I agree. The concept is simple, and it’s not perfect, but it isn’t dumb either. This is basically recreating how coal and oil got in the ground in the first place. Plants absorbed carbon from the air as they grew, then they got buried in a way that prevented them from decomposing and re-releasing it into the atmosphere. My main question here would be whether burying it only 10 feet under ground is really enough for long term storage. The other big elephant in the room with carbon capture is that it can be a convenient excuse for companies to avoid doing work towards actually decarbonizing their operations. If, as the article suggests, this is used primarily by industries like cement making that don’t currently have a way to become carbon neutral then it’s a good thing. If it’s just used as cynical green washing by companies who could be doing better, then it’s at best a wash, and arguably a net negative.

After explaining the destructive force of a single raindrop over a kilometer in diameter:

Fear reigns supreme as the world fears rain supreme

Poetry. True poetry.

I second weawow. It’s got everything I want in a weather app: clean UI, customizable homescreen widget, and you can pick which provider it uses for the weather data.

This is a new twist on a long history of law enforcement misunderstanding and misusing geolocation services.

Just ask the little old lady in Kansas who has 600 million ip addresses in her front yard https://theweek.com/articles/624040/how-internet-mapping-glitch-turned-kansas-farm-into-digital-hell

Searx is a search aggregator. It masks your identity from the search providers, but under the hood it’s still just a middle man for google/bing results. I don’t see how this helps if the results themselves are getting worse.

Nice 'course there’s an Emacs command for that.

You might be interested in the pop-sci book Soonish: ten emerging technologies that’ll improve and/or ruin everything. I haven’t read it myself, but I’ve read the authors’ other book about space colonization, and it was excellent so I would expect this one to be as well.

I mean, this is definitely going to be a disaster but I think the title and article here are a little misleading. The author implies that Warner Brothers is spearheading (and paying for) this venture, but I just read through the buzzword salad of a press release and it barely mentions them. The project is driven by an independent company that licensed the ready player one IP from WB. The whole thing very carefully avoids any details about money changing hands, but my guess is either that WB is getting paid, or they’ve negotiated a cut of any theoretical future profits. Of course, the chances of there ever being profits are slim to none, but I’d say at worst they’re net $0 on the deal, and at best they actually made some money by getting paid up front. They might suffer some reputation damage if it becomes a real catastrophe, but as the author of the article mentioned they are billions in debt, so its probably a risk they’re happy to take.

Suddenly I want to see a super smash bros knockoff where all the playable characters are public domain, and every January 1st they release an update with new characters that lost copyright protection in the past year.

Relevant XKCD

I believe that, legally speaking, a company making a public effort to maintain their trademark counts for a lot. The company that makes Velco may not care at all whether this video convinces anyone to actually change their behavior. It exists so that they can hold it up in court and say “look, we have been putting real time and money into defending this thing, therefore we should be allowed to keep it.”

Relevant XKCD

This is the one I came here to say. For anyone living in or visiting Chicago, the Garfield Park Conservatory is a lovely place to spend a few hours on a cold winter day.

Youtube in has done a remarkably good job carrying the torch of high quality documentaries and educational content beyond the realm of traditional media. Science, art, technology, history. It’s all there, and much of it meets or exceeds the quality of anything the old guard of cable TV channels ever managed to produce.

I’m actually only now realizing that some of the most established channels have been reaching a wide audience with consistent and high quality content for the better part of a decade, and yet I can’t think of any who have successfully broken into more “traditional” media such as television or or even streaming services. That seems exceptionally strange to me. I mean, last month there were headlines about Netflix giving $55 million to an unproven director who proceeded to blow it all on expensive cars instead of filming the show he was hired to make. Who decides to hire that guy over any number of youtube creators who have spent the last ten years cranking out a short video a week along with occasional longer form projects, all with a small crew on a shoestring budget. I can imagine three possible reasons for this. No idea which one(s) could be the real reason, or if there’s something else entirely going on.

1. Hollywood¹ is so insular that they don’t even realize these people exist.
2. Hollywood is so stuck in its ways that they refuse to believe these people could be successful running a larger production.
3. Offers have been made, but those offers have been so restrictive that any number of youtubers have turned them down despite, one would assume, a large amount of money being on the table if they go along with it.

That last one in particular seems unlikely, but I do recall that the popular Primitive Technology channel went quiet for a year or more before abruptly coming back to life. Rumors swirled that he had been hired to turn the concept into a TV show, but the production company kept trying to change things and he eventually gave up and went back to doing it his way on youtube.

¹ used here as shorthand for the more corporate and structured entertainment industry at large.

Are there any viable alternative sites you’re aware of?

I remember reading a comment a while ago (on Reddit, ironically) which pointed out that SFW subreddits naming themselves [subject]porn are borrowing the wrong part from the word “pornography”. “Porn” is from greek pornē meaning “prostitute”, but the suffix -graphy means “to write” and is often used to indicate “the study of” the thing it’s attached to (e.g. geography, cryptography, demography, etc.)

It would be more accurate, and perhaps less controversial, if these communities named themselves earthography, spaceography, unixograpy, etc. As an added bonus, the -grapy suffix is also prominent in “photography” which is appropriate considering that many of these communities are places where people share photos of the subject matter.

I read something a while ago that really put all these “ancient mysteries” into perspective: Modern humans with modern brains have existed in our current form for at least tens of thousands of years. During that time we’ve seen huge advancement as a society thanks to the accumulation and sharing of scientific knowledge, but any individual human today has no more brainpower than one living 10,000 years ago.

In other words, if we can sit around today and brainstorm a dozen different ways to build a pyramid with nothing but ramps and levers, there’s absolutely no reason to think that the smartest builders in ancient egypt couldn’t have come up withl the same ideas or better.

Attributing these achievements to aliens, or divine intervention, or anything other than raw human ingenuity is a disservice to our ancestors.