Small study, so don’t get too excited. Interesting if true, though.
Originally shared by Neuroscience News
Magic Mushrooms May Alter How You Feel About Nature (and Politics)
Long-held beliefs can become entrenched over time, making them hard to change. But psychedelics might provide a way to alter them, a study suggests.
The research is in Journal of Psychopharmacology. (full open access)
Of course, some of these things are still available to the people they’re available to because other people are poor. But it’s also the case that with greater connectivity comes a rise in average prosperity.
Originally shared by Todd William
Why You’re Richer than a King
There exists a trend in the Western World to focus on the negative. The more we have, it seems, the more we have to take for granted. Yet much of this pessimism is grossly unwarranted.
Perhaps no one expresses this better than Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist. With a keen sense of perspective, he provides the following anecdote that will leave even the most cynical of mindsets second guessing themselves.
_____________________
THE KING
“The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services.”
“He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor.”
But what about today?
“Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was.”
“Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach.”
And yet consider this.
“The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavored with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary.”
“You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.”
“You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia.”
“You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamoring to bring you clean central heating.”
“You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell.”
“You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs.”
“My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference?”
“That is the magic that exchange and specialization have wrought for the human species.”
____________________
(Artwork by: Jacek Yerka)
Originally shared by Jennifer Ouellette
The truth about Easter Island: a sustainable society has been falsely blamed for its own demise http://theconversation.com/the-truth-about-easter-island-a-sustainable-society-has-been-falsely-blamed-for-its-own-demise-85563
Who needs microphones when you have cameras?
Originally shared by Winchell Chung
Article from 2014
The team’s processing algorithm lets them take a new tack: a completely passive recovery of the sound. By recording objects’ movements on high-frame-rate video, in ambient lighting—no laser needed—they are able to translate the vibrations caused by speech and music back to sound waves, with only a little bit of noise.
I happened to be reading this book both before and after Ursula Le Guin’s death, which converted the review into something of a tribute to an author I’ve long appreciated.
Via Isaac Kuo. Basically, fewer than half of the total shares of the 25 most-shared articles on climate change in 2017 were of articles with high or very high quality.
The piece also points out that they only looked at direct shares of the sources, not other articles or posts which were based on them and then also widely shared (something probably more common with low-quality information, I would suspect, since people who value high-quality information tend to cite sources).
Originally shared by Bill Smith
Many stories were written about climate science in 2017, but were the ones that “went viral” scientifically accurate? #ClimateChange
While bulk crops like wheat, rice, and soy will still need to be grown on large areas of land, growing 80% of America’s carrots in one sometimes drought-stricken county in California and shipping them for days in trucks is obviously not optimal. Growing vegetables close to consumers has all kinds of benefits.
Originally shared by Greg Batmarx
The urban farms sprouting up and across cities around the world aren’t just feeding mouths, they are “critical to survival” and a “necessary adaptation” for developing regions and a changing climate, according to a new study.
Urban farms, which include plain ol’ allotments, indoor vertical farms and rooftop gardens nestled amongst busy streets and skyscrapers, have become increasingly popular and important as the world’s population grows and more and more people move to cities.
The United Nations predicts that by 2030, two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in cities, with the urban population in developing countries doubling. That’s a lot of mouths to feed.
The new paper, published in the journal Earth’s Future and led by the Arizona State University and Google, finds that this expected urban population boom will benefit from urban farming in multiple ways.
As the Thomson Reuters Foundation explained from the study Urban farms could supply almost the entire recommended consumption of vegetables for city dwellers, while cutting food waste and reducing emissions from the transportation of agricultural products.
According to the study, urban agriculture can help solve a host of urban environmental problems, from increasing vegetation cover (thus contributing to a decrease in the urban heat island intensity), improving the livability of cities, and providing enhanced food security to more than half of Earth’s population.
After analyzing multiple datasets in Google Earth Engine, the researchers calculated that the existing vegetation on urban farms around the world already provides some $33 billion annually in services from biocontrol, pollination, climate regulation and soil formation.
The future of urban agriculture has even more potential, the researchers found.
We project potential annual food production of 100–180 million tonnes, energy savings ranging from 14 to 15 billion kilowatt hours, nitrogen sequestration between 100,000 and 170,000 tonnes, and avoided storm water runoff between 45 and 57 billion cubic meters annually the authors wrote.
In addition, we estimate that food production, nitrogen fixation, energy savings, pollination, climate regulation, soil formation and biological control of pests could be worth as much as $80–160 billion annually in a scenario of intense [urban agriculture] implementation.
Others have praised urban farming for its many benefits.
Urban agriculture won’t resolve all food production and distribution problems, but it could help take pressure off rural land while providing other advantages wrote environmentalist Dr. David Suzuki.
He cited an example of how one patch of Detroit land, where 12 vacant houses were removed to grow food, has supplied almost 200,000 kilograms of produce for 2,000 local families, provided volunteer experience to 8,000 residents and brought the area new investment and increased safety.
Local and urban agriculture can also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and recycle nutrient-rich food scraps, plant debris and other ‘wastes’ Suzuki continued.
Because maintaining lawns for little more than aesthetic value requires lots of water, energy for upkeep and often pesticides and fertilizers, converting them to food gardens makes sense.
Writer and former Vancouver city councillor Peter Ladner also wrote in The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities
When urban agriculture flourishes, our children are healthier and smarter about what they eat, fewer people are hungry, more local jobs are created, local economies are stronger, our neighborhoods are greener and safer, and our communities are more inclusive.
https://www.ecowatch.com/urban-farming-suzuki-2524555512.html
I disagree on using an apostrophe with numbers (“the 90s” is unambiguous, and perfectly logical and grammatical). But the rest of this chart is useful, assuming you already know what part of speech something is.
For a non-chart version that is, in my opinion, simpler, try my explanation at: http://csidemedia.com/wellpresentedms.
Originally shared by Writers Write
According to this article, the business case for asteroid mining is not to bring asteroid materials to Earth, but to build a space-based industrial infrastructure that makes it much cheaper to bring energy and data to Earth.
Attn: Brand Gamblin.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
Want Faster Data and a Cleaner Planet? Start Mining Asteroids http://suhub.co/2mPQTTY
Spice up your fantasy setting with a completely ridiculous medical theory!
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/sham-medicine-orificial-surgery-edwin-pratt-vagina-phrenology