Obsidian Wings

Stuff happening

An open thread. Georgia is a brand of canned coffee sold in Asia, originally a Coca-Cola and Nescafe collaboration, but then, Coca-Cola took over the brand. Anyway, it seemed apropos.

Another thing, we had a bizarre spike in visits two weeks ago. Here is the jump and two days on either side.

2023-08-09	314
2023-08-10	368
2023-08-11	4874
2023-08-12	282
2023-08-13	318

Anything happen on August 11th?

Climate change and geoengineering

by liberal japonicus

I'm not sure about this, but I seem to recall a couple of years ago a spate of articles about dealing with climate change through geoengineering, but with the current weather problems around the world, I'm not seeing them. I can adduce several possible reasons, listed in order of likelihood:

1. I'm not looking in the right places
2. People have given up
3. A cabal of industrialists has cut the legs off these solutions
4. People have realized the issues and have sworn off quick fixes
5. There are actual problems to these solutions that need to be worked out and journalists have learned not to tout them as transformative

Like I said, order of likelihood. A quick dive indicates there are three broad possibilities

1. Removing CO2 from the atmosphere
2. Injecting particulate matter into the atmosphere to reduce the incoming shortwave radiation
3. increasing the albedo to reflect more short-wave radiation rather than allow it to be converted to long wave radiation.

While reason 5 is highly unlikely, I'd like to think that the folks here would prefer (as I would) to talk about them. Here's a good starter
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/geoengineering-is-not-a-quick-fix-for-the-climate-crisis-new-analysis-shows/

And this page has more details
https://carnegieendowment.org/2017/08/21/understanding-climate-engineering-pub-72846

Why this interests me is that here in Japan, we are being struck by increasingly more powerful typhoons and really astonishing heat effects. While this story may be an outlier, there are other stories of people suffering from the heat. Yet I don't get a feeling of 'why doesn't someone do something?' This might be the distance between my internal psychology and the general Japanese psyche. But reading other sources outside of Japan, it seems like geoengineering has gone missing, and I'm not sure why. Is it that polities are so divided that proposals along these lines would just be seized on as another anti-government lever? Or are finances so bad that the economics of this are just not going to happen? Or that current governments have so many problems to deal with that they can't devote any effort along these lines? Or, improbably, have they thought better of this?

This last link is a paper that discusses the Japanese public's perception of geoengineering. It shows a different reaction than I think you would get in the US.

Anyway, another post to talk about the weather. Have at it.

History Lessons

by JanieM

Taking off from lj’s thread, I confess to some bemusement at the worry people express these days over children’s screen time. It’s not like screen time is new; we watched TV all the time when I was a kid. I could sit here all day listing the sitcoms and cartoons and TV dramas we tuned into faithfully every week, or in some cases every day.

Walt Disney was the source of some of both: The Wonderful World of Color on Sunday evenings, and The Mickey Mouse Club every weekday afternoon. Disney offerings were so pervasive that I was pretty sure the world would end if Walt Disney ever died.

I was lucky enough to visit Disneyland in 1961, at the age of 11, and I was dazzled beyond measure. I went again in 1972, by which time the world had changed, or I had changed, or both. I was just out of college, with a world view turned upside down. In the soldiers’ graveyard in Frontierland I saw a gravestone for a brave lieutenant etched with the inscription, “He died fighting for the right.” 

"The right," of course, was not the political right (as we might read it carelessly today), but the “moral” right – i.e., the killing of Native Americans to further the cause of stealing their land. My view of Disney was changed forever.

Although it’s not all that much bigger than the fort in Frontierland, the picture below shows not a fake fort in an amusement park but a refurbished real fort (now a museum): Fort Western in Augusta, Maine, where I go now and then with a camera to explore the geometry of stockades, rooftops, and sometimes piles of snow.

Bigger version of the picture, at Flickr.

Open thread.

Whatcha watching?

by liberal japonicus

What's a old fart to do? Facebook slides into irrelevance, Instagram is a bridge too far, and Tik-tok might as well be from another Galaxy (not to mention X/Twitter), I end up going to Youtube. I use it to show things to students and it is possible to curate lists of videos, but it does wreak havoc with the algorithms. But I thought I'd crack open a thread and ask what folks are watching. For me, a couple of things

I like the Asianometry channel, the person who makes the videos is in Taiwan. I found him because he did some enlightening videos about TSMC, which is building two factories in my hometown, but stayed because he has a lot of interesting takes, not all necessarily confined to Asia. He has a Patreon channel.

The Roseanvil channel, where he cuts modern day and historic boots in half and discusses how they are made and what strictures are involved. I started by clicking on him cutting a Japanese military boot in half and I was off.

My seminar is about Marvel comics and the MCU, so a lot of videos related to that.

PMQs, usually on the Guardian channel

Flexibility posts, which is a cop-out, if I would spend the time actually stretching, I might get more flexible.

Two threads I'm an slowly weaning myself from, I was watching beekeeping videos, which included channels of people dealing with massive hornet nest, which I think started when I was looking at some killer hornet videos in Japanese and hoofed animal foot care videos, probably when I googled some stuff about why horses should have horseshoes. Fortunately, those have stopped popping up, especially after my wife said that the buzzing really bothered her.

So what are y'all watching?

Fantasy Land

by JanieM

I could note the reality of details like the utility pole, the shed, and the float thingie that's sitting under a tree in the middle distance, but the feeling that the picture gives me is quite different from that reality.

In my imagination, every time I look at it I think of a stopping place on a long ago journey. It doesn’t look like the upper portion of a public beach set in a modern town (however tiny and rural), it looks like a place in the wilderness that some travelers come upon with relief (a clearing is nice, water is nice), that gives them the possibility of a resting place before they have to continue their journey.

All by itself the picture has cut out of my perception any sense of the reality of what I know is behind me (my house...), or in front of me just to the right (the town beach), or to the far right (a restaurant...).

It’s the edge of winter, when the water is almost but not quite frozen over. It’s early morning (early for me, at least)—which, now that I think of it, may be why it looks like fantasy land to me.

*****

I figure pictures are nice even when it's quiet around here. Open thread.