tingilinde

"candid and profound"

On Musk's tirade after some large ad-buyers pulled out.

Remarkable that anyone would want to do business with him at this point  The government is locked in on launches through Space-X though and people still buy Teslas.. Linda Yaccarino  appears to be preparing herself for a major role in the second DJT administration.

 

 

 

tipping in america

It varies - it's too bad these establishments don't pay living wages.  Just raise the prices a bit and forgo tips.  A few restaurants in the US follow the practice that's common elsewhere.

 

voice of a starwars fan

A remarkable piece on Industrial Light and Magic in the day. (20 minute video that doesn't embed)

a tip of the hat to John

 

 

sigh

Belief in astrology is soaring.  This from CBC Ideas (podcast - about 50 min)

snip

...

Belief in astrology is on the upswing among young Canadians. According to a survey in Business in Vancouver magazine, 49 per cent of Canadians under 35 believe in astrology. Experts aren't surprised as astrology's popularity rises in times of uncertainty

...

 

 

 

for non-believers

A friend sent a Pat Condell link

probably not for believers.

 

 

accents

london accents through the ages

sixty years of surtsey

A unique laboratory.

snip

...

Before dawn on 14 November 1963, the Ísleifur 2 set a bottom longline off the southeast coast of Iceland (1). The engineer on the Icelandic fishing boat noticed a strong smell of sulfur. Dark smoke emerged from the surface of the sea. Soon tephra—ash, cinders, and lapilli—spewed up from the ocean. By the next morning, a new island had risen 10 m above the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean.

About 3 months after the eruption, Sigurdur Thórarinsson, a professor at the University of Iceland, was the first volcanologist to arrive on the new island, which was later given the name Surtsey, after the Norse giant Surtur. Biologists soon followed, tracking the arrival of organisms to this new landform, which would cover about 1.4 km² along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

...

 

 

more on simone's coat hangers

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

the value of state (foreign) exports

How much and where does it go?

 

birthrates and antiabortion laws

In Poland the government's desire to turn the nation's population bust around appear to have failed.

snip

...

An array of factors — including job insecurity, housing shortages, scarcity of child care and, more recently, the war in Ukraine — is driving the slide in birthrates. Populations in Eastern Europe have also been sapped by people seeking work elsewhere, especially in wealthier Western European countries.

Yet the decline in Poland has accelerated, and more than half of Poles blame the new law. Many Polish women say the obstacles they would face to terminating their pregnancy, even if a fatal birth defect is diagnosed, are a daunting deterrent.

Now, the only way to end a pregnancy is when it results from rape or incest, or if the woman’s health is endangered. And some doctors, who face years in prison if they perform an abortion that doesn’t conform to the law’s stringent exceptions, have been reluctant to help women end their pregnancies in a timely way. That chilling effect appears to have led to unnecessary maternal deaths.

...

 

 

 

canada and emissions

It's drill baby, drill up North.

snip

...

Amid forecasts that Canada is not on target to reach its emissions reductions goals, on Friday the Canadian Association of Energy Contractors (CAOEC) predicted nearly 500 more wells next year, to 6,229 projects.

The news comes as Canada, the world’s fourth-largest oil producer, weighs a possible emissions cap on the country’s oil and gas sector. The environment minister, Steven Guilbeault, has said his government hopes to draft a proposal before the Cop28 climate conference, which begins in Dubai next week. The fossil fuel industry argues the proposed caps are too restrictive.

Despite its ambitious climate commitments, Canada is expected to miss its goal of cutting carbon emissions by at least 40% below 2005 levels by 2030, in part because of emissions from the oil and gas sector. A recent audit found the only significant emissions reductions came during the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Canada is the only G7 country that has not achieved any emissions reductions since 1990,

...

 

 

women in china

China has a serious population problem on its hands - and young woman aren't going along with the the state solution.

snip

...

Now many young Chinese women are doing exactly that, delaying or shunning marriage and childbirth altogether, mirroring the journey of women in other, wealthier patriarchal East Asian societies such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. As individuals, these Chinese women are generally unwilling to challenge official policy. But through their reproductive choices, they collectively pose a radical and complicated problem for the Chinese Communist Party.

Facing a shrinking population and a long-term economic slowdown, the party wants China’s women to be docile, baby-breeding guarantors of social, economic and demographic stability. Instead, many Chinese women, who now have greater personal freedom and control over their lives than during the early Communist era, are quietly resisting.

...

 

 

cheap(er) cryo-em

Cyro-em microscopes are revolutionary and are required for some types of work, but they're very expensive.  There has beeen at least one attempt to make a home-brew low(er) cost machine, but it was never commercialized.  Now another. .. but again will it be commercialized?

snip

...

Talk to any structural biologist, and they’ll tell you how a cool new method is taking over their field. By flash freezing proteins and bombarding them with electrons, cryo–electron microscopy (cryo-EM) can map protein shapes with near-atomic resolution, offering clues to their function and revealing bumps and valleys that drug developers can target. The technique can catch wriggly proteins in multiple configurations, and it can even capture those that have been off-limits to traditional x-ray analysis because they stubbornly resist being crystallized. Many researchers expect cryo-EM will surpass x-ray crystallography in the number of new protein structures solved next year.

Yet for all its charms, cryo-EM has flaws: The freezing process is finicky, and the microscopes are expensive. High-end machines can cost more than $5 million to buy, about as much to install, and hundreds of thousands per year to operate and maintain. Many U.S. states—and countries—don’t have a single cryo-EM microscope. “The haves and have-nots is what it is right now,” says Rakhi Rajan, a structural biologist at the University of Oklahoma, which currently lacks one.

...

 

cheap(er) cryo-em

Cyro-em microscopes are revolutionary and are required for some types of work, but they're very expensive.  There has beeen at least one attempt to make a home-brew low(er) cost machine, but it was never commercialized.  Now another. .. but again will it be commercialized?