor in the state. Details of how the system works at the company web site. For Gates this is all about fighting climate change, but for that to work the reactor will have to be built on budget or at least close, something that has been very difficult to do in the US.
ReplyDeleteWait... they're building a sodium fast reactor?! Seriously?!
I'm no expert, but I study reactor designs as one of my curiosities / hobbies. This seems like an INSANE choice. It's a breeder reactor design, which seems to go against basically all my expectations for a plant of this type.
The primary benefit of a fast-neutron reactor design is space savings. You can build such reactors smaller and more compact, which makes them ideal for things like submarines, or other uses where you need a reactor to fit in a limited space or weigh less than a certain amount. The immediate tradeoff for that, however, is that they tend to be less economical - they require a lot more fuel enrichment, and you're typically trading more compact design for less efficient and most costly energy production.
I have no earthly idea why a land-based civilian power plant in Wyoming would need to make that trade. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, there has never been such a reactor that was economically competitive with more conventional thermal-neutron reactors. The only way they ever would be is if the cost of uranium itself went up dramatically somehow.
Breeder reactors also have a slew of other issues. They enrich nuclear materials at a much faster rate, which is why they are typically favored for nuclear weapons programs - but in a civilian usage, that just translates to creating nuclear waste much faster. They also are inherently cooled with liquid metal, not water, which introduces a whole bunch of safety problems and concerns.
In particular, this reactor design is going to employ liquid sodium - a metal that burns and explodes when in contact with water. Sodium has great thermal properties for use in a reactor as a moderating agent, but if anything goes wrong and reactors temperatures rise beyond safe levels, you have a lot catastrophic problems that can happen. If things go bad with sodium cooling, they go VERY bad, very quickly. Metal fires are deeply terrifying things - hard to stop once they start, outputting wildly toxic fumes, typically highly prone to massive explosions, usually, nightmarishly corrosive, and also the metals themselves tend to easily become radioactive (even if just for short periods of time), which means they can easily dump a lot of horrifically toxic AND corrosive AND radioactive metal compound plumes into the surrounding land, air, and (god help you, since it will often explode) water.
Oh, and did I mention that liquid metal cooling designs are basically guaranteed to leak? They're utterly notorious for it, to the point that it's just accepted as the cost of doing business with them. But I'm sure that won't be any sort of problem in a reactor being built on a very strict budget, right?
None of this is to say that modern design advances couldn't mitigate a lot of these problems and risks... but at the same time, the long history of cut corners and insanely bad decisions carried out by nuclear companies trying to meet inflexible budget and deadline limitations inspires absolutely no confidence. On the surface, this is a recipe for disaster, and you would need to build a lot of trust with me (already an advocate of nuclear energy!) to counterbalance my deep misgivings on this. I hope the issue is just that there are things I'm ignorant about or misunderstanding, but nuclear history doesn't really suggest that as likely.
Also unsettling are some of their marketing bullet points.
ReplyDeleteFour times more fuel efficient than light water reactors
80% less nuclear-grade concrete per MWe
Talking about "fuel efficiency" here is deeply disingenuous. Yes, it uses less physical mass of fuel - but that fuel has to be heavily enriched, which is expensive, and the waste produced is also more problematic.
As for using 1/5th the concrete per MWe, that's like advertising that you use only 20% as much lead shielding. Less concrete might be "greener" and cheaper, but boy is it not reassuring from a safety and containment point of view.
Also, the bulk of these savings are from the lack of needing water cooling towers, since there's no water used to cool the reactor. Instead, it's cooled with molten sodium, which... frankly you don't want to be piping out into a big atmospheric cooling tower anyway, given the problems with metal coolant leaks and the risk of explosive reactions with atmospheric moisture.