At only 1,000km away from the North Pole, the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen stands at the frontier of climate change. Here, homes constructed on a thawing permafrost balance precariously on unstable foundations, residents are plagued by frequent landslides, and rain – instead of snow – falls in winter. In February last year, Vanessa Liu and Mark Cheong visited the northernmost town in the world to explore how climate change is affecting everyday life in the Arctic.
This ancient story was an influence on Xen: The Zen of the Other
Merlin is the archetypal wizard, Welsh and Celtic in origin but with connections across the water in Cornwall and middle Europe, and, of course, the Arthurian legends. The powerful wizard is portrayed across folklore with many magical powers, including the power of shapeshifting, and is well-known for being King Arthur’s mentor, ultimately guiding him towards becoming the king of Camelot. In this documentary, we take a deep dive into the fantastic world of Merlin and his influence in today’s society.
As the continents’ frozen burden dissipates, the ground deforms — not only in the immediate area, but also in far-flung locations.
The loss of melting ice from land masses such as Greenland and Antarctica is causing the planet’s crust to warp slightly, even in spots more than 1,000 kilometres from the ice loss.
What qualities help assure that a community can survive the threat of disaster? The population density of cities leads to inherent vulnerabilities to mass climate disasters: such as single point of failure transit systems and utilities built prior to today’s environmental realities. At the same time the resources of cities offer tremendous potential for preparation and innovation.
As a sociologist, Klinenberg brings insights on how neighborhood dynamics (what he calls “social infrastructure”) can help individuals & communities prepare for extreme weather including flooding and heat waves. He discusses how cities can be wiser and think more long-term by planning traditional infrastructure projects which also enable such social infrastructure in their design.
“Climate Change and the Future of Cities” was given on March 07, 02017 as part of The Long Now Foundation’s “Conversations at The Interval” Salon Talks. These hour long talks are recorded live at The Interval, our bar, cafe, & museum in San Francisco. Since 02014 this series has presented artists, authors, entrepreneurs, scientists (and more) taking a long-term perspective on subjects like art, design, history, nature, technology, and time. To follow the talks, you can:
Firefighters battling the Dixie Fire have also been facing a second enemy: a serial arsonist who went on a spree of setting fires in July and August — and who sought to trap fire crews with his fires, according to agents from the U.S. Forest Service. They allege former college professor Gary Maynard is the culprit, citing their tracking of his movements and other evidence.
“Where Maynard went, fires started. Not just once, but over and over again,” the government said in a court memorandum arguing for Maynard to be denied bail.
LINK TO FULL ARTICLE: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/11/1026700103/former-college-professor-arson-charges-california-dixie-fire
https://youtu.be/BhRYNJOtYC8
One of the Writer/Director’s of Antrum said about Xen: The Zen of the Other:
…wildly creative experiments with form…through a down-to-earth lens and with a sense of humor. … I felt spoken to many times as Ezra articulated his own frustrations with life and with his own expectations of the world. – DAVID AMITO, award-winning Actor. Writer, Producer, Director of Antrum
Working for the app, which feeds users local crime information, ‘is very traumatic’ and the managers ‘don’t appear to care’
“There’s nothing that tells me that that wouldn’t happen again,” one employee said. “It’s a private security force controlled by a bunch of really rich white men who have no concept of the communities that they’re supposedly protecting because all they want is money. What could go wrong?”
Link to full story: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/02/citizen-app-employees-mental-health
Psychotherapists figured out a long time ago that a roundabout approach is necessary if you want to tease out the origins of any serious psychological problem. You won’t get there by any direct approach, since the defensive maneuvers the patient uses to keep from thinking about the real source of his problems will keep you from getting there either. That’s why dreams, slips of the tongue, and the like played so large a role in psychotherapy, back before the medical profession stopped helping people understand their problems and settled for the more lucrative option of drugging them into numbness instead. That strategy is also a viable option when the craziness we need to understand belongs to a society—ours, for example—rather than an individual.
LINK TO FULL STORY: https://www.ecosophia.net/rice-and-beans-in-the-outer-darkness/
A few days ago, millions of tons of super-heated gas shot off from the surface of the sun and hurtled 90 million miles toward Earth.
The eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, wasn’t particularly powerful on the space-weather scale, but when it hit the Earth’s magnetic field it triggered the strongest geomagnetic storm seen for years. There wasn’t much disruption this time — few people probably even knew it happened — but it served as a reminder the sun has woken from a yearslong slumber.
While invisible and harmless to anyone on the Earth’s surface, the geomagnetic waves unleashed by solar storms can cripple power grids, jam radio communications, bathe airline crews in dangerous levels of radiation and knock critical satellites off kilter. The sun began a new 11-year cycle last year and as it reaches its peak in 2025 the specter of powerful space weather creating havoc for humans grows, threatening chaos in a world that has become ever more reliant on technology since the last big storms hit 17 years ago. A recent study suggested hardening the grid could lead to $27 billion worth of benefits to the U.S. power industry.
“It is still remarkable to me the number of people, companies, who think space weather is Hollywood fiction,” said Caitlin Durkovich, a special assistant to President Joe Biden and senior director of resilience and response in the National Security Council, during a talk at a solar-weather conference last month.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE: https://www.pennlive.com/news/2021/05/solar-storms-are-back-threatening-life-on-earth-as-we-know-it.html
