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- Forecast: On Climate Change, Cooler Temperatures Bring Hotter Air – Augh, we are prisoners to so many perceptual fallacies. Recency and narration loom large among them. It turns out that the average temperature of the last 12 months is a reasonably strong predictor of whether or not people think they'll personally experience the effects of climate change (a multi-decade to century-scale process). We are failing to deal with problems we didn't evolve to perceive clearly. (tagged: climate statistics fallacy propaganda science )
- In German Suburb, Life Goes On Without Cars – Ah, the New York Times has discovered Vauban! Now if only it had happened when gas was $4/gallon, we might have had a chance. We desperately need more experimentation in urban design, so we can have working examples to look at and build on. (tagged: sustainability green urban design bicycles germany transportation parking architecture )
- Spuds in a Box – Build a box whose sides you can progressively remove from the bottom up, plant potatoes in the bottom, and fill with dirt as they grow. Remove lower slats to harvest spuds. I've certainly heard this suggestion from other people too. Will be interesting to see how well it works for these guys. Seems like you could also do this with some kind of bag, and if you sewed in sleeves/tubes periodically, that you could tie off, and then untie when you wanted to reach in and root around for a spud, you wouldn't have to worry about soil falling out when you pry off the boards. Others are supposedly reporting 50kg of potatoes from 0.5 m^2 area. (tagged: gardening green sustainability agriculture food urban design potatoes )
- How Much Do You Earn? – A great annotated visualization of income distribution in the US as of the year 2000. It would be awesome to see an animated version of this, and see how it evolves through time. Turns out I make just about the most likely income in America ($20k), which is far below the mean (and the median). As a "household" though, I suppose we're right about at the median ($40k). Interesting. (tagged: economics wealth taxes government policy visualization )
- The Capitalist Threat – Geoge Soros on Karl Popper's Open Society, from the mid-90s. He rails against the West's failure to extend a helping hand to the post-Soviet nations. He acknowledges that Truth may not be a strong enough motivator for most people, and that within a society that has decided to be Open, there are still many other choices to be made, but somehow fails to mention the way these two things end up pushing an Open Society closed with propaganda, apathy, and misinformation. Political evangelism – the process of deciding what (arbitrary) values your society is going to have – creates huge incentives for those who do not highly value truth to assert authority. I guess that's part of his point though, to robustly inoculate society against those assertions of perfect (authoritarian) knowledge. (tagged: economics politics popper society philosophy )
- Sing a dirge for the unused adipic acid – An essay on the unpleasantries of being lab safety officer, and the sentimental attachment that scientists have to their expired reagents. (tagged: science chemistry lab safety )
- Does carbon-eating cement deserve the hype? – A process for manufacturing cement which sequesters CO2 (instead of releasing it) has been recently hyped. Chemistry looks dodgy though, and the company (Calera) is not forthcoming with details, or even a gross inputs/outputs for their miracle black box. Caveat emptor. (tagged: carbon climate technology cement )
- Self Irrigating Planter Resources – A nice little gathering of pointers to information on DIY self-watering planters. Still trying to figure out how one might be able to use tires to make one of these…. (tagged: gardening technology food sustainability urban )
- The Case Against Breast-Feeding – Backlash against the relatively new social imperative (in the west) that women must breastfeed to be good mothers. I think the real issues are that we haven't structured our society and its expectations to meaningfully accommodate having children and equitable peer spousal relationships. I agree there's something broken, but I don't think it's breastfeeding. And I feel like it's another example of the Newtonian hangover… we're so used to being able to figure things out authoritatively, a la Newton, that we almost don't know how to deal with planning around and purturbing complex systems like the climate, or ecologies, or economies, or agricultural systems, or genomes, or nutrition… which we depend on, but don't understand fully (and because of their chaotic nature, may never understand fully. We're used to Apollonian systems, but actually we live in a Dionysian world. (tagged: science food children health breastfeeding society )
- Collapse Of The Ice Bridge Supporting Wilkins Ice Shelf Appears Imminent – This ice shelf is 3x the area of Rhode Island. It's already floating, so it won't have any effect on sea level as it separates, but that's a lot of ice. Wish we had better time series for this kind of observation. Really need the best long term Earth monitoring system we can build. (tagged: environment climate antarctica ice )
- The strengths of the academic enterprise – A great essay by Dijkstra on the nature of academia, and the problems of cooperation between entities with dramatically different time horizons. Who knew he was interested in things other than graph theory? (tagged: academia science sustainability education technology )