Snow fell yesterday.
Category: climate, environment
World Smiles Tentatively
On Wednesday January 20 comes the inauguration of Joe Biden, 46th president of the United States of America.
Of Frogs and Stars
The limerick’s less than idyllic
And yet there are rules to this lyric.
It needs at all times
Three ridiculous rhymes
And a meter quite smoothly dactylic. Continue reading “Of Frogs and Stars”
Meteor and metaphor
The annual Geminid meteor shower may be already strong in the night of December 13/14 Continue reading “Meteor and metaphor”
High-powered view
Jupiter and Saturn, as shown in Continue reading “High-powered view”
Dark Star
The Drake equation is a way of estimating the likelihood that we will ever contact life elsewhere in the universe. Continue reading “Dark Star”
Equation at maximum, jaguar at minimum
Here is the sky at midnight between November 2 and 3. Continue reading “Equation at maximum, jaguar at minimum”
RBG and RGB
Acronyms trip us up. AI: you think you’re about to learn something about Artificial Intelligence, but it’s Amnesty International. RGB is one I have to worry about, when making colored illustrations – should I be using Red-Green-Blue mode, or Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black, CMYK?
XR
Extinction Rebellion should be classified as an organized crime group, according to the British prime minister and home secretary. Bad joke. It is a non-violent grassroots movement of people seriously concerned about the burning of fossil fuels that is threatening to make our planet intolerable for humans and many other beings.
Today we joined our first Extinction Rebellion protest. It was in the Jubilee Garden, a pleasantly curvilinear small park between the Thames bank and a towering plain-faced concrete building, the headquarters of Shell.
The large and friendly crowd was sprinkled with yellow: the yellow jackets of the police and the yellow banners with the Extinction Rebellion symbol. Half a dozen police paddy wagons, ready to carry off criminals, waited like a defensive wall in front of Shell.
The organization was a little amateur, as is perhaps fitting. The criminals are not as hardened as criminals should be. The speeches were clear, earnest, and sometimes poetic. But it is not enough to say we must cut our own use of oil and plastic. A little nearer to the solution was “We’re going to sue Shell, bankrupt them!” But Shell and other such corporations are by nature unable to do otherwise than maximize profit, and use their financial power to defend themselves. They enrich a relative few (executives and shareholders) at the expense of a majority that will eventually include themselves. They fit some reasonable definitions of an organized crime group. (It was good that their murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa was remembered.)
What we need to do is not just call on government to act but create governments that act: vote into power those who will have the guts to triple fuel taxes, stop subsidizing airline fuel, invest massively in renewable energy, ban import of the products of tropical deforestation, and more.
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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
Where are the forests of the sky?
There are no plant constellations. Continue reading “Where are the forests of the sky?”