Tag Archives: Ona

The Ghost Map – Steven Johnson

by Myrna Posted on January 31, 2019

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The Ghost Map

The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

Steven Johnson

Genre: History

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: October 19, 2006

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Seller: PENGUIN GROUP USA, INC.


A National Bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book, and an Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year From Steven Johnson, the dynamic thinker routinely compared to James Gleick, Dava Sobel, and Malcolm Gladwell, The Ghost Map is a riveting page-turner about a real-life historical hero, Dr. John Snow. It's the summer of 1854, and London is just emerging as one of the first modern cities in the world. But lacking the infrastructure — garbage removal, clean water, sewers — necessary to support its rapidly expanding population, the city has become the perfect breeding ground for a terrifying disease no one knows how to cure. As the cholera outbreak takes hold, a physician and a local curate are spurred to action-and ultimately solve the most pressing medical riddle of their time. In a triumph of multidisciplinary thinking, Johnson illuminates the intertwined histories and interconnectedness of the spread of disease, contagion theory, the rise of cities, and the nature of scientific inquiry, offering both a riveting history and a powerful explanation of how it has shaped the world we live in.

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The Ghost Map – Steven Johnson

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Watch kids break down climate change for President Trump

by AYZShantell Posted on January 31, 2019

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No, despite the cold snap, the Midwest does not need more warming. Ever since President Trump’s infamous “Global Waming” tweet, a lot of folks have been chiming in to set the record straight. NOAA. Cable TV hosts. Bill Nye. But two adorable kids just stole the freaking show.

On Jimmy Kimmel Live! Tuesday night, 10-year-old Kaitlynn and 8-year-old Apollo took turns breaking down basic science for the president of the United States. As Kaitlynn put it: “Don’t get angry, Mr. President — it’s just science.”

Kaitlynn handled the greenhouse effect, while Apollo patiently explained the difference between weather and climate: “Even though it’s cold where you are, that doesn’t mean the globe isn’t heating up.”

Kaitlynn stressed that the many consequences of climate change are going to make the world pretty rough for people her age — and that includes Trump’s 12-year-old son, Barron.

At the end, the kids said if there’s anything else the president needs to know, he should feel free to ask. Pretty nice of them, considering their futures are on the line — but as long as they’re offering, maybe they could throw in a spelling lesson next time? Then at least we won’t have to wonder what “Waming” is.

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Watch kids break down climate change for President Trump

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Bill Nye: Climate change is here, and it’s coming for our assets

by ErickaAugustine Posted on January 31, 2019

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The polar vortex is chilling the Midwest, and cable news is using the occasion to talk at length about climate change. CNN’s Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo had a field day tearing down President Trump’s tweet saying the Midwest could use some “Global Waming” — yes, that’s warming with no R — right about now. (F- on science, F+ on spelling.) MSNBC’s Ali Velshi busted out some snazzy graphics to illustrate the rise in CO2 levels in our atmosphere over the long haul, noting the sharp increase in global temperatures as industrialization took off.

Then, Chris Matthews of Hardball brought on a special guest — the Science Guy himself. Bill Nye told him what many of us already know. Climate change is real, and it’s coming for our assets.

Rural, conservative voters are in fact more vulnerable to economic losses from climate change than city dwellers, Nye pointed out. He called out a few agricultural costs of climate change: Food prices will likely go up as farmers struggle to keep up with seasonal pest management, and some U.S. agricultural production may need to shift north “into what would nominally be Canada.” (Well, oops. As Canadians have been quick to point out, Canada is, in fact, Canada.)

The Science Guy definitely got one thing right, though: “The longer we mess around and not address this problem, the more difficult it’s going to be.”

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Bill Nye: Climate change is here, and it’s coming for our assets

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez takes tech companies to task for conference promoting climate denial

by Reinald0150 Posted on January 28, 2019

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This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a Democrat from New York) and Representative Chellie Pingree (a Democrat from Maine) sent a letter to three of the nation’s biggest tech companies on Monday decrying their sponsorship of a conference this month that promoted climate change denial.

As Mother Jones reported last week, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft all sponsored LibertyCon, a libertarian student conference held in Washington, D.C. The event featured a group called the CO2 Coalition, which handed out brochures in the exhibit hall that said its goal is to “explain how our lives and our planet Earth will be improved by additional atmospheric carbon dioxide.”

One brochure claimed that “more carbon dioxide will help everyone, including future generations of our families” and that the “recent increase in CO2 levels has had a measurable, positive effect on plant life,” apparently because the greenhouse gas will make plants grow faster. The group also sponsored the conference and a talk titled: “Let’s Talk About Not Talking: Should There Be ‘No Debate’ that Industrial Carbon Dioxide is Causing Climate Catastrophe?”

Ocasio-Cortez and Pingree, who are both making climate change a priority in the new Congress, were not pleased by the news. On Monday, they sent a letter to the CEOs of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft expressing their concern that the tech companies are contributing to the spread of misinformation about the reality of climate change despite their public commitment to reducing carbon emissions in their own operations.

Pingree says one of the reasons she and Ocasio-Cortez wrote this letter is that “climate change is clearly an all-hands-on-deck situation.” She adds, “Where I live in Maine, sea-level rise and warming is happening at a rate much faster than anyone ever anticipated.”

She says that the tech companies “claim by policy that they’re on board” with efforts to combat climate change, making their sponsorship of the conference all the more troubling. “The idea that they’re secretly working against it makes our job that much harder,” she says.

Pingree and Ocasio-Cortez wrote in their letter:

We understand that sponsorship of an event or conference is a common occurrence and that these sponsorships do not automatically indicate that the company endorses the variety of political viewpoints that may be presented at these events. However, given the magnitude and urgency of the climate crisis that we are now facing, we find it imperative to ensure that the climate-related views espoused at LibertyCon do not reflect the values of your companies going forward.

As you are well aware, the spreading of misinformation can be dangerous to our society. Today’s coordinated campaign to deny climate change, or to put a positive spin on its effects, is not unlike that of the tobacco companies which once sought to discredit their product’s link to cancer. Their propaganda kept the nation from addressing a public health crisis for years, leading to many preventable deaths. We cannot afford to make the same mistake again with climate change.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez takes tech companies to task for conference promoting climate denial

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The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains – Nicholas Carr

by Myrna Posted on January 28, 2019

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The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Nicholas Carr

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $11.99

Publish Date: June 6, 2011

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


Finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction: “Nicholas Carr has written a Silent Spring for the literary mind.”—Michael Agger, Slate “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways. Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes—Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive—even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.

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The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains – Nicholas Carr

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The melting Arctic is revealing caveman-era landscapes

by LorenzoNixon Posted on January 26, 2019

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Parts of the Arctic have now melted enough to expose landscapes that had been entombed in ice for 40,000 to 115,000 years.

Scientists studying Baffin Island, Canada — a snowy mountain range rising from the Arctic Sea — have found land that was last ice free when our ancestors were dallying with Neanderthals, according to a paper published Friday in Nature Communications.

The researchers went to these newly exposed spots looking for plants frozen thousands of years ago. If this were a B-movie, they would have discovered a reanimated ice worm, or some contagion that transformed humans into mewling armadillo-people. But, because real life isn’t always so exciting, they found the remnants of frozen moss. They determined that these plants were at least 40,000 years old, suggesting that glaciers last retreated there when humans were first making their way into Europe, sketching animals and tracing their hands on cave walls.

The newly-exposed landscapes are… pretty much fields of rocks.Pendleton et al.

The scientists wrote that current temperatures are now high enough to “remove all ice from Baffin Island within the next few centuries, even in the absence of additional summer warming.”

Simon Pendleton, the paper’s lead author and a doctoral researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, noted that these northern glaciers are on the front line of climate change. The consequences are easy to see.

“The Arctic is currently warming two to three times faster than the rest of the globe, so naturally, glaciers and ice caps are going to react faster,” he said in a statement.

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The melting Arctic is revealing caveman-era landscapes

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Greta Thunberg dresses down more global elites for climate inaction

by CarltonFng Posted on January 25, 2019

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Young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is continuing her tour of speaking truth to power. Last December, she accused the delegates to the U.N. climate talks in Poland of “stealing” their children’s futures. And on Friday, at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, she delivered another powerful speech, calling for quick and bold progress on climate change.

“At places like Davos, people like to tell success stories,” Thunberg told the audience. “But their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag.”

Climate change became a hot topic of discussion at the 2019 meeting of the global elite. Sixteen-year-old Thunberg joined the ranks of Prince William and British naturalist and TV personality Sir David Attenborough, who also urged decisive action on climate change. National leaders, like Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, unveiled plans and goals for tackling warming at the forum.

Although Thunberg’s message was dire, she stopped short of saying the world is doomed. “Yes, we are failing, but there is still time to turn everything around — we can still fix this,” Thunberg said. “I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is.”

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Greta Thunberg dresses down more global elites for climate inaction

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Former U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon just endorsed Democrats’ fight for a Green New Deal

by IvanVelasquez1 Posted on January 25, 2019

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This story was originally published by the HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon became the first major international diplomat to throw his weight behind the so-called Green New Deal, a nascent effort by left-wing Democrats to zero out planet-warming emissions and end poverty over the next decade.

In an interview with HuffPost, Ban — now the co-chair of the newly launched Global Commission on Adaptation, a cadre of top world leaders slated to host a summit next year in the Netherlands — called the push “a very, very good initiative.”

“I would strongly support it,” Ban said by phone Wednesday afternoon from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “This kind of initiative is good.”

He held the movement in stark contrast to the climate agenda President Donald Trump has pursued, aggressively bolstering fossil fuel production and announcing a withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. He called the Trump administration “very worrisome.”

“It is very important that the people should speak out,” he said. “I have always been urging that there should be the policies of a civil society heard loud and clearly all around the world.”

Ban, 74, made climate change a priority during his term as the United Nations’ eighth secretary-general from January 2007 to December 2016. In 2008, as much of the developed world slid into the Great Recession, the South Korean diplomat urged international leaders to enact a Green New Deal, which he defined as “an investment that fights climate change, creates millions of green jobs, and spurs green growth.”

The concept caught on. Barack Obama, then a presidential candidate, called for a Green New Deal on the campaign trail. Labour Party activists began laying the groundwork for a government-run green investment bank in the United Kingdom. By 2009, the United Nations drafted a report calling for a Global Green New Deal.

But in 2010, austerity politics swept across the Atlantic. In the United States, Democrats came close to passing a cap-and-trade bill — a conservative market mechanism for curbing climate-altering emissions — but ultimately backed down. The term “Green New Deal” remained core to the U.S. Green Party’s platform, but away from the political fringe it all but disappeared.

That is, until 2018. A spate of left-wing Democrats revived the term and imbued it with a new sense of urgency and a much broader scope, calling for a rapid transition to 100 percent renewable energy and a guarantee of union-wage jobs for the millions of Americans struggling to survive as income inequality worsened. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a Democrat from New York) became the most prominent supporter, and at least two top Senate Democrats are now working on legislation. At least half the declared 2020 candidates for president now say they support a Green New Deal in some form.

On Wednesday, Ban stopped short of critiquing the longstanding dogma, among both Democrats and the few Republicans who acknowledge the realities of climate change, that says market-based tweaks, such as putting a price on carbon, are the only politically feasible paths to cutting emissions in the United States.

“There have been many discussions on how to address climate — cap-and-trade, carbon trading, carbon taxes,” he said. “Any such ideas which merit some deep discussions … that should continue.”

The remark bucked with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, which determined in October the world has roughly a decade to halve global emissions or face cataclysmic warming of at least 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, and likely much more. At a news conference, two authors of the IPCC report laughed when asked if market-based policies alone could deliver the cuts needed.

Asked whether the fossil fuel industry should be barred from future climate talks, Ban said no, despite widespread criticism of oil and gas companies’ deep-pocketed efforts to upend climate policies in the United States and elsewhere.

“I don’t think those people should not be allowed to participate,” Ban said. “They should listen to the voices of the people. These climate talks and climate conferences are open to everybody, so … we should welcome them.”

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Former U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon just endorsed Democrats’ fight for a Green New Deal

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Pizza ovens are firing up the coal industry

by RemonaAllen924 Posted on January 24, 2019

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As the interminably salty April Ludgate of Parks and Recreation once said, “Time is money, money is power, power is pizza, and pizza is knowledge.” Well, there’s something about pizza you knead to know: It’s helping the coal industry.

Before you freak out, you should know that not all types of pizza are equally guilty in harming the planet. We’re specifically talking about pizza cooked in coal-fired ovens (though wood-fired pizza is also pretty bad for the environment). Now you may be thinking, “Dude! It’s just pizza,” but slow down there, Ninja Turtle. It turns out the pizza-powered coal market is pretty significant.

Pennsylvania mining company Blaschak Coal Corporation had a blockbuster 2018, selling a record-breaking 382,000 tons of coal. That’s because it mines anthracite coal, the super hot-burning fuel used in many personal pizza ovens. Demand for the centuries-old style of cooking has been growing since 2015. And anthracite coal isn’t just used to cook pizza; it’s also used by steelmakers and for home heating.

Not ready to think about a pizza-less planet yet? One option is to cut down on coal-fired pizza and, y’know, just eat oven-baked pizza like a normal person. But there’s also good news about the coal industry in general: coal is on the decline. Last year was a terrible year for the toxic stuff — the U.S. retired around 15 gigawatts of coal capacity.

So if Americans can keep their insatiable desire for coal-fired pizza under control, we might be able to kick our coal habit after all. But I’m not holding my breath. Also, I’m hungry?

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Pizza ovens are firing up the coal industry

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Will this human dressed as a receipt convince Californians to ban paper receipts?

by OliviaPortillo1 Posted on January 23, 2019

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In the wild world of U.S. politics, it isn’t unusual for elected officials to use props to illustrate their points. As you might recall, Republican Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe brought a snowball onto the Senate floor to argue against the validity of global warming. But San Francisco Assemblyman Phil Ting might have just won the award for best political prop.

Earlier this month, while introducing a bill that would require California businesses to issue electronic receipts instead of paper ones (unless a customer specifically asks for a paper copy), Ting brought a dejected-looking adult man dressed up as a literal receipt onstage and made him stand there for the entire 20-minute announcement. (The cashier at CVS hands me a two-foot scroll every time I buy a roll of toilet paper, but God bless Ting for ensuring that none of us has to rely on that memory alone to conjure up the image of a freaking receipt.)

I promise you that whatever you’re imagining right now isn’t as good as the actual footage of this poor man standing in front of a crowd with his face sticking out of a receipt-hole: 

Oh yeah, about the actual bill: California Assembly Bill 161 is aimed at reducing paper waste in the state, because unlike a lot of other types of paper, receipts aren’t recyclable. Champions of the bill point out receipts are often printed on thermal paper, which is coated with chemicals, often including bisphenol A (BPA), a known endocrine disruptor that can be transferred to the skin in small amounts and is linked to some kinds of cancers.

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BPA can contaminate recycling, so putting receipts in your blue bin (or, you know, excessively licking your fingers after handling them) is probably a bad idea. And considering California has already passed bills banning single-use plastic grocery bags and straws, making receipts an opt-in paper product could seem like a logical next step. If Ting’s new receipt reducing bill passes, businesses will have to go electronic by 2022 and would be subject to a small fine if they fail to do so.

But is a receipt-ban really the best way to go about reducing our environmental impact?

In the weeks since Ting brought his man-receipt on stage, critics have argued that, much like California’s plastic straw ban, the new bill isn’t exactly a ground-breaking win the environment. First of all, some businesses have pivoted away from BPA-coated receipts in recent years anyway. But more importantly, there isn’t a ton of evidence that receipts pose a huge environmental burden in the first place.

“Even 314,000 tons of paper receipts amount to less than .08 percent of the more than 400 million tons of all paper products — receipts to cardboard — used globally on an annual basis,” wrote Adam Minter of Bloomberg News. He argues spending time and energy on banning something as small as receipts “diverts attention and effort from bigger and far more pressing waste and recycling issues that are negatively impacting the state right now.”

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Will this human dressed as a receipt convince Californians to ban paper receipts?

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