reverie, altruism & nostalgia.

Apr
08

Apr
03

climateadaptation:

This “invention” keeps popping up in my daily enviro-reading. It’s being hyped by lefty-enviro media as the savior of our ocean garbage troubles called the Great Ocean Garbage Patch (actually, there are 6 patches). Garbage patches are huge, semi-floating patches of garbage and plastic in our oceans. They’re accumulations of garbage dumped directly into the oceans from cities, rivers, ships, and beaches. The trash gets caught in currents, and collects in large “patches” of ugliness. They kill hundreds of thousands of birds, fish, marine mammals every year.
As a solution to this problem, a young man invented the above conveyor belt/floating boom robot machine to help collect and appropriately dispose of this terrible situation.
From engineeringisawesome:

19-Year-Old Student Develops Ocean Cleanup Array That Could Remove 7,250,000 Tons Of Plastic From the World’s Oceans
19-year-old Boyan Slat has unveiled plans to create an Ocean Cleanup Array that could remove 7,250,000 tons of plastic waste from the world’s oceans. The device consists of an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms that could be dispatched to garbage patches around the world.
Instead of moving through the ocean, the array would span the radius of a garbage patch, acting as a giant funnel. The angle of the booms would force plastic in the direction of the platforms, where it would be separated from plankton, filtered and stored for recycling.

To be clear - it hasn’t been built, it doesn’t exist. And I’m sorry to say, this exciting device cannot - in it’s current concept - appropriately address the problem. I get what this young man is proposing, but it is false hope. The problem is so huge and way far beyond a gadget(s) like this to handle.
Here are some reasons why it won’t work (for now):
Laws protecting the oceans and its animals. The first thing that came to mind when I saw this was: “Jeez, this thing will slaughter thousands of marine species and violate countless animal and habitat laws.” For example, if an endangered or listed turtle, fish, mammal, or bird species got caught in the contraption, the owners would be in serious legal trouble.
They’d pay more fines than I can conceive. And since there are 6(!) garbage patches around the world (not just the one in the Pacific we hear so much about), the owners would have to navigate domestic and international laws from a variety of countries. From the U.S., see, Protecting Marine Mammals and Endangered Marine Species from the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy for a list of domestic laws that would obliterate this young man’s invention if it caught any protected animals.
Further, and with bitter irony, if the thing tipped they would be fined for polluting the ocean! I know - ironic. But laws prevent vessels from dumping into the oceans regardless of the source or intent of the vessel - no free passes kiddies!
Plastic doesn’t really float. The plastic in the 6(!) Great Ocean Garbage Patches are well below the surface - not floating on it. The trouble is that plastic in question are tiny sized bits about the size of a fingernail. The patches are not great swathes of floating bottles and discarded tech packaging, but teeny tiny pieces of plastic suspended many feet below the surface. Floating trash picker like this would be utterly ineffective. See:
It’s too small. Again, with 5 patches in the sub-tropical oceans one one in the Arctic, this size of this contraption is the equivalent of floating a toothpick on the sea. It is just too tiny to address a problem tens of thousands of miles wide. You’d have to deploy thousands of these at a cost of billions.
Lack of political guts. With little (perhaps zero) political or international support to clean up the ocean’s trash, I’m sorry to say there’s near zero hope for such a project to come to life. This is especially true if it doesn’t have a clear return on investment. It’s true that there are a myriad of ecosystems services, fisheries, shipping, tourism, and ocean economic arguments. These are noble, well reasoned, fact based arguments. But we must look squarely to reality and recognize the paltry support from the general public to clean up this trash. Worse, there are no politicians, country platforms, nor private-sector actors effectively arguing to eliminate existing plastic from the oceans. It is a sad reality, but we must be clear about such things. (See also a government supported, interesting project called The Great Drifter Program, which tracks plastic around the world’s oceans by satellite).
Ocean storms and waves. Floating booms are not known for their durability. And waves regularly top 30 even 60 feet in the open oceans (see, Marine Hazards). The sturdiest, strongest ships in the world cannot survive in open waters for long, never mind flimsy floating booms. This machine, noble as it is, will simply shred into more tiny pieces of plastic in no time. Any number of hazards could sink, shred, pull down, ensnare, or otherwise doom the project to a depthly doom of doom.
Shipping routes. See this map for a reference starting point. It is unclear how this contraption would not get in the way of the tens of thousands of ships that travel right through the patches.
Moral hazard. Counter intuitively, such an invention could create more plastic pollution, not less. It’s that feeling you get when you litter either on accident or on purpose in cities: <shrug> “Meh, someone else will clean it up.”
Moral hazard is tricky. It’s the tendency to be more willing to take a risk, knowing that the potential costs or burdens of taking such risk will be borne, in whole or in part, by others (see here). It is well known that when people go “green” they actually use more energy and consumer more products. People drive faster when behind the wheel of a bigger vehicle, use more energy when they change their light bulbs to energy efficient ones, drive more when they purchase electric vehicles, etc etc.
The same holds for manufacturers and polluters. If someone else is cleaning up the plastic in the ocean, and there are little to no fines for dumping, then it becomes cost effective to just dump more plastic into the oceans.
To be clear, dear readers, I support this young man’s invention. The above criticisms serve to highlight reality and temper the hype…

Mar
27

Mar
24

69,697 notes

Feb
17

Feb
12

Jan
02

hisnamewasbeanni:

shapefutures:

hisnamewasbeanni:

mrskaaay:

starfaise:

faery-cadence:

hadeniikuze:

bonjourentrez:

dawnofthesecondday:

How do Japanese multiply?

Well fuck my life if only I had known this in school >_____<

FUCK

THE

WHAT

GO

FUCK

YOURSELF

This is something I will teach my children.

This is a SUPERIOR method of multiplication and if I had known this before, omfg.

I might not have failed math three times.

omfg this is amazing my child will learn this yep.

Mind = blown

Holy…
What.

When I’m awake enough to have any brain power left I’m figuring out why this works, unless it’s a rather basic thing that I should be seeing but am overthinking. Right now I’m fumbling with possibilities of array and place value and squinting at the screen to see where things fit.

Okay, got it.
It’s basically the same principle as is behind: (a+b)(c+d) = ac+ad+bc+bd
To use their example:
21*13
= (20*10) + (20*3) + (1*10) + (1*3)
= 200 + 60 + 10 + 3
= 200 + 70 + 3 (This is the step that they “jump to” after counting the dots)
= 273
You do have to be careful if multiplying numbers with different numbers of digits, though. It still works, but is complicated a tiny bit.
You have to be more careful again, when multiplying a value with one of its digits as 0.
But overall, I really like this process. It doesn’t have a whole lot of use in secondary maths (as most students should really have calculators), but could be an interesting and fun exercise to try.

(via picturesinthestars)

79,512 notes

Dec
02

1,732 notes

Nov
04

145,993 notes

Nov
01

lovechampagnekisses:

In the nineteenth century, a morbid and curious custom has spread to various parts of the world: the photos were ”Post Mortem”.”Post Mortem” comes from Latin, meaning after death.The photos ”Post Mortem” apparently originated in England, when Queen Victoria asked to photograph the corpse of an acquaintance or a relative, so she can keep as a souvenir.soon after, this idea spread around the world, keeping a morbid reminder of loved ones that have passed on.Even today, as strange as it may seem, some places still have this custom.
The girl who is standing in the photo is the one who is dead.
This is a classic example of photographic art.
Notice the hands
for people wondering how the corpse is standing up, there is a posing stand supporting the body it’s very hard to see but the stand is supporting the neck, arms and back.

the girl in this picture has her eyes open, but in some cases the photographer will paint pupils on the eye lids to make it seem like they are wide awake

Sep
29

calvinklein:

Celebrating 30 years of Calvin Klein Underwear.

Sep
14

30,545 notes

Jul
10

599 notes

May
25

discoverynews:

Is This a Parrot on Mars?
A new paper claims this is not a Rorschach test for the extraterrestrially challenged, but an anatomically correct, three-dimensional rendering of a parrot on Mars that is too accurate for chance.
So concludes an independent team of two geologists, three veterinarians and a sculptor — who spent six years hashing out the details of three images from NASA’s now-defunct Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft taken between April 2000 and December 2005.
What is generically described by NASA as “repeat layered material and rectilinear ridges” in its description of Mars Global Surveyor photo No. S13/01480, actually includes an “avian-shaped formation that exhibits a unique set of proportional features,” says independent researchers Michael Dale, George Haas, James Miller, William Saunders and veterinarians A.J. Cole, Joseph Friedlander and Susan Orosz, in a paper in the Journal of Scientific Exploration.
keep reading

May
24

23,489 notes