tingilinde

quite a piece of work

DeSantis vetoes all arts grants in Florida

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For the past 10 days, Richard Russell has been rattled, poring over budgets and working the phones in an attempt to limit the consequences of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s veto pen.

Mr. Russell, the general director of the Sarasota Opera on Florida’s Gulf Coast, had expected his nonprofit organization to receive a state grant of about $70,000 once Mr. DeSantis signed a budget that state lawmakers had approved in March.

But in a move that stunned arts and culture organizations, Mr. DeSantis vetoed the entirety of their grant funding — about $32 million — on June 12, leaving them scrambling to figure out how to offset the shortfall.

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butterfly population drops

Climate change certainly - but also pesticides 

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What’s driving ominous declines in insects?

While a growing body of research shows decreases in many insect populations, it has been hard for scientists to disentangle the possible causes. Are insects suffering from habitat loss as natural areas are plowed and paved? Is climate change doing them in? What about pesticides?

The latest insight comes from a study on butterflies in the Midwest, published on Thursday in the journal PLOS ONE. Its results don’t discount the serious effects of climate change and habitat loss on butterflies and other insects, but they indicate that agricultural insecticides exerted the biggest impact on the size and diversity of butterfly populations in the Midwest during the study period, 1998 to 2014.

Especially detrimental, the researchers found, was a class of widely used insecticides called neonicotinoids that are absorbed into the tissues of plants.

“It’s a story about unintended consequences,” said Scott Swinton, a professor of agricultural economics at Michigan State University and one of the study’s authors. “In developing technologies that were very effective at controlling soybean aphid and certain other agricultural pests, non-target species that we care about, butterflies in particular, have been harmed.”

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pollution and heat waves

Pollution levels tend to rise in heatwaves

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They detected spikes in methane, a potent greenhouse gas, most likely from leaks, or from natural-gas-burning buses. They found plumes of nitrous oxide, possibly from wastewater. And all along the ride, they logged elevated levels of ozone, the main ingredient of smog, as well as cancer-causing formaldehyde — both of which form readily in hot weather.

The bottom line: The streets are dotted with pollution hot spots. And the heat makes pollution worse.

“If you want a chemical reaction to go faster, you add heat,” said Peter DeCarlo, an atmospheric air pollution researcher at Johns Hopkins University who’s leading an effort to use the vans to measure emissions along Louisiana’s petrochemicals corridor. “On hotter days, it’s the same idea,” he said.

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how the square root of two became a number

A nice piece on the Dedekind cut and Cantor's equivalent definition of irrationals.

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The ancient Greeks wanted to believe that the universe could be described in its entirety using only whole numbers and the ratios between them — fractions, or what we now call rational numbers. But this aspiration was undermined when they considered a square with sides of length 1, only to find that the length of its diagonal couldn’t possibly be written as a fraction.

The first proof of this (there would be several) is commonly attributed to Pythagoras, a 6th-century BCE philosopher, even though none of his writings survive and little is known about him. Nevertheless, “it was the first crisis in what we call the foundations of mathematics,” said John Bell, a professor emeritus at Western University in London, Ontario.

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checking out early

The death toll in this year's hajj in the oven that is Saudi Arabia these days.

 

 

norman rockwell's photos

He was an excellent photographer - reference photography.

a tip of the hat to Robert

 

 

when tv weather people are threatened

For trying to relate the reality of global warming to cultists.

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But in June 2022, Ms. Smith, the news director, invited him to lunch. She told him that viewers were saying they just wanted the forecast, not the science behind weather, Mr. Gloninger recalled. They also wanted to hear a whole lot less about climate change.

Mr. Gloninger was devastated. He was still reeling when, a week later, menacing emails began arriving in his inbox. One accused of Mr. Gloninger of “pushing nothing but a Biden hoax.” Another called Mr. Gloninger “a worthless Biden puppet, a liar, a conspiracy theorist, and an idiot.”

Then a threat arrived. “We conservative Iowans would like to give you an Iowan welcome you will never forget, kinda like the libtards gave Judge Kavanaugh,” it read.

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a beautiful photo of a gigantic jet display

From APOD a few days ago

 

climate related visualizations

A few are very nice.

 

the solstice

On redefining what is Summer

Here's some change from the 1960s -- an average from the 50 largest US cities