climateadaptation:
kateoplis:
Nope, this is not a still from Blade Runner. It’s smog in Beijing.
Some of my friends in Beijing have said the air burns their eyes and lungs. Here’s a picture of my colleague with his double-barreled air mask. Intense. Note he’s wearing a trash bag to protect his suit from the dirty air when he goes out.
Read moreRead moreOnce the Dragon is attached to the forward Harmony module, the station’s robot arm will be used to pull the BEAM pallet from the cargo craft’s unpressurized payload bay and attach it to the aft hatch of the port-side Tranquility module, 90 degrees up from the familiar multi-window Earth-facing cupola compartment. The space station crew then will activate the BEAM’s pressurization system to inflate it.
Over the course of its two-year test run, instruments will measure its structural integrity and leak rate, along with temperature and radiation levels. The hatch leading into the module will remain mostly closed except for periodic visits by space station crew members for inspections and data collection. Following the test run, the module will be detached and jettisoned from the station.
Video of a glacier literally exploding. It’s called a “jökulhlaup,” a type of glacial flood caused by volcanic or geothermal pressure. An extremely rare event, it’s rarely caught on camera. The above catastrophic jökulhlaup occurred in 2010 when the Eyjafjallajökull erupted.
A jökulhlaup (Icelandic pronunciation: [ˈjœːkʏl̥ˌl̥øip]) is a glacial outburst flood. It is an Icelandic term that has been adopted by the English language. It originally referred to the well-known subglacial outburst floods from Vatnajökull, Iceland which are triggered by geothermal heating and occasionally by a volcanic subglacial eruption, but it is now used to describe any large and abrupt release of water from a subglacial or proglacial lake/reservoir.
Since jökulhlaups emerge from hydrostatically-sealed lakes with floating levels far above the threshold, their peak discharge can be much larger than that of a marginal or extra-marginal lake burst. The hydrograph of a jökulhlaup from Vatnajökull typically either climbs over a period of weeks with the largest flow near the end, or it climbs much faster during the course of some hours. These patterns are suggested to reflect channel melting, and sheet flow under the front, respectively.
Similar processes on a very large scale occurred during the deglaciation of North America after the last ice age (e.g. Lake Agassiz), and presumably at earlier times, although the geological record is not well preserved. Via Wikipedia (great entry!)
Read moreUpdate on Google Glasses.
Babak Parviz, head of Project Glass at Google has given an interview updating some of the progress since they were first shown off Mid-2012.
Among other information, he describes how the glasses are currently controlled:
Right now, we have a touch pad on the device that allows people to change things on the device if they wish to do so. We have also experimented a lot with using voice commands. We have full audio in and audio out, which is a nice, natural way of interacting with something that you’d wear and always have with you. We have also experimented with some head gestures.
Check out the full interview here.
Tim O’Reilly is a very smart guy, and even though he is a dyed-in-the-wool technophile, he hasn’t let that blind him:
Tim O’Reilly, The Rise Of Anti-Intellectualism And The End Of Progress
For so many in the techno-elite, even those who don’t entirely subscribe to the unlimited optimism of the Singularity, the notion of perpetual progress and economic growth is somehow taken for granted. As a former classicist turned technologist, I’ve always lived with the shadow of the fall of Rome, the failure of its intellectual culture, and the stasis that gripped the Western world for the better part of a thousand years. What I fear most is that we will lack the will and the foresight to face the world’s problems squarely, but will instead retreat from them into superstition and ignorance.
[…]
Yes, we may find technological solutions that propel us into a new golden age of robots, collective intelligence, and an economy built around “the creative class.” But it’s at least as probable that as we fail to find those solutions quickly enough, the world falls into apathy, disbelief in science and progress, and after a melancholy decline, a new dark age.
Civilizations do fail. We have never yet seen one that hasn’t. The difference is that the torch of progress has in the past always passed to another region of the world. But we’ve now, for the first time, got a single global civilization. If it fails, we all fail together.
Yes, we’ve become entangled, and our fate will be shared. To avoid the endarkment will require a great deal of hard work, and the hardest part might be the necessary first step: realizing that we are at a pivotal moment, and that just about everything must change.
He’s as right as he is wrong: There’s still plenty of edges left to rebuild from.
Tim O’Reilly on The Endarkment
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The Committee to Nuke Elysium 