in the graph below.
Matt Simon - WIRED
Never forgetting that ...
just one month after Cop26 ended in Glasgow, the warning that the 300-metre thick, 50-mile wide Thwaites glacier has started to crack up has been met with silence from governments preoccupied by Covid-19 and the return of normal politics. The danger is that the many actions pledged in November to address global heating will be shelved for another year, to become just one more risk in an increasingly dangerous world. Thwaites underlines that global heating and glaciers do not wait for politicians, and every year action to reduce climate emissions is delayed only accelerates global disaster.
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was limiting its appeal here. So I've repackaged it as one of my Explainer episodes. I Hope you enjoy.
People have been asking for the math. So here it is. The Sun's core temp is ~13.6 MK. For hydrogen nuclei the Coulomb barrier is roughly 0.1 MeV. This corresponds to a temperature in excess of 1 GK! Luckily, tunneling and the distribution of speeds among nuclei lower the actual temperature required. So without tunneling even the Sun's core isn't hot enough for fusion.
To see most of this worked through, check out this link:
http://burro.cwru.edu/Academics/Astr2...
for a less mathematical explanation, try:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_...
The Tabletop Explainer is an intermittent educational vlog presenting answers to viewer questions, brief science lessons, and ideas for teachers and students.
It is a feature of my blog "Tilts at Windmils" which can be found at http://www.davidcolarusso.com/blog/…
s we think. Listen for illuminating stories -- and maybe, a way forward.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate. Watch a highlight reel of the Top 10 TEDTalks at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10…
d War One, extended further. When I was a child, our system of ideology and
mass media still protected that story, but in the last thirty years the incursions of reality
have punctured its protective shell and have ruptured its essential infrastructure.
We no longer believe our storytellers, our elites. We don’t believe the politicians, we don’t
believe the doctors, we don’t believe the professors, we don’t believe the bankers, we don’t
believe the technologists. All of them imply that everything is under control, and we know that
it is not.
We have lost the vision of the future we once had; most people have no vision of the future at
all. This is new for our society. Fifty or a hundred years ago, most people agreed on the general
outlines of the future. We thought we knew where society was going. Even the Marxists and the
capitalists agreed on its basic outlines: a paradise of mechanized leisure and scientifically
engineered social harmony, with spirituality either abolished entirely or relegated to a materially
inconsequential corner of life that happened mostly on Sundays. Of course there were dissenters
from this vision, but this was the general consensus.
When a story nears its end it goes through death throes, an exaggerated semblance of life.
So today we see domination, conquest, violence, and separation take on absurd extremes that
hold a mirror up to what was once hidden and diffuse. The year 2012 ended with just such a
potent story-disrupting event: the Sandy Hook massacre. Even realizing that far more, equally
innocent, children have been killed in the last few years by, say, U.S. drone strikes, it really got
under my skin. No one was immune. I think that is because its utter senselessness penetrated
every defense mechanism we have to maintain the fiction that the world is basically OK. Unlike
9/11 or Oklahoma City, and certainly unlike the horrors that go on around the world, there was
no convenient narrative to divert the raw pain of what happened. We cannot help but map those
murdered innocents onto the young faces we know, and the anguish of their parents onto
ourselves.
At the base of our Story of the People is separation, of humanity from nature, of me
from you, of each from all, and this event united everyone, of whatever culture, nationality,
or political persuasion. For a moment, we all felt the exact same thing. For at least a moment,
I am sure, most people were in touch with the simplicity of what is important; I am sure many
people had that fleeting feeling, “It doesn’t have to be that difficult, if only we could
remember what is so obvious now, that love is all there is.”
We humans have made such a mess of things, forgetting LOVE. It is the same realization we
have when a loved one is going through the dying process, and we think, “Ah, how precious this
person is – why couldn’t I see that? Why couldn’t I appreciate all those moments we had together?
All the arguments and grudges seem so tiny now.”
Charles Eisenstein
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