Five Links #046
Discover more from Bennett’s Five Links
Five Links #046
Googling Hopes and Dreams; Marriages and Other Resources
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Ok. Thanks buddy..
It warmed my heart to see this weatherman call his kids on live TV to warn them that the tornado warning he was reporting on was going to go right over their house. And also that the majority of the commentary I've seen on it supports him. Because family comes first.
(via r/nextfuckinglevel)
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Google it, Mate ..
More than half the subscribers to Five Links are international now and so I don't plan to cover the upcoming Australian election too closely. But I loved Adam Bandt's response to a journalist trying to catch him out for not knowing some statistic off the top of his head.
It reminds me of this speech by make-believe West Wing politician Arnie Vinick on political phoniness and make-believe West Wing politician Matt Santos' ‘Hopes and Dreams’ Speech .
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A rock is just a rock ..
A long read - a potentially unpopular long read - on why concerns over finite resources 'running out' overlook the infinite potential for humankind to develop knowledge to exploit new resources.
"Before steam engines were a thing, people still needed to do certain kinds of work. For example, they needed to crush rocks for smelting, or pound wood to make pulp for paper, or they needed to mill four in a grist mill so that bread could be baked. And the first way of doing this without using hand was to use a water wheel—literally a big wheel driven by flowing water on streams and rivers. So from feeding to reading, the movement of large wheels helped do the work on larger scales that people by hand could only dream of. Eventually, in a place like England where so much of this sort of innovation began, the number of suitable places to build water wheels were taken up. It took the creation of great innovators like Thomas Savery, Thomas Newcomen and most famously James Watt to lay the foundations in the 1700s for the mass production of the steam engine. Here then was a device which converted stored energy—potential energy—into heat and then into the energy of motion: work. And work at a far greater rate than any water wheel could hope to have done. That’s literal power, and why the unit of power is now known as the Watt."
and
"But though any particular resource like coal is finite, resources in general are not. What we need to turn a useless rock like coal into electricity or chalcopyrite into copper is knowledge. Knowledge is the catalyst that turns the useless into the useful, and even into the essential."
and
"Shouldn’t we be afraid of running out? No. The lesson here is that the limiting factor is not resources—but knowledge. Knowledge of how to take the useless and turn it into the useful. To create solutions from the matter around us—to literally transform the physical reality in which we find ourselves into a home. Outside our physical home, it is our resource."
Are we running out of resources?
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Everything the light touches ..
(via r/funny)
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Quietly. Slowly. ..
This one hits a little too close to home.
"I spent most of my life believing that what ended marriages were behaviors I classify as Major Marriage Crimes. If murder, rape, and armed robbery are major crimes in the criminal-justice system, I viewed sexual affairs, physical spousal abuse, and gambling away the family savings as major crimes in marriage.
"Because I wasn’t committing Major Marriage Crimes, when my wife and I were on opposite sides of an issue, I would suggest that we agree to disagree. I believed she was wrong—either that she was fundamentally incorrect in her understanding of the situation or that she was treating me unfairly. It always seemed as if the punishment didn’t fit the crime—as if she were charging me with premeditated murder when my infraction was something closer to driving a little bit over the speed limit with a burned-out taillight that I didn’t even know was burned out."
The Marriage Lesson That I Learned Too Late
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Bennett