Michael Tobis (mt)

#graphicdujour

A metric on which Canada and the USA are at opposite extremes

www.pewresearch.org/religion/202...

bsky.app/profile/mtob...

while i am not an academic i did see this coming and post about it on bluesky, which is why i am quoted in this article

How many plants do you need to breathe? TESTED YouTube video by Joel Creates

A: Lots!

youtu.be/xWRkzvcb9FQ

I believe I’m not the one making assumptions here…

If they created the same number of jobs they eliminated within the same company they would be pointless.

It’s not obvious that more jobs will be created in other sectors, as they are all automating as well.

But go ahead and linearly extrapolate a nonlinear situation. Nobody will stop you.

Bluebells at Riverbend Park, Fairfax County, Virginia Photo Michael Reinemer

“A sustainable future is not guaranteed—if we want it, we need to create it.”

— Dr. Hannah Ritchie
“Not the End of the World” 2024

Demand the Data: What’s Really Going Viral? | Mozilla Foundation Social media platforms aren’t sharing what goes viral on their sites. Tell YouTube, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, and X to disclose their most-viewed content. Sign now.

Mozilla Foundation made a request to YouTube, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, and X: share the top public posts per EU country.

These are public posts that have already been seen, in some cases, by millions.

But so far, every single platform has refused.

www.mozillafoundation.org/en/campaigns...

The core error:

Separatists doing "easy math" treat federal taxes as "lost money" instead of the cost of operating a country.

You wouldn’t eliminate a level of government.

You’d replace Ottawa with Edmonton. (Or Washington, DC, who would have even greater control over natural resource revenue.)

An independent Alberta would need to fund:
• National defence
• Border services
• Foreign affairs & trade
• Immigration
• Higher level courts
• Aviation regulation
• Debt servicing
• Central banking, etc.

This stuff is also conveniently left out of the "-$23B" fiscal balance calculation.

In practice, I gather that houseplants don’t freshen the air in your house enough to make a big difference, as I suspected.

It turns out that many people have taken this on and therr’s a plethora of answers depending on constraints.

Of course the lifecycle of a plant is exactly carbon neutral if the remains of the plant are allowed to decay. In your sealed environment you would want to eject dead leaves and dead plants.

Good thinking!

Wife just raised question of indoor plants. How much carbon does an individual exhale, and how much does a houseplant take up? Which houseplants work best? How many plants needed in a perfectly sealed environment?

My intuition: it’s impractical but I’m guessing.

@climatebook.bsky.social

Again from memory only but I think direct toxicity is barely detectable at ten thousand ppmv, and that places like schools and office buildings often register in the 3000 ppmv range. Which is why we like openable windows even in the 420 ppmv world.

yeah i think anything in the range 600-1000 is considered okay. the paper does mention time spent indoors as an area of consideration/further research so at least they didn’t ignore it but the methodology doesnt seem to factor that in.

I don’t have numbers handy but I looked into it once. If I recall right indoor CO2 concentrations are very typically 1000 ppmv which would likely overwhelm a trend of a few tens of ppmv outdoor ambient over a multidecadal time scale.

Haven’t read the source paper but can imagine them missing this.

I am concerned that they didn’t mention high CO2 exposure indoors. Both indoor time and indoor CO2 concentrations are likely rising (due to better insulation). Indoor CO2 is known to be much higher than outdoor ambient levels.

I have trouble with this report - attributing serum CO2 to increased ambient outdoor CO2 makes little sense when many people spend most time indoors at much higher CO2 levels. Wouldn’t the trend be more likely due to more time indoors in more tightly sealed buildings?

Perth ON last week

The world could be such a nice place if we allowed it. It's all so goddamn unnecessary. There's no need for any of it. It's so beautiful here. It should be so cool to be alive

So, what's Poilievre's take on this? Is he going to be anti-war just because Carney has shown surprising hawkishness?

I think that the lack of substance to the negotiations was obvious, frankly.

Amusing collection of tree photos; don’t miss the alt text.

There are plenty of other terrible things about generative AI but overall my objection to it is spiritual and I just can’t really get into arguments about that. That objection doesn’t extend to every use case for it, but as far as generating anything “imaginative”, those are all graven images to me

Downtown Vancouver separated protected bike-lane filled with people on bikes

Never forget, when you’re being asked to prove that safe bike-lanes or pedestrian crossings across currently unsafe conditions are ‘needed,’ it's hard to justify a bridge by the number of people swimming across a raging river.

Americans are so unaccustomed to persistent road ice that they have just invented a clever word for it.

But the problem is not skepticism. Nor is it only that anyone can create and widely distribute a faked image. It’s that this ability has given everyone a permission structure to doubt. Everyone, in other words, has been granted license to choose which images they will and will not believe, and they can elect to unsee an image simply because it doesn’t confirm their priors: the mere possibility of its algorithmic generation opens it to suspicion.

Here the phrase is once again in something I've written. You would never agree to *choosing* to disbelieve a photo. That would be preposterous. But you want to disbelieve it. Well, AI lets you do that now.

www.artnews.com/art-in-ameri...

Google search query: "how many days until 1 may 2026" AI Overview: "There are approximately 75 to 78 days until May 1, 2026, depending on the exact calculation method from today, February 15, 2026. It is a Friday."

How many processor cycles are we now burning in order to fail to subtract one number from another