Social Media Dump Oct 17-31 2021

See also: Oct 1-16 and Nov 1-15 (View all)

MR DINOSAUR SPEAKS: “Let me tell you — and you kind of think this would be obvious, going extinct is a bad thing. And driving yourselves extinct? In 70 million years, that’s the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard! At least we had an asteroid, what’s your excuse? You’re headed for a climate disaster, and yet every year governments spend hundred of billions of public funds on fossil fuel subsidies. Imagine if we had spent hundreds of billions per year subsidizing giant meteors. That’s what you’re doing right now!”

Note: I’m leaving the Social Media Dumps at top of my blog for their corresponding month, but in fact most of my work is not done on these linkdumps but the Robert’s Roundup of Ebook Deals and the music discovery posts. These things take forever to complete (I’m still working on the September column for both posts).

Word for the decade: solastalgia.

Paula Kael reviews the movie Bladerunner.

Here’s an ongoing list I’m keeping about favorite sitcoms by decade. I’ll be adding to it over time.

Here’s an incendiary anti-Manchin video. Maybe we can persuade him to step down?

FUN COMIC SONG (OR VEILED POLITICAL ALLEGORY?) This funny & slightly irritating multilingual song by this Malaysian and Taiwanese singer pokes gentle fun at “little pinkies” (slang for Chinese nationalists), Chinese firewall censorship, Pooh (i.e. Chinese president) and NMSL (slang for “Your Mom is Dead”) Here’s a list to some fun Chinese Internet slang.

I’ve been a Wikipedia editor since 2006. I’ve even created several new articles. I submitted an article for review, and it’s been in the waiting queue for approval for more than 7 weeks. General observations:

  1. Wiki rules are much more complicated than they used to be 5 years ago. (Examples here, here, here and here). The documentation is really incredible, but there’s so much of it.
  2. At least half of the newly submitted articles are about living people or companies.
  3. Initial quality of submitted articles is a lot higher than it used to be.
  4. The rich text editor is easier to use and more powerful. Great job! At the same time, it is very hard to use correctly and according to policy.
  5. Templates are a monster subject. Here’s the “quick guide.” Good luck figuring it out.

After doing a lot of research, I have figured out the best way to upload images (i.e., photographs) to Wikipedia:

  1. Ask the photographer to register with Wikimedia Commons . Direct them to go here.
  2. Have them fill out the form and assign it creative commons sharing rights.
  3. Then any person can assign it categories and tags for the sake of findability. Here’s an example of a photograph taken of me which was uploaded by the photographer himself. Here’s an example of an artsy selfie-photograph of me which I uploaded myself.

It is also possible to submit documentation supporting that the artwork was work-for-hire and that the copyright owner doesn’t have to be the creator, but oh, that’s complicated.

It’s NSFW, but here’s Great long AVN profile/obituary of Gloria Leonard, porn star who later became a magazine editor and advocacy for the porn industry. Fun fact: She used to hit the college circuit to have debates with conservatives about porn, and she in fact visited my college campus at Trinity. I even remember asking her a question at the event — though for the life of me I don’t remember what about.

Leonard is also remembered as the mistress of the bon mot—what are called nowadays a “sound bite”—most notably her oft-quoted line, “The difference between pornography and erotica is the lighting.” It was also said of her, in a phrase she often repeated, “She’s as famous for what comes out of her mouth as what went into it.”

On the relationship between Chicxulub impact crater (the one that killed the dinosaurs) and climate change:

By analyzing the fish fossils inside, researchers determined that global temperatures were stable for a long time before the asteroid impact, but then, afterwards, temperatures quickly rose and stayed about 5 degrees Celsius warmer for about 100,000 years.

MacLeod says it’s notable that the impact pumped up carbon dioxide over a short time span that, geologically speaking, is comparable to what humans have been doing in burning fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

“The atmosphere was loaded for a very brief interval of time, and the consequences of that change in atmospheric composition lasted for 100,000 years,” MacLeod says. “So it illustrates, I think, really strongly, even if we went back to 1850 levels of carbon dioxide emission, it’s going to take a 100,000 years for the carbon dioxide that we’ve already put in the atmosphere to cycle through the Earth’s systems.”

Lots of information about climate change and Biden’s infrastructure plan. Outlook is extremely gloomy. Actually a lot of the sources are on NYT, Washington Post, so let me find sources elsewhere.

As a climate change activist interested in climate policy, it’s hard to describe my feelings these past few weeks. DISMAYED at the failure of the Senate to settle on a sensible climate policy, OVERWHELMED by the amount of media coverage (even I can no longer keep up) and PESSIMISTIC about the upcoming Glasgow climate conference (which China, India, Russia and Brazil won’t be sending leaders to). DAILY PODCAST had Coral Davenport yesterday — where she basically described the ugly process of letting Manchin write the climate bill — and then backing away from the bill he himself wrote. Like I said, the amount of news is overwhelming even for environmentalists. The best source of info has been the twitter and substack newsletter of David Roberts , Climate Crocks blog and the FB/Twitter of scientist Michael Mann.

Overall, we have topnotch environmental reporting around the country, but nobody really cares or notices. The main obsession is with gas prices (ugh!)

Here’s the best explanation of the climate change problem that I’ve seen –– told with graphs. I know a lot about the data being presented (for a layman anyway), and I know that a lot of assumptions are grounded in a moderate estimate of climate sensitivity. That is not guaranteed at all.

I mentioned before that I go on Twitter a lot mainly as a lurker. I still think Twitter like any variation of social media limits your expression. It can get maddening. I for one refuse to embed any tweet on my blog! (Just like I won’t embed tiktok, etc). Today I learned quite accidentally that the QUOTE TWEET function is a HIDDEN dropdown option on the retweet icon. What a stupid interface for a social media platform! (This tutorial explains how to do it right). I have relished not going on twitter — it’s a surefire recipe to have your thoughts drowned out by other random and frequent bullshit. About 6 months ago I relented and decided to post my monthly columns there. Now that I know how to quote other tweets the right way, I’ll be posting somewhat more frequently. (No more than once a day aside from a special occasion). So you might want to start following my twitter now which is @NAGLETX. Ouch I see that the default option of WordPress is to embed tweets and youtube.

Merrill Goozner on US’s failure to develop its lithium recycling program:

Lithium-ion batteries, which first became commercially available in the early 1990s, are now ubiquitous in computers, cell phones, cameras, and other electronic devices. Worldwide, only about half those batteries are currently being recycled. The rest get thrown away or lie dormant within products no longer in use (like the old computers and cell phones gathering dust in people’s homes).

Most of the battery recycling taking place today is in China and Europe, which have far more stringent regulations than the U.S. The Energy Department estimates only 5 percent of America’s discarded lithium-ion batteries get recycled. Call2Recycle, a nonprofit consortium promoting battery recycling, counted collections of just over 1,000 metric tons in 2020, which is just 12 to 15 percent of rechargeable batteries available for recycling, a spokesperson for the organization said.

Mark Jacobson on solving climate change with existing technology (rather than waiting for other solutions).

Already in many places, solar plus batteries is cheaper than coal or nuclear and is replacing both. In fact, battery costs have declined 90 percent in the past 10 years. No miracle is needed in this area, just more rapid deployment. Thus, we have no need for modern bioelectricity, nuclear, or carbon capture attached to fossil or bioelectricity…Electric vehicles are commercial and replacing fossil-fuel vehicles of all types and weights, aside from long-distance aircraft and ships, the longest-distance trucks and trains, and heavy military vehicles. Such long-distance, heavy vehicles are part of the last 5 percent of energy technologies that may take until 2035 to 2040 to commercialize. However, such vehicles can and likely will run on hydrogen fuel cells. To produce hydrogen, we will use existing and improved electrolyzers powered by renewable electricity. Thus, no biofuel, such as ethanol, biodiesel, or bio-jet fuel, is needed.

This Australian progressive group produced a fun & cynical & (yes!) informative look at the risible claims about the “promise” of carbon capture and storage (Authorized by the Department for Prolonging the Fossil Fuel Era — and Making YOU pay for it)


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