Adam Clare

There’s no Reason to Buy Clothes

If you’re like me then you’ve stopped wearing nice clothes to work because you never leave your house for work. Us “office workers” don’t need to buy clothes because the social situation around us has changed. If you work in an environment where you physically have to be there you too can stop being clothes.

Mend!, new book by Kate Sekules explores the concept of repairing our clothes in fun ways. Yes you can fix your own clothes no matter your skills.

You love clothes, but do you know where yours came from? I donâ€™t mean Uniqlo or â€œstolen from my sister,â€ but their fundamental origins and what it all means. Clothes can be complicated creatures. They are not inert, but become unique with wear, even from the first time we take them for a ride, and then they gain in individuality with each outing. Our collections become extensions of us (â€œThat dress is so you!â€), combining in their own special, comforting ways and routinely performing magic tricks. Many of us own a results dress or lucky socks for sports, or a coat thatâ€™s gorgeous on the hanger but ghastly when worn. Clothes â€œchange our view of the world and the worldâ€™s view of us,â€ wrote Virginia Woolf. The â€œwhyâ€ of visible mending is all about that personal nature of clothes. And, while extending their lives, it also acknowledges their origins.

Submerged Servers Are More Efficient Than Landlubber Servers

A few years ago Microsoft decided to sink a data centre and see how well it performs. The short answer is: well, the underwater server farm did just fine. This is significant because it proves that underwater data centres are feasible and, to Microsoft’s surprise can be more reliable.

Data centres take a lot of energy to keep cool so by putting it in the water the cooling system uses the chilly waters surrounding it. The carbon footprint of these underwater systems is potentially smaller too since instead of running massive air conditioners (which consume a lot of energy) they are using their local environment.

Their first conclusion is that the cylinder packed with servers had a lower failure rate than a conventional data centre.
When the container was hauled off the seabed around half a mile offshore after being placed there in May 2018, just eight out of the 855 servers on board had failed.
That compares very well with a conventional data centre.
“Our failure rate in the water is one-eighth of what we see on land,” says Ben Cutler, who has led what Microsoft calls Project Natick.

Art Can Help us Understand the Climate Crisis

The world of art may one way to help people understand issues around the climate crisis. The impacts of climate change are diverse and interconnected, which makes it difficult to conceptualize. Single use plastic use is connected to the tar sands, inequality is connected to palm oil production. It’s all so overwhelming.

Artists can help us get an understanding on what the climate crisis is to humans in practice through their works. Some artists try to capture the anthropecene while others make art to rile up politicians to act. Art and artists provide another way to understand the changing world around us.

While it’s hard to know what effect any one work has on the audience, creators â€” from authors to filmmakers to visual artists â€” are making a case for their role in tackling climate change: to engage people’s emotions and imagination in ways that straight data just won’t.

“Film … has the capacity to move people in a number of ways simultaneously … intellectually, emotionally, viscerally, all at the same time,” said filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal in an interview with Lynch.

“Using that medium to open up that consciousness, to move people in that way is our goal. Whether it works or not is another matter.”

USA Court Rules NSA Spying Illegal

Edward Snowden risked his life and freedom to bring to the world’s attention that the American government illegal (and unethically) spies on innocent people everywhere on the planet. Many Americans called Snowden a traitor and a liar. Now, the courts in his home country agree with Snowden: the wiretapping by the National Security Agency (NSA) was indeed illegal. Hopefully the American government will stop spying on innocent people, and with his vindication hopefully others will be inspired to speak truth to power like Snowden did.

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said that the program, under which the NSA collected and analyzed bulk data provided by telecommunications companies, was in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and could have been unconstitutional.

“Seven years ago, as the news declared I was being charged as a criminal for speaking the truth, I never imagined that I would live to see our courts condemn the NSA’s activities as unlawful and in the same ruling credit me for exposing them,” said Snowden, who fled to Russia after exposing the program, on Twitter. “And yet that day has arrived.”

I See a Wind Turbine and I Want it Paint it Black

Believe it or not there are people out there who don’t want renewable energy and actively campaign to keep our power grid based on world-destroying fossil fuels. These backward thinking individuals have had success in stopping some wind turbine installations by arguing that wind turbines kill birds. Sadly, wind turbines do kill birds (but come on, coal, oil, and gas power plants kill way more than just birds).

There’s now a simple way to protect birds from wind turbines: paint one bald black. An experiment run in Norway found that a simple visual clue is enough for the few birds that hit rotating blades to evade the blades.

Applying contrast painting to the rotor blades resulted in significantly reduced the annual fatality rate (>70%) for a range of birds at the SmÃ¸la windâ€power plant. We recommend to either replicate this study, preferably with more treated turbines, or to implement the measure at new sites and monitor collision fatalities to verify whether similar results are obtained elsewhere, to determine to which extent the effect is generalizable. It is of the utmost importance to gain more insights into the expected efficacy of promising mitigation measures through targeted experiments and learning by doing, to successfully mitigate impacts on birdlife and to support a sustainable development of wind energy worldwide.