A Bloomberg analysis of the use of primary private planes among some of the richest people in the world finds that Musk comes out on top. For example, his private jet took more than twice as many trips as Ellison’s in 2022.
The roughly 2,112 metric tons of greenhouse gas emitted in 2022 from flight’s on Musk’s personal jet — not the Tesla or SpaceX corporate jets — is a tiny fraction of the 8.4 million metric tons that Tesla estimates its customers avoided emitting in 2021. But it’s more than 140 times the average American’s carbon footprint and, to make it up, a Tesla Model 3 would have to replace an average premium internal-combustion car for 7 million miles.
On average, a normal person emits about 4 tons of carbon per year. This asshole contributed over 500x the amount of CO2 in 2022. Some additional context, Musk is infamous for creating problems for himself, micro-manages his teams and can’t seem to figure out teleconferencing. Musk continues to maintain a ridiculous illusion that he truly cares about the environment and is concerned for the future of humanity. It is all a facade. If he truly gave one iota, he could simply adjust his schedule to be more remote-friendly or I don’t know, maybe not take a private flight every day. Musk is and always has self-righteous silver-spooned spoiled piece of of shit.
I came across this excellent post on how to season a wok on Reddit. A classic Reddit post (that appears to have been cross-posted from TikTok). As is internet tradition, one of the top commenters was confused by the wok range and let us all know. A threaded conversation ensued. The last comment from a Redditor in particular shared a delightful video from Chef Wang that explains a bit about how ranges operate. Obviously, it get’s blazingly hot. So, it’s absolutely essential there’s running water on (or nearby) wok ranges:
> i don’t understand both the seasoning process and the setup of this kitchen
>> The wok burners produce a tremendous amount of heat required for proper wok cooking, the water cools the cooktop top, but the cooktop also contains a drain so the wok can be cleaned quickly (water is used only to maintain the wok seasoning), as well quick as access to water to use in cooking.
>>> As explained and demonstrated by chef Wang here on what happens if you don’t have the flowing water: https://youtu.be/uTSsXQ-9bnQ
Calendars and time-keeping, is what makes or breaks civilizations. It’s no mistake that the Julian and Gregorian calendar varieties carry their Caesarian namespace. Managing how we catalog time is a pretty political, financially-motivated and generally sensitive topic. We don’t like change. It’s human nature to resist change. It takes serious inertia to introduce new (let alone change) calendar or time formats.
Does it ever piss you off that you can’t calculate what day of the week it will be a month from now? Or schedule an appointment off the top of your head on a day of the week that’s a weekend? Or a weekday? Why do some months have 30 days and others have 31? What’s up with February? The hell is a leap year? The Gregorian calendar is a mess.
This could all be so much easier. Eastman Kodak did their homework. They realized a more efficient calendar would yield more productive appointments and scheduling. I mean, wouldn’t be amazing if every month was the same format? 13 months, 28 days:
It’s also known as the International Fixed Calendar. There would be 13 months (the 13th month would be called Sol, sandwiched between June and July), and no month would contain a “5th week,” because each month would be comprised of 4 weeks. Incredible. The entire calendar can sit in a beautiful matrix (see above). New Year’s Day would simply be an “magic” day, added as a sort of holiday at the end of the year. Also called “Year Day” or “Double Sunday” as the calendar resets for the new year, it would fall on a Sunday it ends and begins on. The next day would be Jan 1, a Sunday.
Do you like this concept? Because I sure do. If you like it as much as I do, contact your representatives here! Make your voice heard.
I think any genre succeeds from a few of these recommendations. But, a good rule of thumb, constraints are good. Typical creative constraints make you squint your eyes and see the world differently. Think of them as adding or subtracting weight resistance like at the gym. Only instead of working out your body, you’re exercising your brain! Here’s the first tweet in the thread:
I like #ScienceFiction, but the quality of a lot of #SF movies and TV is awful. A while ago I threatened to do a thread of rules for SF scripts. This is it.
Adrian Bowyer is a retired Mechanical Engineering professor from University of Bath. A careered researcher in computational geometry, geometric modeling, and Biomimetics. According to his website, he is the founder of the RepRap Project, “humanity’s first general-purpose self-replicating manufacturing machine.” Pretty awesome! Sounds like he has some insights we should all hear out.
Here’s the entire thread (saved from Thread Reader here) in a bullet-list for posterity:
The overriding rule, never to be forgotten, is: “Coincidence is a failure of art.” – Tom Stoppard
It is easy to blow something up. It is hard to have a character say something original, insightful and clever. But writers are dirt cheap. The ratio of explosions to wit should be 1:10 or less.
If at any point a reasonably scientifically informed audience is going to say, “But… PHYSICS?!” do it another way. The same goes for not following Darwinian evolution.
If the action is set in the future or the past, go through the script and remove every contemporary informal idiom of speech, where “contemporary” means at least the last fifty years. Replace EVERY cliche with a newly-coined metaphor or phrase.
The good guys should not beat the bad guys (if they do) because the bad guys have a system with a single point of failure.
Human culture has much more continuity than saltation. Have characters in the future occasionally do something from the past as a hobby – making bread, riding a horse, painting in oils; that sort of thing.
Spend money on set dressing. They won’t have oil drums in the future, nor will ship’s containers make it to other worlds.
Constraints make things more, not less, interesting. In particular, if something is powerful it should be difficult to use. For example, if someone is capable of telekinesis, then, when they use it, it should cost them a few days bed rest. And so on.
The Universe runs on conservation laws (Lagrangian symmetries). To make them more convincing new phenomena should also exhibit conservation laws.
Arthur C. Clarke’s “indistinguishable from magic” law is true. But that’s not an excuse to put in any old glowing-orb nonsense when the plot needs a deus ex machina. Go back and rewrite the plot so the deus ex machina isn’t needed.
Faster than light travel makes everything parochial, and therefore less interesting.
Bipedal life will be very rare in the universe, as it is on Earth.
Artificial gravity is less captivating (!) and less probable than weightlessness.
“Go with your gut,” will be just as terrible advice in the future as it is here and now. Plots should reflect this immutable fact.
Brainstorm a number of un-commented-on technical innovations and put one in the background of each scene for the audience to notice, or not.
It was only two days ago that the New South Wales Rural Fire Service warned the developing bushfires were growing in intensity and would generate its own weather system. Unfortunately, these bushfires were growing far too quick to be contained. In turn, these sorts of weather patterns become a repeating cycle: fires, wind, thunderstorm, lighting, and repeat.
The Amazon fires had roughly 2.2M hectares burned, the 2019/2020 Australia Bushfire has burned 5.9M hectares so far. It’s a bit mind-blowing to draw a comparison between two very large numbers. The destruction of wildlife alone is enough to make your stomach churn, and the video really communicates the devastation:
Most of the pictures of these bushfires and the pyro-cumulonimbus (sometimes referred to as cumulonimbus flammagenitus) cloud formations are really intense:
Pyro-cumulonimbus clouds have developed to altitudes over 16km in East #Gippsland this afternoon. These fire-induced storms can spread fires through lightning, lofting of embers and generation of severe wind outflows #VicWeather#VicFirespic.twitter.com/gZN6sC7meU
As global temperatures rise, pyrocumulus clouds may become more common. A similar fire-induced weather system took place during California’s wildfire season in 2018. The state’s hilly terrain created perfect conditions for not only thunderstorms, but fire tornadoes. An unprecedented number of wildfires in north Russia and the Arctic Circle in the summer of 2019, as captured by satellite images, contributed to an increase in lightning strikes in the North Pole.
Perhaps, instead of destroying the bacteria directly, the venom’s effect is indirect, kick-starting the immune system. Bee venom studies have shown promise in combating symptoms for autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. According to Justin Schmidt, an insect venom expert at the Southwestern Biological Institute, in Tucson, it’s possible that when the immune system begins attacking itself, an injection of bee venom may help by providing an alternate target—“something to chew on,” he said, “and this tends to regulate the immune system so it does what it’s supposed to be doing, which is attack toxins that are getting into your body.” While Lyme is a bacterial infection, it sometimes mimics autoimmune disorders, and so maybe, somehow, similar rules apply.
It’s also possible that the pain of the stings plays a role. “Maybe the venom is doing something to kick off pain receptors,” he said. Anecdotal evidence suggests that other types of venom may also work this way. A brief article in the Lancet, from 1983, described a 43-year-old woman in Arizona who had MS and went into remission for two months following a scorpion sting on her right foot. An immunologist in Houston told me she was contacted by a physician experiencing progressive MS who said he’d been stung by a sea anemone and went into temporary remission.
This piece from Texas Monthly was mind-blowing. For one I had no idea that bee venom had a use for treating Lyme disease. The viability of the treatment is still unknown. The entire ritual of using bee-stingers has an Eastern-medicine quality to it (never mind the fact it kills our precious bee friends in the process). But, whatever works for treating the pain of Lyme is a win in my book. Even if it is a placebo, pain management is hard.
Carell, an organic chemist, and his collaborators have now demonstrated a chemical pathway that — in principle — could have made A, U, C and G (adenine, uracil, cytosine and guanine, respectively) from basic ingredients such as water and nitrogen under conditions that would have been plausible on the early Earth. The reactions produce so much of these nucleobases that, millennium after millennium, they could have accumulated in thick crusts, Carell says. His team describes the results in Science on 3 October1.
The results add credence to the ‘RNA world’ hypothesis, says Carell, who is at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. This idea suggests that life arose from self-replicating, RNA-based genes — and that only later did organisms develop the ability to store genetic information in the molecule’s close relative, DNA. The chemistry is also a “strong indication” that the appearance of RNA-based life was not an exceedingly lucky event, but one that is likely to happen on many other planets, he adds.
The results, are essential to the Hot Spring Hypothesis and the origin of complex life on Earth. Pretty awesome!
Our planet, Earth, as it has come to be known — is the only place known to harbor life, is a pretty weird and mysterious ball of mud. We have it pretty good here. Even as we sit right on the cusp of complete annihilation, it’s really not so bad here. Protected by our thin atmosphere and fickle magnetosphere, we dodge immediate extermination by the all too occasional heat, radiation, and the insufferable sub-zero temperatures of interstellar space.
New research may now have yielded a more credible explanation for the fairy circles as examples of natural ecosystem engineering by a particular species of sand termites, Psammotermes allocerus. A German scientist reported on Thursday that most likely these industrious termites were the agents for making much of their desert home an oasis of permanent grassland.
Curious thing about the fairy circles, they occur pretty frequently in the deserts of Namibia. Researchers continue to go there for answers but then, something very peculiar happened. The fairy circles began cropping up in Australia.
The only thing Australia has in common with southwest Africa is the dry, arid conditions that resemble a desert. But apart from that, the two continents have been separated from each other for about 200 million years now, and the wildlife disparity couldn’t be more different.
Many other researchers, including entomologists and botanists, aren’t convinced. They think the circles occur because plants engage in a tug-of-war for water and other scarce nutrients. Due to their battles, the landscape “self-organizes” into rings of deep-rooted grasses, draining water from a central reservoir where no other plants can thrive. This explains why, as the researchers Michael Cramer and Nichole Barger found in 2013, the fairy circles are restricted to places with low rainfall, and why they grow after dry years and shrink after wet ones.
There we have it. To be brief, there are two grass types: one that prefers to grow deep with roots on the edges of moisture and nutrients., and the other which prefers to grow in a collective matrix with shorter root structures. A slide from Cramer and Barger’s research is pretty revealing:
Kentucky Friend Chicken is rolling out Beyond Meat’s plant-based meat substitute deep-fried nuggets and boneless wings in test markets in Atlanta. The Morning Brew reports:
The meatless revolution has breached the castle walls. Today, a KFC store near Atlanta is rolling out Beyond Meat’s plant-based nuggets and boneless wings, all but guaranteeing fried chicken will remain in the news cycle for a second straight week.
I cannot wait to try this. Here’s to hoping the test market responds well to Beyond Fried Chicken ????
The “penguin parade” has been a major attraction since the 1920s, when tourists were led by torchlight to view the nightly arrival of the birds — the world’s smallest penguin breed, with adults averaging 13 inches tall — from a day of fishing and swimming.
For much of that time, the penguins lived among the residents of a housing development, mostly modest vacation homes, in tight proximity to cars and pets, as well as ravenous foxes. The penguins’ numbers fell precipitously. But in 1985, the state government took an extraordinary step: It decided to buy every piece of property on the Summerland Peninsula and return the land to the penguins. The process was completed in 2010.
The birds are now thriving. There are about 31,000 breeding penguins on the peninsula, up from 12,000 in the 1980s. Phillip Island Nature Parks is the most popular wildlife tourist destination in the state of Victoria, drawing 740,000 visitors in 2018. And late last month, a gleaming symbol of that success opened to the public: a $58 million visitor center, a striking star-shaped building with glass walls that look onto penguin burrows.
The penguins are alright! ????????
This is the first time in a very long time, I’ve come across a positive environmental story. Make sure to checkout the entire piece at The Times. There’s incredible photography, and it’s such an uplifting tale. It’s proof-positive that when we come together, invest in long-term preservation efforts, we can make a lasting impact protecting what matters most to us — our shared home.
If you know me personally, you know how much I love The Times. It’s a wonderful newspaper I fell in love with in college. I’ve consistently held a subscription in one form or another since then. It has prestige, integrity and a wide breadth of reporting. From real estate musings, to the incredible science pieces. It’s the standard candle, few papers can emulate. It has growth rings and battle-scars like the great Redwoods in California:
Update:speaking of frontpages of the New York Times, they really missed the opportunity on a proper headline to capture the racist-filled mass murdering that took place over the weekend. A total of 31 were left dead:
FWIW (certainly better to do this than not IMO) they changed their headline between the 1st and 2nd print edition. pic.twitter.com/DOSAMFbvq0
The mission was relatively inexpensive in space terms, costing less than $150 million — less than it cost to make the 2014 film “Interstellar.”
But Chandrayaan-2 will take much longer to reach the moon than the relatively straight shot made by the Apollo missions, which cost billions (the presence of humans added to the price tag).
The Indian orbiter will conserve fuel by making ever-widening orbits around Earth before being captured by the moon’s gravity and pulled into lunar orbit.
Chandrayaan-2 includes a rover, a lander, and an orbiter. The rover will collect samples for analysis. Given the fact that rovers sent to planetary realms typically outlive their lifespan, the possibility of sending a rover to the Moon is truly thrilling.
Researchers combined two forms of photography that drastically reduces the destruction of cells:
The current microscope fills a 10-foot-long table. “It’s a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster right now,” says Betzig, who is moving to the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall. His team is working on a next-generation version that should fit on a small desk at a cost within the reach of individual labs. The first such instrument will go to Janelia’s Advanced Imaging Center, where scientists from around the world can apply to use it. Plans that scientists can use to create their own microscopes will also be made freely available. Ultimately, Betzig hopes that the adaptive optical version of the lattice microscope will be commercialized, as was the base lattice instrument before it. That could bring adaptive optics into the mainstream.
“If you really want to understand the cell in vivo, and image it with the quality possible in vitro, this is the price of admission,” he says.
This little guy wiggles and stretches like a piece of gum. I hope your two-dimensional perception of cells has been completely shattered. I’m reminded of the white blood cell chasing bacteria. The white blood cell footage was taken underneath glass slides which is why most cell footage appear to be cross-sections or two-dimensional.
