Dunedin Lightning

 

Dirty Old Zealand

They say I was surprised to stumble upon the information that in 2022 Aotearoa/NZ imported 3.7 million tonnes of animal feed. Dairy consumed 75% of it and poultry 12%. The worst news is that just under 2 million tonnes of that was from the palm oil industry.

Can we really claim to have a sustainable beef and dairy industry when it relies so heavily on imported feed, much of it from sources known to be unsustainable? #sustainability #globalheating #climate

SPACE

 Lovely pics coming from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)! Here's a preview:

Have a look, each with informative plaques : https://transfem.social/notes/9q3vm1v0x6lh02q1#pswp

That bunch of tarp it's sitting on is sunshield, the telescope needs to operate at extremely cold temperatures (around -220°C) to observe the faint infrared light coming from distant objects in the universe. Yay!

the animal industry

damning criticism

(lifted from reddit)

If you are not vegan, you support extreme agony and violence against other animals without any justification or necessity, and you support the greatest form of climate destruction by far.

prompt: Schindler's cows

And that's no exaggeration. If we implement veganism, we are able to reclaim about 75 % of the land that is currently used to grow animal feed etc. Globally, that corresponds to an area the size of North America and Brazil combined. That itself reduces emissions enormously, but we then can also rewild those vast areas of land. If we restore wild ecosystems on just 15 % of that land, we save about 60 % of the species expected to go extinct. We then also are able to sequester about 300 petagrams of carbon dioxide. That is nearly a third of the total atmospheric carbon increase since the industrial revolution. Now let's say we were not so conservative, and we brought that up to returning 30 % of the agricultural land to the wild. That would mean that more than 70 % of presently expected extinctions could be avoided, and half of the carbon released since the industrial revolution could be absorbed.

So basically by implementing a switch to veganism, we would not just halt but reverse our contributions to global warming. That and it would also be a step towards ending our violence against non-human animals.

References:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2784-9

https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2020/10/rewilding-farmland-can-protect-biodiversity-and-sequester-carbon-new-study-finds

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

the fix

A physical internet (via drive cables, a packet switched gondola network) where you can easily get most of a meal delivered to your kitchen.

I believe it's mostly the complexity of really good vegan cooking that holds people back.

This can be seen in the way the bag-of-chips product often has milk solids added to fatten it up.

The veges can be tastier, but that requires either:

• Growing such healthy specimens the eater is in awe, wants nothing else
• Adding other veges - just the right ones, prepared just so...

Which is where "most of a meal delivered" comes in.

Provide the hard stuff like caramelising onions, freshly seared chilli, rendering down and steeping (for a day?) a tomato sauce...

Such a system would have surplus, so it might push food on people in that case.

Quite new world.

javascript variable names may contain hidden characters

 javascript allows[0] this invisible character in variable names... can you see it in your editor?

    let goodbye = 1
    let good‍bye = 2

The Good

In vscode,

In vim,

The Bad

In letz,

In github, which is surprising since a lot of code review gets done via their web interface?

They can be fed to xxd or vim to show you the character again.

Or you can search for ZWJs locally (but not on github?)

s@sa:~/src/letz$ grep -rnP '\x{200D}' src | sed -n 'l'

src/routes/Code.svelte:21:    let good\342\200\215bye = 2$

Really?

Vite|typescript will not have it:

But devtools will:

Oh Well

Could be exploited huh? 

[0] https://262.ecma-international.org/14.0/#sec-names-and-keywords

Land of Look Behind

a Rasta movie. very good.

About Rasta, with some universal things to witness for all humans.

eg early on the will to progress and conquer clean water and such is laid bare.

2eaa877165bb34b1bb3090bab34b59d02a232a09

delandslide seaside highlife

shabam location coming onto the market soon! snap it up you geoengineer.

It's looking at the sunset, beachfront Island Bay, Wellington, NZ

Creator: Sandy Abbot

For a 3d experience, put a wall between your eyes and these:

What. Could. Possibly. Go. Wrong. — internet onlooker

That's what the market will say. But YOU! You know better...

What could go RIGHT!

After a long arduous IT|etc career, living here shouldn't stress you much.

Also, we can fix it all!

You could build a dome over the house, or secure the hill...

We'll focus on securing the hill with ecology of course! It would be a damn shame to see a giant retaining wall here in the bay, aesthetic as it is.

Some agapanthus are already there! People seem to have used that extensively in similar situations around the coast toward Owhiro Bay.

  Could probably forget about that species. There's a similar native one... What was it.....

Anyway.

Tagasaste trees are perfect for dry banks.

More greenery, even far above, will ooze fortitude down.

Cactus (Trichocereus *) should really nail things together long term.

  Most plants look like their root systems if unrestricted.

They are both fine on the coast.

more random info

  Via Google Earth none of it seems very steep?

       About one third of a rise over run, or 30°.

  Cactus would love some pissfrastructure (urinal -> pump -> hill), whose drip line could be slowly moved uphill to make their roots search for water.

    Even just doing this irrigation is likely enough to fix it all. Bonus for not introducing any species!

  The soil probably wants some phosphorus, otherwise great. Tagasaste wouldn't mind either way.

  Swales seem good, but only small and just by adding material, banks can apparently fall apart after digging at the top.

  Basket willow is an up-and-coming tree about NZ, a vast amount of it could be all woven together to form a basket over the whole hillside! Ha. But it's not clear how pestilent it would be there. It seems civilised in Otago.

  

  Tagasaste atop most of all.

    They are intensely ectomycorrhizal and canopiating. Unmanaged forests are worth $200/ha/yr with $50/ton carbon sequestration, almost more than cows.

    They have seeds ready (turning brown) right now (January|summer).

  Also to be a bit careful, you'd want ongoing soil salinity tests (easy) over time (10-50 years) to ensure they're not pumping salty water up there - they can bring water up from 30m deep and irrigate their community, apparently (I lost this exact source, help?). Maybe they'd bring salt? They've been a stone's throw from the sea before, but everything there was salt adapted anyway so dunno.

  Also, if we build the soil, salt spray would be less likely to rinse out of it...

    So perhaps lid some soil amongst tagasaste, and also some soil not amongst tagasaste, and then figure out what's going on from all that data. Science wormhole, but it would be good to confirm this 30m welling factoid, it was a bit loose iirc, mentioned in only one of the many cool papers on this tree. There's 8-60m elevation that we could potentially find a salt gradient over...

    Here are some I'm growing, they must be drilled in with a 30-40mm auger, which is not much clay to break.
    The unevenness of this batch is my fault due to slugs and dodgy housing early on, I think.

    You'd want more air around and under the tubes to keep the tubes more together - they got a bit slimy on me in this old fish crate - but not too together since they've gotta blur into the ground when installed...

   Perhaps you'd want to rip off the top portion of the tube once installed, so it doesn't wick moisture out of the hole?

   More on this technique when I've got it more correct. So far so good - these had nice simple foot-long root systems going on.

Hope this helps.