Four Quick Links for Friday Afternoon
2 June 2023 | 9:52 pm

Paragraphica is an AI-powered camera without a lens. It uses your location data and data from various APIs (weather, time of day, nearby places) to construct a text prompt that's used to generate an image.

Almost 800,000 Maryland licence plates include a URL that now points to an online casino in the Philippines because someone let the domain registration lapse.

India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks, along with "certain pollution- and climate-related topics". The changes are said to be driven by an increasingly authoritarian and conservative political environment.

Life expectancy in the US is dropping and Covid is only one factor. "In a change never recorded in the past century, the probability that children and adolescents will live to age 20 is now decreasing." My god, what a catastrophe.

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The Need for Carbon Removal Is Clear
2 June 2023 | 8:29 pm

To effectively combat the climate crisis, we're going to need to remove carbon from the atmosphere. But what's the best way to do it? Two of the main solutions being considered are direct carbon capture technology and growing trees and each approach has its pros and cons.

Carbon removal is a catch-all term for anything that people do that pulls CO2 out of the air and stores it somewhere else. To meet the world's climate goals, we would need to do this on a massive scale — anywhere from 440 billion to 1.1 trillion metric tons before the end of the century. That's more carbon than the U.S. has emitted in its entire history.

So how do we remove all that carbon? There are two carbon removal ideas that have really captured the conversation. One is direct air capture, which involves big factories that suck in tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, chemically concentrate it, and store it deep in the ground. The other idea is to simply plant trees! After all, trees have naturally sequestered carbon for millions of years.

(via digg)

Tags: climate crisis · video

Times New Bastard
2 June 2023 | 6:19 pm

Times New Bastard, a font based on Times New Roam but every seventh letter is jarringly sans serif

Times New Bastard is a free font based on a Tumblr thread: "It's Times New Roman but every seventh letter is jarringly sans serif."

Tags: remix · typography


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