The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes. If the air were not constantly stirred by convection currents and winds, the corn would stop growing
'There isn't much left': NSW town of Balmoral destroyed by devastating fire
TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI. Our Leaders Fiddle While Australia Burns
As homes and communities go up in flames, Australian politics descends into new depths of silly-season absurdity. Enough is enough. It is time for Australia’s leaders to face up to the nation’s greatest security threat. Continue reading
The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes. If the air were not constantly stirred by convection currents and winds, the corn would stop growing
As homes and communities go up in flames, Australian politics descends into new depths of silly-season absurdity. Enough is enough. It is time for Australia’s leaders to face up to the nation’s greatest security threat. Continue reading
LORENA ALLAM and NICK EVERSHED.- Too hot for humans? First Nations people fear becoming Australia’s first climate refugees.
NSW fires LIVE updates: Man missing, PM addresses firefighters
Emergency warnings still in place across NSW following a day where homes were lost and one man was reported missing.
‘Everything is Burning’: Australian Inferno Continues, Choking Off Access to Cities Across Country Common Dreams. The map mentioned in the article.
‘Everything is Burning’: Australian Inferno Continues, Choking Off Access to Cities Across Country Common Dreams. The map mentioned in the article.
One year after Opal Tower fiasco, buyers are wary, sales are slow and the law hits a roadblock
The cracks appeared in Opal Tower on Christmas Eve last year. It's been a wild ride for the past 12 months.
Your chronic pain could be making your office a lot more toxic Scroll
Olga Khazan writes about How to Flake Gracefully:
I am the queen of cancellation.”Heyyyyy guyyyyyyyssss-” begins a typical email from me backing out of plans, yet again. (The Ys multiply the guiltier I feel, and the more recently I’ve no-showed.) A book thing came up, and it has to be done by Monday, so I can’t use that non-transferable ticket you got me after all. Or I’m sick, again. But actually sick this time — not pretending to be sick so I can run errands without making anyone mad. To make time to copyedit something, I canceled on a work party of my boyfriend’s, then canceled on my own work party for good measure. I’ve started feebly sending this same boyfriend to social engagements in my stead, like a sad foreign minister from Flake Nation.
Part of the secret is not to overbook yourself in the first place. I’m a long-time practitioner of this technique — I say a straightforward no to lots of things, and if I say yes to something, I almost never cancel. And lately I’ve been saying yes more often, because as Khazan writes, getting out and doing stuff, even if it’s potentially uncomfortable and maybe not even your cup of tea, is part of caring for yourself. Human souls are not meant to be left on shelves; they need to run and play with others in the real world. Still though, as an introvert, I have to admit that nothing feels better than when someone cancels plans with me. The pure luxury of unanticipated JOMO knows no equal.
Did This Guy And His Video Game Really Destroy The Industry In The 1980s?
“Once the most highly coveted game developer — a hit-maker with the Midas touch — [Howard Scott Warshaw] had been immortalized as the man who createdE.T., the ‘worst’ video game in history. But Warshaw’s story, like that of Atari, is a parable about corporate greed and the dangers of prioritizing quantity over quality.” – The Hustle
3,600-year-old disposable cup shows even our ancestors hated doing dishes
Los Angeles Times, ‘Adulting’ Is Hard. UC Berkeley Has a Class For That:
Five Books – Best Books of 2019 – “Every year, we approach experts and ask them to recommend the best books that have been published in their field that year. Below you’ll find all our best books of 2019 reading lists as they are published on Five Books. (Our best books of 2018 and 2017 lists are also still available: those books are also well worth reading!). For subjects like philosophy, history, economics, and science these book recommendations have been specifically made for Five Books. For broad subjects like nonfiction and fiction, where there are so many books and topics it’s impossible for any individual to make a call on what the best books are, we tend to interview the chair of distinguished prizes, as they have systematically gone through all the books published that year to choose the very best. Either way, we can guarantee one thing: all the books below are very, very good books…”
“The UK Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) has published an update in its examination of online platforms and digital advertising, uncovering new detail about how the sector’s biggest names operate. The CMA’s interim report [12/18/19] has found that:
- Last year, Google accounted for more than 90% of all revenues earned from search advertising in the UK, with revenues of around £6 billion
- In the same year, Facebook accounted for almost half of all display advertising revenues in the UK, reaching more than £2 billion
Actor Danny Aiello, 86
He memorably portrayed blue-collar heavies and hotheads in films such as “The Godfather: Part II,” “The Purple Rose of Cairo” and “Do the Right Thing,” and played against type as a middle-aged mama’s boy in “Moonstruck.” – Washington Post
RTnews’ Top 200 Collectors List For 2019
“There is this great shift in what’s going on in collecting,” said Sara Friedlander, Christie’s head of postwar and contemporary art. “Collectors across the board are looking for something new that is also of great quality—in concert with what’s happening curatorially in museums and in scholarly gallery shows.” The result, she said, is “shifting the conversation away from simply dead white men to artists of color and women.” – ARTnews
Insolence and Arrogance Beyond Measure'
“God’s world is good. Only one thing in it is bad: we ourselves.”
Chekhov is always pithy and to-the-point. In both stories and letters, even those addressed to family and friends, there are few if any preliminaries. He is in Moscow, having just returned from his journey by train, horse-drawn carriage, river steamer and ocean-going freighter from the katorga, or penal colony, on Sakhalin Island, north of Japan, 4,000 miles east of Moscow. He is writing to his friend, editor and sometime-antagonist Alexi Suvorin on this date, Dec. 9, in 1890:
“While I was living on Sakhalin, I felt nothing more than a certain bitterness in my innards, the sort that comes from rancid butter, but now, when I think back on it, Sakhalin seems to me like hell itself. For two months I worked strenuously, giving myself no rest, and during the third the bitterness I’ve just spoken of became more than I could stand, the bitterness and boredom and the thought that cholera was on its way to Sakhalin from Vladivostok and that I might therefore risk spending the winter quarantined in the penal colony.”
I don’t know how people who don’t read can write. There’s no such thing as spontaneous generation. Words spawn words. Literature spawns literature, and it’s not just a matter of having models. Writing is a private itch having less to do with self-expression than with the human compulsion to absorb, imitate and best other humans. In a 1953 interview with the BBC, when asked if he was conveying a “message” in his work, Evelyn Waugh replied: “No, I wish to make a pleasant object, I think any work of art is something exterior to oneself, it is the making of something, whether it’s a bed table or a book.”
Britain’s 70-Something-Old Nightclubbers Who Just Won’t Quit
Oh, well, why not dance, listen to music, and party into your 70s? After all, Mick Jagger still does it. “For those who do keep dancing, it can be much more than just a night out. What starts as an act of teenage transgression becomes radical in middle age.” – The Guardian (UK)