Posts tagged “pollution”

• “Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure.”
• In Praise of The Pitt, the Most Normal Show on Television
• Bluesky has overtaken its flailing rival Twitter in hosting posts related to new academic research. – via eicathomefinn.bsky.social
• How do you get over losing The Masters?
• Rick Steves is now on Bluesky!
• For your enjoyment: Here is Secretary of Education Linda McMahon talking about implementing AI in schools, but pronouncing it “A1” as in “A1 Steak Sauce” – via joshkovensky.bsky.social
• This Is Not Normal:
  • Daughter captures the moment masked ICE agents smash the window of her mother’s car in order to take her into custody. – via mims.bsky.social
  • America Is Backsliding Toward Its Most Polluted Era
  • WITAF? Members of the cabinet, as well as Congresspeople and Senators, are being instructed to wear a golden POTUS bust lapel pin as a tribute to their inglorious, convicted felon leader. – via kwcollins.bsky.social
  • Just weeks away from graduation, at least 50 international students at Arizona State University have inexplicably had their visas revoked and have been blocked from completing their degrees.
  • The acting head of the Internal Revenue Service resigned after the Treasury Department and Homeland Security reached an agreement to share tax data from some immigrants living in the country without legal status.
  • The director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that deportation should operate just like Amazon “But With Human Beings” – via thebasement.nz
  • Days after being confirmed in February, FBI Director Kash Patel was apparently removed from his post as the acting chief of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives – via girlsreallyrule.bsky.social

• Researchers in Japan have developed a durable and recyclable plastic that fully dissolves in the sea and doesn’t leave microplastic pollution in the oceans because it breaks down in the water over time. – via @oceanbluestar.bsky.social
• Early entry for the best news of the year? Ted Lasso is returning for a fourth season.
• I recently finished Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. It is easily the best work of fiction I’ve read in the last twenty years. After five pages I was enjoying it so much that I decided to pace myself so I could inhabit its story as long as possible, but ended up devouring it in just a couple of days. My only regret is that I will never get to read it for the first time again. ¹
• Happy belated 27^th birthday to kottke.org, the website that inspired me to start blogging a quarter-century ago.
• Notes from the firehose:
  • Conservative former federal Judge J. Michael Luttig issued a stark warning about what he described as [the President’s] escalating attacks on the legal system.
  • Former Spiritual Adviser to POTUS Indicted for Sexually Abusing a Child
  • Top Democrats Warn “DOGE” Employees of Potential Criminal Exposure from Ethical Misconduct – via @beyer.house.gov
  • “Mr. Schumer’s stated approach of waiting for Trump to ‘screw up’ and continue this inexplicable embrace of the slippery slope is wholly inadequate and an astonishing failure of leadership.”
  • [The President’s] deportation of Venezuelan migrants may have violated a direct court order, leading to what the former general counsel of the FBI, Andrew Weissmann, has called a potential “doomsday scenario.”
  • [The President] has already implemented at least half of Project 2025’s objectives in eight areas.

• Open the microwave door as close to the timer hitting 0:00 as you can without the bell dinging. (My high score: 9766.) – via Kottke
• We would not accept [this] from a pizza company. Why do we from healthcare? – via @greg_meyer61
• Go to Amazon (app or website) and type “Thank My Driver” in the search bar. Doing this will prompt Amazon to give your last delivery person an extra $5 tip at no cost to you. – via @froggyab
• I hate that I love you: The neuroscience of heartbreak, a paper on what happens to your brain when you experience pain from love. – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter from Jodi Ettenberg (threads / bluesky)
• Wordiply is my new favorite daily mental challenge.
• Keira Knightley said she won’t have more kids because she can’t watch more Peppa Pig – via jezebel (threads / bluesky)
• Oprah‘s list of The Most Thought-Provoking Books of 2024 includes my favorite.
• The Gas Industry Is Paying Instagram Influencers to Gush Over Gas Stoves – via Mother Jones (threads / bluesky)
• Always follow the money, and especially when it comes to climate change. As newspapers withered in Florida and Alabama, a consulting firm filled the void – using money from power companies to prop up news sites promoting their corporate agendas. – via NPR (threads / bluesky)

• A child might ask, “Why is the sky dark at night?” Astronomers asked that for centuries, but it took a poet to answer it. And you’ll never guess which one… – via @thebadastronomer
• “What’s a first down?”: Meet Tobi Haastrup, the accidental superstar and coveted recruit – via @austinflack
• There have been a few articles lately about the terrifying amount of deadly recycled plastic in black kitchen utensils, so we got rid of ours and replaced them with this gorgeous beige silicone set. Highly recommend.
• For ages the only copy I had of the 1989 Kon Kan hit “I Beg Your Pardon” was a cassette recording I captured from local FM radio, so any time I hear it I am reminded of Casey Kasem explaining how cool it was that they sampled the theme song from The Magnificent Seven.
• There’s a Threads account that is posting album covers recreated with LEGO and it’s wonderful.
• My superpower is not being able to stop thinking about an apostrophe error in one of the fake newspaper headlines in the 1994 Nicolas Cage/Bridget Fonda rom-com It Could Happen to You. – via me, Dec 27, 2021
• Serious question: Why aren’t Moonlighting and Remington Steele on just as frequently as Law & Order?
• Literally any task can be made dramatically more complicated with the simple addition of a six year old narrating your every move on a karaoke microphone set at maximum volume. – via me, Dec 28, 2021
• “To say that we’re losing the war on plastic is to flatter ourselves with a lie. The fact is that we’re not even fighting it.”: How Plastic Liberated and Entombed Us

• Everything designed for children should be dishwasher safe. Everything. Lunch boxes. Water bottles. T-shirts. Nintendo controllers. Nikes. Backpacks. All of it. – via @gatordavid
• “Only a twisted type of fantasy can see [pornography] in a biblical figure, in a statue that is also an icon of the Renaissance and the most famous statue in the world. It’s not only absurd, it’s a worrying sign of sheer ignorance, in its most literal sense: a lack of knowledge of history – religious history, of Christianity and Judaism, and art history.” – via @italo.americano
• Transitioning to clean energy would reduce the volume and harm of mining dramatically, because a fossil fuel economy requires 535× more mining than a clean energy economy. – via distilled
• The research linking alcohol to breast cancer is deadly solid: Alcohol, regardless of whether it’s in Everclear or a vintage Bordeaux, is carcinogenic.
• The curious case of two Scott Stallings and one Masters invitation – via TheAthletic
• Private schools across the South that were established for white children during desegregation are now benefiting from tens of millions in taxpayer dollars flowing from rapidly expanding voucher-style programs.
• Beyoncé to perform halftime show at Ravens-Texans on Christmas on Netflix

• Biden Administration Proposes a Rule to Make Over-the-Counter Birth Control Free
• I guess this counts as good news: EPA imposes stricter standards to protect children from exposure to lead paint. (We’ve known that lead is dangerous for close to 2,000 years!)
• The moon hasn’t changed since the 1960s, while every technology we used to get there has seen staggering advances. But twenty years and $93 billion after the space agency announced our return to the moon, the goal seems as far out of reach as ever. – via hiro.report
• If your website aggressively pushes me to use your AI support and/or search features, I will not assume you have a bunch of radical, hip, cutting-edge tech bros on your web development team. I will assume your CEO surrounds himself with a bunch of greedy, soulless sycophants who refuse (for the worst possible reasons) to pay humans a living wage to do valuable work. – @gatordavid
• I feel like every single time I receive an email from LinkedIn, I click the unsubscribe button. Yet every day I seem to receive at least one completely new type of email from LinkedIn. – @gatordavid
• Penguin Random House is adding a clause to all their copyright pages explicitly stating the contents of their books are not to be used to feed generative AI models. It’s a lovely sentiment, of course, but about as effective as the FBI warnings they used to play at the beginning of VHS tapes. (The tech bros building these resource hogs certainly aren’t going to respect copyright law.) – via @clairecameron123

• Some excellent climate news: United States greenhouse gas emissions peaked in 2005 and have been declining ever since. — via All Predictions Wrong
• Some excellent environmental news: The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife announced Chinook salmon have returned to the Klamath Basin for the first time since the construction of hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River in 1912. – via @saramontourlewis
• “Sorry I missed your call. I was sitting on the couch holding my phone and watching it ring.” — @scottevandavis
• Allbirds are great everyday shoes. They’re stylish, comfortable, and you can toss them in the washing machine. I have three pairs and love them. They’re having a 30%-off Fall sale ending October 27, 2024.
• A few days ago I realized that my sons have never heard of Snidely Whiplash. They don’t know Dudley Do-Right or Grape Ape or Hong Kong Phooey, either. I feel like I’m a terrible parent.
• I currently have a fourteen-year old. And I absolutely remember being a fourteen-year old. This video about growing pains from Amsterdam’s NEMO Science Museum is <chef’s kiss> good. – via @dsnyderuk
• In order to pass your CCNA exam, you need to be proficient at converting decimal numbers to binary numbers and binary numbers to decimal numbers — and do so quickly. Cisco made the challenge into a video game, and it’s pretty fun! – via Jason

Newly published study says now inevitable that ~3% of Greenland ice sheet will melt due to climate change, triggering global sea-levels to rise a foot, an outcome we couldn’t avoid at this point even if world stopped emitting all greenhouse gases today.

• Let’s go for a swim! (Don’t forget your sunscreen!)
• A friend of mine discovered what may be the most horrifying cause of death in the history of the world.
• College football season starts in just about eight weeks. Much of it is televised. You should watch.
• Driving with His Lordship would make getting lost pretty scary.
• The Rolling Stone article concludes by declaring we have no hope of winning in Afghanistan. That is 10,000 times more important than any stupid snipe by an unnamed “aide”.
• If you have an old iPhone collecting dust, you can easily convert it into an iPod Touch. Or you could simply try to let yourself be bored.
• Did you know that an astronaut on the International Space Station was tweeting photos from space? (see also)
• You Were Doing It Wrong is the best Ask.MeFi thread ever. It should be required reading for everyone on the planet. (Second best!)