Paul Sutton @zleap@social.cleverlibre.org

Boost please British folk. Woods here are FULL of death caps. Amanita phalloides. In decades of picking I have never seen as many as here on Cambridge today. It not even usually common here. It's brutally poisonous, please share a warning to avoid it #mushtodon #fungi #mushrooms

This seems important, that the 1930s German courts helped fuel the rise of fascism — by going light on rightwing coup plotters and criminals.

We are learning a lesson like this today in America and I hope we learn it fast enough.

@Alon and quoting @tzimmer_history on the article he wrote that got cut.

From CU Boulder.

grades 8-12
There so many ways to create energy beyond fossil fuels.

Students investigate the thermal storage properties of some common materials: sand, salt, water and shredded paper. Students then evaluate the usefulness of each material as a thermal storage material to be used as the thermal mass in a passive solar building.

NGSS standards.

https://www.teachengineering.org/activities/view/cub_environ_lesson09_activity1

#K12 #science #engineering #education #teachers #energy #SustainableDevelopment #HandsOnLearning #PBL

For those of you on the Fediverse who are interested in a positive outlook on climate action (@susankayequinn comes to mind), I discovered a new Dreamwidth community today dedicated to that. Even if you're not on DW, you can follow posts via RSS https://green-joy.dreamwidth.org

With so much of the internet circling the drain, there's a major corner of the internet that's still a good news story - thank goodness for the 22-year-old Wikipedia powering on!

My recent editing there inspired my new post @PLOS:

Some things I like about the expanding Wikipedia universe

https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2023/08/02/some-things-i-like-about-the-expanding-wikipedia-universe/

#Wikipedia #WikiData

Very soon telling people you went to school in Florida will be the same as saying you didn't go to school

@zleap @pattykimura @futurebird The principal didn’t agree, the day we blew a hole in the middle of the soccer field.

@zleap @mzedp also might be worth looking into PHB and other biophysics 🙂

@zleap @mzedp here's another idea for you though: polymers are made from monomers, monomers such as ethene, styrene, vinyl chloride et al don't *have* to come from oil. You can synthesise them from carbon dioxide & water & a few others using green energy. It's just not thermodynamically favourable or cheap.

Many internet critics have tried to blame social media for ethnic violence. The sad reality is that ethnic violence is as old as the Bible and not recently spurred by technology.

It turns out quite often that social media is actually a way for victims to spread word about crimes against them and document. Without it, these atrocities simply happen in the darkness without global eyes on them. 😞

https://www.wired.com/story/internet-shutdown-manipur-burning-in-the-dark/

@zleap @mzedp a few things I want to say about this topic:
- plastics replaced wood products when they were popularised
For many products we could return to wood, it's just more expensive
- which brings me to my second point: plastics are only so cheap because ethene etc are by-products of oil refining where the main $$$ product is fuel (octane and hydrocarbons with similar properties to octane),
Ban burning fossil fuel hydrocarbons & it fossil fuel plastic becomes economically unfeasible to

Increased atmospheric CO₂ is expected to expand the Hadley cell, leading to more droughts in the subtropics and rainfall in the tropics.

A study finds that CO₂ removal (CDR) will not return the Hadley cell to its original state for centuries.

It’s best not to emit CO₂.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/26/23807051/climate-change-carbon-removal-desert-drought-hadley-cell-research

@futurebird As a curious 8 year old I conducted my own clandestine experiment I named "Does It Burn?". I watched my mom use an aluminum pie tin in the oven, so I used that as my holder. I created a list of things to test: Dirt, rocks, kleenex, newspaper, glass, brown paper bag, stainless steel, aluminum, cast iron. Each with a hypothesis. I used my Dad's matches and tested, and safely guessed each outcome until aluminum. There I learned an aluminum sheet does not burn if held horizontally, but if turned vertically, bursts into big flames like paper scaring the heck out of an unprepared 8 year old. Frightened, I dropped it into the pie tin. Which I realized was also ALUMINUM!!! Even more frightened I dropped the flaming sheet and pie tin into the trash can lined with a brown paper bag. Oh NO! Brown paper bags burn! I was so frightened I blew it all out with one adrenaline infused breath, then dumped the whole thing into the stainless steel kitchen sink and turned on the water. I stopped my experiments on that day. Science is very exciting. I became a poet.

@anderspuck a pendulum implies equal swings. The conservatives after the Brexit referendum decided to exploit the situation to gain a new electoral coalition based on nationalist-populist ideology. That's run out of steam, meanwhile the Labour party is as centrist as ever. This means the conservatives have lost the votes of the educated middle class and no longer have the nationalist issue to mobilise the working class and lower middle class. The party needs to be rebuilt after Boris.

Wow! In what has been a rare occurrence for some time, a contract has ended and I have some availability in my schedule.

I'd love to help some new folks build their project on the open web. I'm well-versed in design systems and component-based architecture, #WebComponents in particular. I also have expertise working with both #JavaScript & #Ruby on the backend, and decades-long know-how when it comes to building out integrated systems and build processes.

Ping me! ✌️

#WebDev #jobs #freelance

Russia is offering cheap grain to developing economies "to create new dependencies by exacerbating economic vulnerabilities and global food insecurity."

https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-economy/3743727-russia-seeks-to-create-new-dependencies-with-cheap-grain-borrell.html #ukraine #news