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Whoa, weird. And bad.
Why? It has to do with one of the stranger mechanisms in ice physics. Glaciers, it turns out, don’t just alleviate sea-level rise by freezing water and keeping it out of the ocean. Their gravity fields are strong enough that they actually attract ocean water from elsewhere on the planet. The farther you go from a certain patch of glacier, the greater the gravitational effects—and West Antartica is very far from the United States. So Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers essentially swaddle themselves with water that would otherwise slosh against the beaches of the East Coast.
But if West Antarctica’s ice melts, and it loses mass, then its gravitational field will also lose its protective power. And North America will suffer the consequences. For example, for every bit of West Antarctic ice that tumbles into the sea, sea levels in Boston will bear an additional sort of gravity tax of 25 percent.
“For every centimeter [of sea-level rise] from West Antarctica, Boston feels one and a quarter centimeters. And that extends down the East Coast,” said DeConto. -
A consequence of so much information being out on the internet is that it's harder to tell what's authoritative, even in non-political cases. When I need medical information or information about a business's policies, I search, then end up making a phone call to get an answer I can trust.
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Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six.
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11-4-3-4. It was hot, but the bike path shade kept it tolerable.
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Two of the panelists on the latest episode of Talking Politics advise the common citizen to accept the legitimacy of the other side for the sake of democracy. I kind of see where they're coming from, but no, I cannot accept Trump as legitimate, given the voter suppression, micropropaganda (which they've discussed on that podcast), and interference from a foreign totalitarian state that he has benefitted from. Nor can I accept white supremacy as a legitimate viewpoint. That is in part what has triggered this break in the faith in democracy, and that is why it is a bit of a circular answer to advise people to see the other side as legitimate.
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Huh, Spain has gotten out of its economic depression. No idea if people are actually living well, but I didn't expect to hear about any sort of recovery.
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"I didn't ate the banana bread at all. I threw up the banana bread."
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I listened Sepultura's Manifest for the first time in a long time. It is a song that prosaically relates the events of the Carandiru massacre, in which the Brazilian military responded to a riot by pushing prisoners into their cells, then shooting them. 111 prisoners were killed that day.
As a kid, the song seemed heavy but really distant. It was a thing that happened in far-off Brazil, the Land of Chaos A.D., as I subconsciously reduced it to, having had no reference points to Brazil other than Sepultura.
Now, in light of the attitude of the US president, the 90% of Republicans that support him, ICE, and the police, it would not seem out of place if it happened here. -
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I hate to take the dystopian route, but YouTube’s role in spreading this “crisis actor” content and hosting thousands of false videos is akin to a parasitic relationship with the public. This genre of videos is especially troublesome, since the content has targeted (individual) effects as well as the potential to trigger mass public reactions.
The view count for 50 of the top mass shooting-related conspiracy videos is around 50 million. Not every single video overlaps directly with conspiracy-related subjects, but it’s worth pointing out that these 8842 videos have registered almost four billion (3,956,454,363) views. -
