Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

You know when someone says something like “My therapist let me know a really interesting trick:” and then they say something that’s an obvious solution to a problem you cannot imagine having? You’ve seen a little too deeply into their worldview? This is how a lot of year-end lists come across.

Friends fear he’s e-mailing geophysics grad students about their YouTube videos again.

Experimenting with finally having that linkblog: https://t10a.link/

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate, Safeway twenty minutes before closing on Christmas Eve, etc.

The Pleiades, Antarctica, in synthetic aperture radar (from the Umbra open data collection).

Maybe 90% of the plastic stuff I own would be at least as good if it were wood – maybe in a processed form like paper or cardboard – or even the cheapest possible metal. Tinplate and cast iron.

The last 10% (or whatever) is trickier to replace, but that’s a much smaller problem.

We’re getting the benefits of a society that uses plastic in a few key places, but the problems of a society that uses way too much plastic. Surely we can figure this out.

This is kind of what I’m trying to get at when I talk about aviation. It’s a huge problem. But if we had a zero-based carbon budget, letting people see other parts of the world is far more valuable than letting people, you know, rent out an improperly insulated building, or commute in a five-seat car for hours a day, or whatever.

It’s painfully easy – which is different from realistic – to imagine a society with the self-control to say life-changing experiences yes, car commutes no.

I am not an expert but I catch myself thinking this all the time.

Fossil fuels and plastics are bad staples, but would be good seasonings in our material culture if they could be limited to that. Medical implants! Certain industrial coatings! Helmets and seat belts!

The problems arise when you burn millions of tons of it a day and send microscopic shards of it into every nook and cranny of the planet.

https://mastodon.nz/@KiwiEV/111604033520122903

Instructions on cooking with koji: Now hold the temperature at 30 °C (85 °F) for at least 36 hours.

Me: Ha ha, that would of course put it right in the center of the famous Danger Zone of food safety, so how about I set the sous vide to, say, 60 °C?

IOCWK: No, it should hover slightly above room temperature. Moistly.

Me: But it’ll get moldy!

IOCWK: [sighs]

There is much about the present world that I would like to change, but it’s pretty neat that I can think “Wait, why are Daubechies wavelets shaped like that?” and it turns out there’s a full day worth of Daubechies presenting her work at an intermediate level that I can go watch for free.

Bravely fighting off the urge to think about synthesizing a green band for GOES for another several months or years.

The Western Australia dust storm is pretty astonishing even at this scale. https://botsin.space/@dscovr_epic/111569828399944670

How I know I don’t have telekinesis is there hasn’t been a multi-year rash of human combustion incidents by cooking influencers who take a bite of the dish they just made and performatively smile like they’re honestly amazed how good it is and the camera just happened to catch that totally unplanned moment of spontaneous joy.

Every time we go to Lost Landscapes I look around at the crowd of vaguely artsy, apologetic-looking nerds and think “I must know like 20% of the people here online.”