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Featured Editorials

Open Thread - Thurs 5 Sep 2024 - Materials, Energy, Batteries

Submitted by Sima on Thu, 09/05/2024 - 5:00am

I was reading this article (Circular Battery Self-Sufficiency) by Cory Doctorow, a person I know more about in relationship to his work with open source software and the EFF, about battery recycling and climate change and suddenly I found some reasons to be optimistic about the future. Maybe there aren't very many reasons, but they are there! Yay!

Doctorow starts off by acknowledging the difficulty it is going to take to transition to renewable energy, but says it's not insurmountable. It's going to require a lot of politics AND a lot of engineering, and reconceiving our relationship to energy and materials. Instead of energy being scare and materials being abundant, energy is everywhere (sunshine!, tides!...) and materials are scare. What a change it's going to take to get humans to accept that though!


Here comes the sun... (from here).

Butterfly effect

Submitted by earthling1 on Tue, 09/03/2024 - 10:10am

open thread_130.jpg
Had a great Labor Day weekend. Spent it up at the farm harvesting crops and working on my combination pumphouse/outhouse, just in time for the family to arrive for a kayak trip down river.
Six of us floated down and stopped about halfway to have a sack lunch. Didn't see any river otters this time but plenty of eagles fishin' for lunch.

Kanto Massacre, historical denial; will martial law return to South Korea?

Submitted by soryang on Mon, 09/02/2024 - 7:48pm

Below an excerpt from an October 2021 Georgetown Journal of International Affairs article on the Kanto massacre and Japanese denialism, the author is Tessa Morris-Suzuki:

Un-remembering the Massacre: How Japan’s “History Wars” are Challenging Research Integrity Domestically and Abroad

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