Visualization

I just found this opinion piece in the New York Times from 2023: The World’s Population May Peak in Your Lifetime. What Happens Next? It starts: The global human population has been climbing for the past two centuries. But what is normal for all of us alive today — growing up while the world is growing rapidly — may be a blip in human history. Children born today will very likely live to see the end of global population growth. A baby born this year will be 60 in the 2080s, when demographers at the U.N. expect the size of humanity to peak. The Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna places the peak in the 2070s. The Institute for Health Metrics…

One day charging with solar in Washington Square Park, I saw a bunch of birds flapping around on the panels. I'm not sure if you can see them playing around in this picture. The video below partly captures their playfulness, but not as much as seeing them. They'd flap up onto the panel, then flap around up and down, solo, in pairs, and in groups. It was a warm day, otherwise I'd presume they were trying to use the warmth of the dark surface to heat themselves up. Adding to the mystery, I've brought the panels out probably hundreds of times and I'd never seen them doing it before or since. If any readers are birders and can tell what they were doing, I'd love…

Emissions of greenhouse gases are measured and reported as major indications of environmental problems. Emissions aren't the relevant measure. They distract us from what is relevant to human well-being. They lead people to say, "I exhale and poop. Life requires pollution," and conclude action won't work. To be more precise, they feel like they conclude, they actually just rationalize and justify the preconception they wanted. They miss that fossil fuels' effects are locked in from the moment they enter the biosphere, well before they are burned and emit greenhouse gases. The relevant measure for fossil fuels is extraction. There are two types of pollution and depletion. I've written about the difference between emissions from the two processes in Know the 2 carbon cycles and don’t…

I've written and recorded a bunch lately on the peaches and heirloom tomatoes I've been eating tons of lately because people don't take them. Here are those posts: Podcast episode: 834: Do Americans Know How to Prepare Food From Scratch? Blog post: When did you last prepare a full meal from scratch, not one packaged product? Blog post: More fresh juicy local peaches and heirloom tomatoes than I can handle, saved from waste by rich and poor alike I took a picture of the tomatoes so people could see how some are bruised and the skin broken. Maybe many people would find them unacceptable. In the picture below, the one in the upper left is pretty bruised, but didn't lose any flavor. The purple one…

After picking up litter today, I had to look up octopus intelligence. The first link on my search was titled Octopuses may be so terrifyingly smart because they share humans' genes for intelligence. Why did I have to look up their intelligence? Because of how disgusted I felt, but didn't feel I felt disgusted enough. Below are three increasingly horrifying pictures of a garbage can in the northwest corner of Washington Square Park. Here is the can, as usual, overflowing with garbage, nearly all single-use plastic. As I got closer, I saw people had thrown away a lot of food. The clear containers come from a place a couple blocks away that just opened. The amount of single-use garbage coming from the place is sickening,…

I once read about two percent of the US is paved. Two percent of fifty is one, implying about one state worth of the US is paved. How do we reach the point of paving an entire state's worth of land? It seems to me: First we tread over similar land to create dirt paths. Then we tread over them enough that rain makes them muddy enough to make them impassable or unusable at times. Then we pave them over to make them unaffected by water. If earlier steps removed life from them, paving them made them unable to sustain life. They become deadly. Then we pave more around them. Then we create machines that enable us to travel faster on paved roads. Then we…