Some Americans imagine that everyone in Taiwan is freaked out about a looming Chinese invasion. Meanwhile, in Taiwan, "64k people have signed up for a Facebook event asking McDonald's to allow people to order hash browns a la carte after 10:30 a.m."
Ukrainian naval drones sank the Russian missile corvette Ivanovets Wednesday night, amazing video. And on YouTube.
Hermit crabs using plastic trash instead of old shells.
Work from home is boosting strip malls, because they are well-suited for quick trips out of the house.
Meanwhile in Ukraine: "The future is now. The future is little robots making minefields. Congratulations."
Death by Numbers, a historical project digitizing and investigating London's Bills of Mortality, which contain a lot of data about deaths in the city from 1603 to 1752.
Meanwhile in Modi's India: the tomb of a Sufi saint who advocated religious tolerance, long famous as a place where Hindus and Muslims pray together, "made headlines recently after a top political leader said that he wanted to "liberate" it for just Hindus."
We might run out of sand.
Freddie deBoer, a revolutionary socialist who dislikes being called "liberal" or lumped in with Democrats, has a go at explaining what "liberal bias" really means by analyzing one NT Times article about the DEI industry. Says there is a long history of anti-DEI arguments from the left. One of his comments: "The essential case against mandatory top-down diversity efforts seems neither contrarian nor controversial to me: racism is not an administrative problem and cannot be solved on the administrative level."
New Maya royal tomb.
This week's music is Colter Wall, who has the perfect voice for country/roots music: Kate McCannon, Sleeping on the Blacktop.
Some weird new physics around superconducitivty. One day our super-intelligent AI physicists will figure out how to make verything superconducting.
New solar installations totaled more than 400 gigawatts in 2023, 1000 times more than in 2000.
Fantastic illustrations by Jean Mallard.
Pondering the Edwin Fox, a surviving, 19th-century ship that carried convicts to Australia and Chinese "Coolies" to New Zealand.
Interesting NY Times story about the student athletes who went to New College to play softball and study marketing, only to discover that they are pawns in Ron DeSantis' war on wokeness, and that the school doesn't offer majors in marketing or business. As others have noticed, none of them show any interest in the great books, "classical liberalism" curriculum the new board wants to promote. Also interesting on dumb jock vs. special snowflake tensions, which I'm sure you can all imagine.
Ferrock is a concrete substitute made mainly from steel dust and ground glass, which when heated together draw carbon dioxide from the air to make iron carbonate. If the mix contains the right amounts of fly ash (mostly silicates of oxygen, iron, and aluminum) and clay the result is a "mud" that can be poured like concrete. It seems to be stronger than concrete for some uses and resists salt better. When it is made from waste materials it is also pretty cheap, but experts caution that there is not enough waste steel dust in the world to massively scale up the process. (Quick summary, news story, scientific article)
4 comments:
Some Americans imagine that everyone in Taiwan is freaked out about a looming Chinese invasion. Meanwhile, in Taiwan, "64k people have signed up for a Facebook event asking McDonald's to allow people to order hash browns a la carte after 10:30 a.m."
Taiwan has been living with their weird status quo of a theoretical "looming Chinese invasion" for many decades at this point. They're quite comfortable in their state of limbo, and anyone who bothered to turn their brain on an actually think about things for a second could be reasonably expected to work that out.
"Some Americans" (a deeply troubling number, actually) are just simply morons, who will always favor knee-jerk gut reactions and unconsidered emotional responses to expending even the most basic levels of effort to think and reflect on actual verified facts.
Meanwhile in Ukraine: "The future is now. The future is little robots making minefields. Congratulations."
It's taking people a frustratingly long time to realize that we've been slipping further and further into a literal cyberpunk dystopia for more than half a century now.
I suppose that's the insidious thing about gradual changes combined with a society dominated by poorly educated, media-illiterate citizens. You don't need Big Brother and state-controlled media to convince people that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia - ignorance compounded over time means they will happily convince themselves, sparing you the effort.
That NYT article, which I also highly recommend, ends up on a quite hopeful note about jock/snowflake relations. The jocks discover/re-discover interests in sociology and theater, the snowflakes are impressed with the jocks' dedication to their sport, etc., etc. There's a note of touching curiosity: "How on Earth did she squat for that long?" some new nerd friends ask a catcher. One could react to such a question with cynicism and hostility, I suppose, but the catcher in question chooses to see it as sweet.
@David - yes, there was some quite positive stuff about people from the two cohorts coming together. But notice that none of it was about excitement over studying the Odyssey, or whatever other classical liberal texts the new administration has in mind.
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