tumbledry

Energy

Maybe I’m grasping at straws, but this article the most optimistic thing I’ve read in a few years, though of course tempered by the current political disaster:

Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply.

In fact, the sheer scope of that potential change seems to be motivating much of the current backlash against clean energy in the U.S.

Plus, I always love a bit on e-bikes; not only fun, but an excellent way to get around without burning things:

E-biking—best thought of as biking without hills—may prove to be an even more important innovation. The e-bike is almost unbelievably efficient: to fully charge a five-hundred-watt e-bike costs, on average, about eight cents. That charge provides some thirty miles of range, so it costs about a penny to ride five miles.

Tons of facts here that indisputably illustrate how the transformation of global energy that is not only under way, but accelerating:

The United Kingdom—where, after all, fossil fuel really began—now has so much wind power that in 2024 its carbon emissions fell below what they were in 1879

Worth a read. Let’s see if the optimism I felt while reading it is still there in five years.

A Wheel

Atul Gawande at The New Yorker, The Cost of Defunding Harvard:

Sarah Fortune, a professor and the chair of the department of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard’s school of public health, is among the world’s leading experts on tuberculosis, the No. 1 infectious cause of death globally. She had a sixty-million-dollar N.I.H. award for a seven-year moon-shot effort to unravel exactly how tuberculosis makes people sick, in order to find ways to better control the disease. It is now the beginning of the fifth year of the contract, which has supported work involving some sixty people across fourteen institutions—including Case Western Reserve University, in Ohio, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Colorado, and clinical sites in South Africa and Uganda. That work—in humans, animals, and machine-learning models—had already revealed a pathway to a truly protective vaccine against T.B., which was previously believed impossible. The team had been conducting testing in macaques of an injectable vaccine developed by researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital.

But, on Tuesday morning, Fortune had received an e-mail with a letter from the N.I.H. ordering her to stop her research, “effective immediately.” Virtually all spending was halted. This was reminiscent of the stop-work orders and terminations at U.S.A.I.D., which ended more than eighty per cent of the agency’s programs and led to layoffs for some two hundred thousand people in the U.S. and around the world. These programs and people had saved lives by the millions. The indifference to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is most horrifying.

Clayton Dalton, Letter from Gaza: Hospitals In Ruins:

In the pediatrics ward, a cramped space that had cartoon characters painted on the walls, a nine-year-old named Mariam cried softly as another of my colleagues examined her. Her hair was neatly braided and tied with a yellow scrunchie. Mariam had lost an arm to amputation after an air strike, and shrapnel had slashed a hole between her bladder and her rectum. She had already undergone five surgeries. On a bed next to her lay a three-year-old boy, who had needed surgery after he was injured in an air strike; his five-year-old brother was killed in the attack. The boy was suffering from an infected surgical wound. “It just doesn’t feel real,” Saleem told me later. “How can something so horrible be real?”

Israeli forces have now dropped more explosives in Gaza than fell on London, Dresden, and Hamburg combined during the Second World War. More than fifty thousand Palestinians have been killed.

I asked the paramedics what was hardest about this work. Responding to an air strike and discovering that it’s your own family, one said. Recovering the bodies of children, another said. He paused, then added, “It is strange that the world has allowed this to happen to us.”

The indifference to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is most horrifying.

Georgia. May, 1918.:

According to investigator Walter F. White of the NAACP, Mary Turner was tied and hung upside down by the ankles, her clothes soaked with gasoline, and burned from her body. Her belly was slit open with a knife like those used “in splitting hogs.” Her “unborn babe” fell to the ground and gave “two feeble cries.” Its head was crushed by a member of the mob with his heel to hide any evidence of what had happened, the crowd then shot hundreds of bullets into Turner’s body. Mary Turner was cut down and buried with her child near the tree, with a whiskey bottle marking the grave. The Atlanta Constitution published an article with the subheadline: “Fury of the People Is Unrestrained.”

The indifference to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is most horrifying.

Sweet Briar College

Lydia Kiesling on Refusing to Speak at an Anti-Trans University

A large group of people feels one way, while a small group with a disproportionate amount of structural power tells them they are wrong to feel it. This is particularly true for college students around the country. Their Instagram feeds are full of eviscerated children, but their passionate protest—the real-world application of everything their liberal, humanistic education was supposed to impart—has made them criminal, first in the eyes of their school administrators, and now to their government. The tactics of the protest movements they read about in their textbooks comprise illegal acts.

Sledding

Lamp

Lamp

Mykala with a lamp from the Branches show.

Ess and Mykala

Ess and Mykala

Before a field trip to the Minnesota History Center.

Branches in the News

Branches in the News

Mykala’s Branches - show announcement in the newspaper! I ran to the library to see if I could find this, and I was SO EXCITED to see it there. From there, I raced to the last remaining newsstands in Woodbury (Kowalski’s and Lunds) to buy up the day’s papers. SO fun to have this.

Mobile Video Rig

Mobile Video Rig

We all went in on a mobile video rig for Mykala — I can’t wait to see what she makes with it.

39!

39!

The Little Mermaid

The Little Mermaid

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