Another Odyssey, Terzata #34
The man, like a trackless train,
Makes his own determined grooves
With the churning of his brain.
Mud up to his axles, he moves
On his earthbound odyssey.
(Not one goddess approves.)
He’ll see the grassy sea
As he sinks into the sand.
“Now,” he cries, “for Persephone!”
A neap tide drowns the land,
While he, chugging into the main,
Discovers himself unmanned,
Rudderless, sane, and insane.
Feb. 2, 2022, was the 100th anniversary of
James Joyce’s Ulysses.
The states and territories have agreed to work with the federal government on a national digital ID system, sparking fresh warnings from privacy advocates who have likened the proposal to the controversial ‘Australia Card’ plan of the 1980s.
National digital ID plan sparks ‘Australia Card’ warnings
OUT ON A LIMB: The Chinese Communist Party always medals in moral corruption.
Profiteering off China’s regime isn’t new, but these Olympics raise broader implications. The CCP intentionally wields the profit motive as a tool to co-opt foreigners and foreign corporations into plowing capital and know-how into the Chinese market, for the regime’s benefit. Mr. Xi even has a term for the practice: “dual circulation,” in which the CCP lures foreigners to become more dependent on China while simultaneously working to reduce Chinese companies’ dependence on the outside world. Meanwhile, the Party allows a few lucky foreigners to make piles of cash. In return, these individuals serve as witting — or in some cases, unwitting — propagandists for the regime.
US corporations are starting to awaken to the impossible situation that they’ve put themselves in. By investing in Xi’s China, they’ve signed up for Beijing’s rules, which exist to prop up the regime at all costs. Their bets on China expose these companies to intellectual property theft, reputational harm and physical threats to their employees. Thus NBC News, which broadcasted the Games, tried to walk a fine line between ignoring the regime’s human rights abuses and criticizing the communists too harshly. The conundrum resulted in some truly cringe-worthy discussions, including one panel in which one China “expert” sanitized his commentary and made pains to present the CCP’s point of view of the Uighur genocide.
The 2022 Olympics felt far too much like the 1936 Olympics — but without Jesse Owens.
Everything you always wanted to know about vegetables — 500 of them
Bringing out the best in your plants needn’t involve degrading essential carbon sinks — and don’t forget the value of worms
A few years ago, I was tired and heartsore. A close relative had died and I got no pleasure from my work or pastimes. I packed a rucksack and hiked on to a remote Scottish promontory to camp out for a week.
The weather was dry and I easily crossed the pristine bog that sprawled between the shoreline and the mountains. For thousands of years the sphagnum moss had grown there, trapping carbon in every successive layer. Peatlands store twice as much of the stuff as all the world’s forests.
As well as a carbon sink, this was a place of wild beauty. A golden plover challenged me as I crossed its territory. Later, a snipe soared and dipped in its display flight, tail feathers thrumming, above a tumbledown cottage over which roses scrambled.
The way back was harder. It had rained for two days and the bog had swelled like a giant sponge. I skirted the spots where surface water submerged the sphagnum fronds. Even so, I kept sinking up to my knees in the mire. It was a sharp reminder that bogs are liminal places between land and water — and between life and death. Some archaeologists believe that ancient people consigned sacrifices to them, including human ones.
With bogs, as with so much of nature, we are destroying the legacy of millennia within our own lifetimes
Luckily, I avoided mummification of the kind that preserved the Grauballe man. The great Irish poet Seamus Heaney describedthis prehistoric Dane with humane tenderness: “The grain of his wrists like bog oak . . . A head and shoulder out of the peat, bruised like a forceps baby.”
Instead, reeking of bog ooze and wood smoke, I returned to blight civilisation, in this case the blameless community of Portree, on the Isle of Skye. I was nursing a mild case of trench foot and a new appreciation of peatlands. After that, I never bought another packet of dried sphagnum moss to line a plant pot.
With bogs, as with so much of nature, we are busily destroying the legacy of millennia within our own lifetimes. It can take up to 10,000 years for a raised bog to grow, according to Ali Morse, water policy manager at the UK’s Wildlife Trusts. We have lost around a quarter of the world’s peatlands in a fraction of that time.
If I told you that drained peatlands emit 1.9 gigatonnes of carbon annually, your eyes would glaze over. The toll is easier to register as the three jumbo bags of peat-based compost that a keen gardener might buy yearly, generating more than 66kg of CO2 as it rots down. That excludes processing and transport, and is roughly equivalent to the emissions from heating your house with non-renewable energy for a week.
A garden is one of the few remaining places where we can still do what the heck we want. I am therefore tiptoeing rather than marching towards the suggestion that readers should, like me, aim to eliminate peat from their gardening this year. Persuasion, as dispensed by British TV horticulturalist and national treasure Monty Don, is preferable to a judgy eco-warrior wagging his metaphorical finger every time you buy a grow bag.
I will therefore mention without recriminations that we UK amateur gardeners and our suppliers actually increased our annual use of peat by a tenth in 2020 to 2.3mn cubic metres. I will commend the Horticultural Trades Association for its honesty in disclosing these figures. I will withhold condemnation of its members for failing to come within a country mile of actually phasing out peat by 2020, as the government had asked them to in 2010.
Targets make sense, as long as you stick to them. The UK government is considering a ban on domestic gardens using peat from 2024. Gardeners can help with the transition by buying only compost that is labelled as peat-free. Coventry University’s David Bek points out that bags badged as “sustainable” may still contain it.
The real deal is getting easier to obtain as stockists expand their ranges. B&Q, for example, plans to make all its bagged compost peat-free from 2023. Travis Perkins has already done so for its bulk-bought products.
Plants grown in peat-free compost are also making a welcome appearance on the market. Another solution is to grow your own from seeds or cuttings. In my experience, young plants can struggle in nutrient-poor coir or bark-based compost. Spiking these with herbicide-free manure — and grit for drainage — solves the problem for me.
Gardeners’ challenge: let’s go peat-free by 2023
9 out of 10 ticks in this Pennsylvania park carried a potentially fatal neurological virus LiveScience
How ancient plants ‘learnt’ to use water when they moved on to land – new research The Conversation
Ex-Googlers resurrect Google Inbox interface as “Shortwave” email
Ars Technica: “Google Inbox has been deadfor nearly three years, but the people have not forgotten. Google promised to bring many of the innovations of Inbox to its surviving email client, Gmail, but never really did. If you still miss Inbox and how easy it made managing email, maybe the time has come to venture outside of Google’s client offerings. Meet “Shortwave,” a new email startup from a few former Googlers that exactly replicates the Google Inbox interface. Every major innovation from Inbox is back: emails get collected up into “bundles” called things like “updates,” “promotions,” and “social,” and messages can also be categorized by age. Critically, the “Sweep” button is back, which lets you mark multiple emails in a bundle as “done” with a single click…”
“OK Computer but Everything Is My Voice”
YouTuber shonkywonkydonkey takes songs and reworks them using only his voice — all the original instruments, vocals, sound effects, etc. are replaced by his vocals. The results are waaay better than you would
Measles Makes Your Immune System Forget Its Protections Against Past Illness
Historically, contracting the measles has been linked to subsequent illness (and possibly death) from other causes. In the past few years, scientists have discovered why this is: measles causes “immune amnesia”.