A ‘Big Night’ for Newts
A ‘Big Night’ for Newts, and for a California Newt Brigade
Science
Synhelion – Swiss Synfuel Project
Synhelion uses solar heat to convert CO2 into synthetic fuels – so-called solar fuels. Solar radiation is reflected by the mirror field, concentrated onto the receiver, and converted into high-temperature process heat. The generated heat is fed to the thermochemical reactor that produces syngas, a mixture of H2 and CO. The syngas is then processed … [Read more…]
Books in 2023
Last half of “Bleeding Edge” by Thomas Pynchon 01/06/2023 – Done – enjoyable. Checked out “Rising : dispatches from the new American shore” by Elizabeth Rush from the library – good account the present impact of rising seas on a few areas in the world and a cautionary tale about the future. She’s an excellent … [Read more…]
Jaron Lanier on Poisoning
Trump, Musk and Kanye Are Twitter Poisoned The New York Times, Opinion Guest Essay, Jaron Lanier, Nov. 11, 2022 ‘Extinction is on the table’: Jaron Lanier warns of tech’s existential threat to humanity, The Guardian, Edward Helmore, Sun 27 Nov 2022. Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist who pioneered research in virtual reality and whose … [Read more…]
The Crime Spike Is No Mystery
In The Atlantic, Patrick Sharkey writes about the causes of crime; “By zooming out and looking at the big picture, the question of what causes violence becomes quite answerable.” November 23, 2022 Patrick Sharkey is the William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He … [Read more…]
Herman Daly, 84, Who Challenged the Economic Gospel of Growth, Dies
The New York Times 11/08/2022 poking “a big hornets’ nest with a short stick.” Perhaps the best-known ecological economist, he faulted his mainstream peers for failing to account for the environmental harm growth can bring. Herman Daly, who for more than 50 years argued that the economic gospel of growth as synonymous with prosperity and … [Read more…]
The labyrinthine patterns traced by birds on the wing – in pictures
From the Guardian 10/29/2022 – The labyrinthine patterns traced by birds on the wing – in pictures by Alice Fisher. On a hike one day, photographer Xavier Bou, who is based in Barcelona, wondered if the flight paths of birds could be captured on paper. Through research he realised they could – and represented in … [Read more…]
Ebola – Small Market for Vaccines
From the 10/26/2022 PROMED Digest email, in an entry on the current Ugandan Sudan Ebola outbreak, is this snippet from a longer release. It seems “a long, tortured history” is an apt description of the efforts for an ebola vaccine. Small market ———— Ebola vaccines have a long, tortured history. The VSV platform used … [Read more…]
Uncanny Art Generation
I’ve been working on my syntax, my commands, my interaction with my new toy, stable-diffusion. I’m like a few hundred thousand others tonight, all working away at how best to communicate with this software to get the images we think we might want, but we won’t know until the machine comes back with them, completed. … [Read more…]
The Elusive Future of San Francisco’s Fog
The Elusive Future of San Francisco’s Fog from the New York Times of 09/14/2022.