Well this is interesting

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This series is not yet finished (expect episodes roughly weekly) but it’s well nifty so far.

Geometry and history, nicely explained. Usual Extra Credits style of animation.

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This is truth. I was there, saw it with my own eyes, lived a part of it. Not at the school in the story, but students had the same stories at a completely different school halfway across the country. Only we didn’t have that kind of support there/then. That 9% graduation rate sounds awful, but when you realize that it only takes one little thing - one sick day, one car breakdown, one job problem, one family argument, to completely derail someone’s chances, then it makes sense that so many didn’t make it. Among the people I knew at the time, those sorts of crises were a routine thing. We were all trying to improve in spite of them, but it wasn’t easy. Any one event could ruin everything. It’s really nice to see people acknowledging that and working to make it better.

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This one has pipe dream written all over it. But they’ve had a working plant for a year, so it’s not just calculations and projections

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Agreed. I’d file it under “every little bit helps”, but not get my hopes up further than that.

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I can’t help thinking “let’s concentrate on getting politicians to accept anthropogenic global warming before publicizing ideas on atmospheric carbon extraction.” Research them, yes, but don’t give them ammunition to say, “oh, see, we don’t have to worry about CO2; we can just turn it into gasoline.”

I don’t know where the optimum point is.

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yeah, I felt that. I feel that. But it’s like if a software company made everything guaranteed bug-free before release: nothing would ever get released and they’d go out of business. Even if that were doable, the hardware mfrs will release new chips and the OSes will all update in that time so you couldn’t do it anyway.
Everything is compromise. Everything is politics. I hate it, my personal philosophy is “do it right the first time, and do it once.” But that probably goes a long way to explaining my lack of success.

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Today I learned that concentrated blue food dye has an aftertaste that’s just as bad as the red dye, Red40; which I can always taste in cakes, and other baked goods… no matter how sweet they may be.

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Turning CO2 into gasoline isn’t going to mean any decrease, anyway, because that stuff ends up getting burned rather than stored. This is more a carbon-neutral source of fuel – or rather conversion of fuel, since it’s using hydrogen to make the gasoline.

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Well it’s not CHOOH2 fuel from plants, but it still sounds cyberpunkish. My concern is the attitude in the quote:

“This opens up the possibility that we could stabilize the climate for affordable amounts of money without changing the entire energy system or changing everyone’s behavior.”

There’s a reason that we can’t have lightning-fast computers with tons of storage space and network bandwidth and instant-loading web pages. It’s not the tech. It’s the fact that whenever CPU and RAM increases, software bloat increases. When disk space increases, we start storing images instead of text (images of text even) and then videos instead of images. Whenever bandwidth and browser performance increases, we immediately consume it by adding more bloat to websites.

If we’re going to stabilize the climate, we do have to change the energy system and our behavior, not just make people feel like it’s ok now to burn and pollute even more than they used to.

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Whenever I “need” blue food coloring, I end up contemplating pounding a whole bunch of flowers with a mortar and pestle and usually conclude that I don’t need blue that much. I guess I know why blue food dye has never come up as an alternative (although sweet pea flowers lend their flavor to foodstuffs as well).

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*lolz!

I live in the Bay Area, so ‘Golden State Warriors fever’ is a thing right now.

Anyhoo, today someone thoughtfully brought in sugar cookies for the whole office in the team’s colors; yellow with deep blue piped-icing. It was a sweet gesture, and I wanted to like it… but that after-taste just ruined the overall flavor.

:anguished:

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Never go to one of Alfred Hitchcock’s dinner parties.

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Why, did he eat blue food exclusively?

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Should I really see this? Some things are better when they’re ambiguous.

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