Plankton Are Multiplying Like Crazy Due To Warming

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding

A 40-year-old man proposed to Salamatou when she was just 14. Every year, tens of thousands of girls are married before reaching their 18th birthday. 

They are some of the most vulnerable girls on earth. They are denied their rights, they are at risk of abuse, their health is jeopardized, and their future prospects are limited. 

From 25 November to 10 December, the world observes 16 days of activism against gender-based violence. 

In Niger, which has one of the highest child marriage rates in the world, 16 extraordinary girls refused to become child brides. Read their stories here: http://www.unfpa.org/16-girls-16-stories-resistance

An isochronic map showing how many days it took to travel to the furthest corners of Britain’s Empire in 1914 [1,400 x 908] CLICK HERE FOR MORE MAPS! thelandofmaps.tumblr.com

Send me to Mars with party supplies before next august 5th

“We have an opportunity to re-think how we regulate city activities for the public interest. I think the big opportunity is to harness the data streaming out of all of these activities and use it to enable a more permissive, but more accountable, “2.0” regulatory regime.”

- Nick Grossman

By focusing on peer-to-peer urbanism, we would be able to create more functional and enjoyable communities while using less resources through sharing — both on and offline. By working collaboratively, there’s an opportunity to create solutions for the masses at a lower cost for the government, and therefore for tax payers. It’s problem solving by community.

Check out the interesting examples of user-generated urbanism, agile urbanism, and today’s peer-to-peer urbanism movement in Nick’s post. 

(via loyalcx)

Breathtaking Images of Underwater Life Captured by Freediving Photographers Alex Voyer and Alex Roubaud

When Firms Become Persons and Persons Become Firms: outstanding lecture

UC Berkeley Political Scientist Wendy Brown came to the London School of Economics last week to discuss her book Undoing the Demos, and her lecture (MP3) is literally the best discussion of how and why human rights are being taken away from humans and given to corporations.

Brown looks at the human rights enumerated in the US Bill of Rights, and how they have been interpreted in successive Supreme Court rulings like Hobby Lobby (corporations are people whose religious freedom entitles them to deny contraception to their workers) and Citizens United (corporations are people and have the free speech right to buy politicians). She suggests that these have been misread as merely conservative/business-oriented thinking gaining influence, and that rather, they are best understood as an ongoing project that grants personhood to companies at the expense of real people.

Brown speaks for more than an hour with almost no poli-sci/econ jargon, building elegant, beautiful arguments that should be accessible to anyone. If you listen to anything this weekend, make it this.

Neoliberal rationality — ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture — remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In vivid detail, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice cede to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either.

In an original and compelling theoretical argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that, far from being the lodestar of the twenty-first century, a future for democracy depends upon it becoming an object of struggle and rethinking.

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution [Wendy Brown/Zone Books]

When Firms Become Persons and Persons Become Firms: neoliberal jurisprudence in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores [LSE]

MP3

Climate Change Signal Emerges from the Weather

Scientists begin to detect the influence of global warming on extreme weather

From Hawaii’s flurry of hurricanes, to record high sea ice in Antarctica, and a heat wave that cooked the Australian Open like shrimp on a barbie, 2014 saw some wild weather. How much of that was tied to climate change is what scientists around the world tried to answer in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society’s annual attribution report, which was published Thursday.

What they discovered was that the clearest impacts of warming could be found in heat-related events, from heat waves on land to unusually hot ocean waters. Other events, like droughts in East Africa and the Middle East, California’s intense wildfires, and winter storms that continually swept across the eastern U.S., were harder to pinpoint. In part this is because such events are inherently complex, with a multitude of factors influencing them.

For example, while the East African drought was found to be both more likely and more intense because of warming, the situation in the Middle East was less clear, with no discernable climate change connection to the various factors that influenced it. Likewise, no direct push from climate change could be found in California’s wildfire activity, though it is clear that it is increasing the overall wildfire risk there.

And while some events, like the U.S. winter storms and the record high Antarctic sea ice extent, could be pinned to a particular cause, that cause could not be linked to climate change. For other events, like the drought in Brazil and flooding in the Canadian prairies, humans influenced the likelihood in other ways besides the greenhouse gases that continue to be emitted into the atmosphere.

What was clear, though, is that the fast-growing field of what is called extreme event attribution is gaining momentum. Researchers are casting a wider net for extreme events to examine and continually refining their methods. Attribution work has traveled a considerable distance since its inception just over a decade ago.

“Extreme event attribution” is a new topic for me. Very cool science right thar.

Researchers at MIT have developed a new method for harnessing energy generated by very small bending motions, which could be capable of harvesting power from a broader range of natural human activities such as walking and exercising.

Yale Environment 360: New Device Harvests Energy From Walking and Exercising, Researchers Say