Things Are Good

Lack of Demand for Dead Whales Will End Whaling

Undoubtedly, whaling is bad for whales, nature, and even geopolitical reactions. Demand for whale meat and byproducts has been decreasing due to ongoing pressure from consumers and activists. Countries that permit whaling are frowned upon by other nations for conitrnuig the practice. The good news for whales is that due to COVID-19 the demand for whale meat has decreased to the point that Iceland may finally shutdown their whaling operations.

Another issue for Loftsson is that public opinion on whaling has changed, says Ãrni Finnsson, chairman of the Iceland Nature Conservation Association. â€œWhat has changed is that the fishing industry is not willing to support him anymore. They feel that Iceland needs to be able to export fish to the U.S. market, and they donâ€™t want to continue defending whaling. I think heâ€™s done.â€

What Fiction We Read Matters Politically

The fictional worlds we engage with can change how we think about politics and how we justify our political beliefs. According to a study published in the Cambridge University Press people who read dystopian fiction are more likely to support extreme political reactions to things. The point? Read something that is good for you, go read some classic literature and try to avoid overly-dystopian worlds (or at least read them knowing the impact they may have on you).

Given that the fictional narratives found in novels, movies, and television shows enjoy wide public consumption, memorably convey information, minimize counter-arguing, and often emphasize politically-relevant themes, we argue that greater scholarly attention must be paid to theorizing and measuring how fiction affects political attitudes. We argue for a genre-based approach for studying fiction effects, and apply it to the popular dystopian genre. Results across three experiments are striking: we find consistent evidence that dystopian narratives enhance the willingness to justify radicalâ€”especially violentâ€”forms of political action. Yet we find no evidence for the conventional wisdom that they reduce political trust and efficacy, illustrating that fictionâ€™s effects may not be what they seem and underscoring the need for political scientists to take fiction seriously.

Americans: Go Vote!

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Americans: please go vote if you haven’t already.

Not an American? Here, go enjoy pure internet click bait.

I have nothing good to say about the last four years of the Republican rule in the USA. Sure, good things have come out of America over the years and we’ve covered that here. Efforts to undo damage to the environment and reduce greenhouse gas emissions have happened in the states, but that’s all happened at the state and city level.

It’s time that Americans remove politicians that block positive progress from office.

Let’s hope that we get good news from this election.

No matter the outcome, I’m sure that cities in the states will keep fighting climate change and trying to help their local populace.

If you’re in the states you can find out how to vote from the official government webpage.

Learn Faster by Knowing Less

People learn when they can experiment with whatever they are working with, be it something physical like carpentry or something mental like philosophy. Teachers can even encourage faster learning by letting students essentially play with what they have and stepping back. Providing too much instruction means students don’t need to create a process for themselves so they learn to cope, instead they learn to follow the instructions. A recent study showed demonstrated that how make choices as learners impacts how quickly we learn.

This observation means the brain is primed to learn with a bias that is pegged to our freely chosen actions. Choice tips the balance of learning: for the same action and outcome, the brain learns differently and more quickly from free choices than forced ones. This skew may seem like a cognitive flaw, but in computer models, Palminteriâ€™s team found that choice-confirmation bias offered an advantage: it produced stabler learning over a wide range of simulated conditions than unbiased learning did. So even if this tendency occasionally results in bad decisions or beliefs, in the long run, choice-confirmation bias may sensitize the brain to learn from the outcomes of chosen actionsâ€”which likely represent what is most important to a given person.

Cooking With Electricity is Cleaner than Gas

Gas stoves have reputation for being good to cook with, but they are really quite bad for everything else that happens in the kitchen – like inhaling air. Indoor fas stoves can actually make your kitchen air quality worse than a highway’s. Thankfully, electric stove technology has improved to the point that the cooking benefits of gas are negligible compared to a quality stove.

So if you’re in need of a new stove, go electric.

On the air-quality front, at least, the evidence against gas stoves is damning. Although cooking food on any stove produces particulate pollutants, burning gas produces nitrogen dioxide, or NO2,, and sometimes also carbon monoxide, according to Brett Singer, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who studies indoor air quality. Brief exposures to air with high concentrations of NO2 can lead to coughing and wheezing for people with asthma or other respiratory issues, and prolonged exposure to the gas can contribute to the development of those conditions, according to the EPA. Homes with gas stoves can contain approximately 50 to 400 percent higher concentrations of NO2 than homes with electric stoves, often resulting in levels of indoor air pollution that would be illegal outdoors, according to a recent report by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a sustainability think tank. â€œNO2 is invisible and odorless, which is one of the reasons itâ€™s gone so unnoticed,â€ Brady Seals, a lead author on the report, says.