How much land would be needed to power the world with solar energy?

Harvard University has announced that its massive endowment fund is divesting from fossil fuels. Many other universities had already done so under pressure from their students and alumni and others are likely to follow.

Academic endowments are entering a new normal after Harvard University, the richest school in the world, said it would divest from fossil fuels.

The decision wasn’t made lightly. The nearly $42 billion endowment succumbed to years of pressure from students and climate activists, a massive protest at a 2019 football game, and a string of legal efforts. President Lawrence Bacow in the past has said the endowment shouldn’t be used for political ends. Earlier this month he changed his tune.
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A cascade of similar announcements has followed in Harvard’s wake, with Boston University, the University of Minnesota and the $8 billion MacArthur Foundation pulling the plug on fossil fuels. And there are more to come.

“We’re going to see this ripple out in the coming months,” said Richard Brooks, climate finance director at the nonprofit Stand.earth. “The financial arguments have never been stronger, with declining demand for oil, gas and coal. The social acceptability has now shifted as well.”

Divestment activists now have turned their focus to Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Boston College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, none of which have fully abandoned fossil fuels.

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John Oliver on voting rights

He explains what is going on in the effort to suppress the votes of poor and minority groups. He says that the Democratic party leadership and Joe Biden are avoiding taking the step of abolishing the filibuster and passing stronger voting rights laws, thinking that they can out-organize the Republicans and get out a large vote like they did in 2020. But that is not a given.

Taliban promise to revive barbaric punishments

A leader in the new Taliban government is promising a return to barbaric punishments.

The Taliban will resume executions and the amputation of hands for criminals they convict, in a return to their harsh version of Islamic justice.

According to a senior official – a veteran leader of the hardline Islamist group who was in charge of justice during its previous period in power – executions would not necessarily take place in public as they did before.

The Taliban’s first period ruling Afghanistan during the 1990s, before they were toppled by a US-led invasion in 2001 following the 9/11 attacks, was marked by the grisly excesses of its perfunctory justice system, which included public executions in the football stadium in Kabul.

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Which hapless nation is going to be the next Grenada?

The secretary of defense Lloyd Austin, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff of the US military general Mark Milley, and the head of the US Central Command general Frank McKenzie have all been trying to explain the reasons for the debacle in Afghanistan, not just the final chaotic withdrawal but the failure of the entire two-decade long nation building enterprise and the inability to defeat the Taliban despite pouring vast amounts of money into the Afghan military and providing all manner of material, training, and air support. When the USSR was the occupier of that country, the US government was providing covert support to the then-Mujahideen to undermine the Soviet-backed government but there is no evidence that any outside power, Russia or any other country, was providing anything like significant support for the Taliban in its fight against the US.
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Please don’t try this

There is dramatic video of a Florida man who encountered an alligator that had wandered onto his front yard and managed to force it into a trash can, close the lid, and later release it into the wild. A wildlife expert who watched the video said that this was a very bad idea that could have gone terribly wrong in any number of ways with tragic results. He said the best thing to do is get the hell out of there and into your house and call the authorities to take care of the problem.

There are so many news stories and videos of people in Florida encountering alligators that I am beginning to wonder if people who actually live in that state take it in their stride when they see one in their neighborhood, like us with turkeys here in Monterey, giving them a wide berth but not really shocked.

Death and the final exit in The Good Place (spoilers)

I recently re-watched the TV series The Good Life which I have praised highly in the past but did not discuss the way it ended because I did not want to spoil it for others. But since almost two years have passed since it ended, I feel that it is safe to do so.

Those who watched the entire series know that it begins with four people who have died being fooled into thinking that they have entered the ‘Good Place’, which is a euphemism for a heaven but without a deity, because they have lived exceptional lives on Earth. But in reality they are in the ‘Bad Place’ (a euphemism for hell) as part of an elaborate hoax by demons who are experimenting with a new form of torture in which they get people to torture each other by making each others’ lives miserable by squabbling over all manner of things. You know, just like people do on Earth. Most of the series involves the four, after they discover the hoax, trying to figure out how to get into the real Good Place and avoid eternal torment.
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Good news about those who sheltered Snowden in Hong Kong

Back in 2016, I blogged about a family of Sri Lankan asylum-seeking refugees in Hong Kong who in 2013 hid Edward Snowden in their tiny apartment when he was hiding from the media and the clutches of the vindictive Obama administration. This was after he left the hotel from where he had released his bombshell revelations about the massive spying efforts waged by the US and its allies against their own citizens. The family sheltered him for two weeks before he was able to get to get out of Hong Kong and into Russia where he now lives. The role of this family was only revealed in 2016 in the Oliver Stone film Snowden.
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A sign of the apocalypse

As if the pandemic had not already given us enough to worry about, we now have rats coming up through toilets via the waste pipes. This is apparently because, due to the pandemic, there is less rubbish around to provide them with food so they are going farther afield in search of it. This is apparently being reported all over the UK but they will surely come here too.

Forget the Four Horsemen. This is far more terrifying.

A pixel is not a tiny square

I had thought of a ‘pixel’ as the smallest unit of digital space, like a tiny square, and that digitial images are made of up such units. This article says it is not that simple and that it is related to Fourier transforms, in which any wave form can be decomposed into the sum of sinusoidal waves of different frequencies.

Perhaps the most unexpected person in this story – at least for readers in the United States – is Vladimir Kotelnikov, the man who turned Fourier’s idea into the pixel.
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Early in his career, Kotelnikov showed how to represent a picture with what we now call pixels. His beautiful and astonishing sampling theorem, published in 1933, is the foundation of the modern picture world.
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A pixel exists only at a point. It’s zero-dimensional (0D), with no extent. You can’t see a pixel.

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Death and the universe

John Horgan writes that he thinks physicists are drawn to the multiverse idea (which he dislikes) because they cannot bear to think that our universe will end at some point. He postulates an explanation for why multiverse theories are so popular among physicists despite the lack of any supporting evidence for them.

Here is my guess: physicists are freaked out by the mortality of our little universe. What was born must die, and according to the big bang theory, our cosmos was born 14 billion years ago, and it will die at some unspecified time in the far future. The multiverse, like God, is eternal. It had no beginning; it will have no end.

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