Interesting Links for 07-10-2019

[andrewducker]

20 Years Later, and the Women of Angel Still Deserves More

(tags:Buffy women pregnancy )

The UK government appears boxed in on the Brexit extension

(tags:law uk government europe )

A floating device created to clean up plastic from the ocean is finally doing its job

(tags:plastic ocean environment waste )

Unprecedented rise in infant mortality in England linked to poverty

(tags:England poverty austerity death babies OhForFucksSake )

David Bowie and the invisible mask

(tags:DavidBowie autism confidence )

The Ocean Cleanup struggles to prove it will not harm sea life

(tags:Ocean plastic environment nature )

The British government is interfering with its "independent" advisors

(tags:UK advice government OhForFucksSake )

Westworld: the first film with CGI (and its source code)

(tags:programming movies video cgi )

"Stop Asking About My Trans Husband's Junk"

(tags:penis transgender privacy )

OECD tax reform plans could make inequality worse

(tags:tax reform inequality )

US customs officer holds journalist's passport until he agrees he writes 'propaganda'

(tags:usa immigration OhForFucksSake )

Countering the worst of the current anti trans propaganda

(tags:transgender lgbt )

Book Review: 'The AI Does Not Hate You' by Tom Chivers

(tags:review rationality books geek ai )

The missing millions: Young people and private renters left off electoral register ahead of snap election

(tags:elections voting UK )

What is a constitution and is the UK undergoing a constitutional crisis

(tags:constitution uk politics )

Why Boris Johnson's Brexit offer falls well short of what the EU can accept

(tags:Europe UK Doom )

'World-first' low-carbon greenhouses bigger than the O2 to grow 20 tonnes of tomatoes a day

(tags:farming uk vegetables )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

There are big opportunities for use of waste heat. Each of the dozens and dozens of thermal power stations in the UK is pumping warm water in to cooling ponds and then lukewarm water back in to the rivers and seas. There's some value to the energy in that warmish water if you can commercially and physically connect the power plant with an off-taker.

Then there are lots of smaller waste heat producers. Smaller thermal power plants, food chillers, air-conditioning for large buildings.

Also the Tube in London.

The obvious problem is the capital cost of the pipes. The less obvious problem is matching up certainty of supply and the certainty of demand.

[cyprinella]

The town I went to university in piped it under the sidewalks in the downtown area to keep them free of snow all winter, which is pretty impressive in Michigan.

[danieldwilliam]

I am struggling to understand the mismatch between Johnson's talk on Brexit and the legal position.

Unless he has some clever wheeze in mind he doesn't seem to be the person who decides if we leave on the 31st October. His last clever wheeze failed in court and ended up with a finding of fact against him that he had mislead the Queen in the fulfilment of his duties. So, if I were him, I'd be a bit less confident of how clever and wheezey my clever wheeze were.

The people who do have the power to make a decision don't seem to agree with him that the deal he has offered is acceptable.

So unless he's going full on coup he lacks the power to make Britain leave the EU on the 31st October.

He's going to look pretty bad on the 1st of November if we haven't left. I mean with Brexit supporters. He might be able to persuade many of them that it was someone else's fault, but not all. There are only so many times you can promise something and not deliver and blame someone else and for that to be effective. There's a possibility that he splits the pro-Brexit vote again going in to a General Election.

Perhaps he's not planning on having a general election, but again he's not the only person who gets to decide on that.

A thousand maids with a thousand mops

[frith]

A garbage dump cleanup device with a Sisyphean task... I've seen this movie before. So, it's a 5 year half life model for the efficiency of this ocean clean-up plan. How soon before plastic removal reaches an equilibrium with plastic recruitment in these garbage gyres? How soon before the agency/agencies harvesting this barnacle-encrusted trash gets de-funded and abandoned in the scramble to cope with climate change?

The passive netting device is a neat solution for sieving out plastics, but there will have to be an automated compaction aspect. Also, apart from the microplastics, aren't these floating reefs or plastic Sargassos? Do they serve as nurseries for some species?

Edit: OK, article 6 addresses the life in the gyres aspect. So yeah, mining the garbage-filled gyres is problematic.

[danieldwilliam]

If it reaches an equilibrium point, is that equilibrium point small enough that a more active intervension could economically reduce the amount of free-floating plastic to close to zero?

Automatic compaction or at least automatic removal of the waste from the collector to the shore is pretty straight-forward. (I work in martime autonomous robotics).

[frith]

I think it would have to be autonomous as I don't think there is any money to be made with life-encrusted plastic.

So many questions. ^_^

[danieldwilliam]

Not much money in it I reckon. I think the market for recycled plastic is not as big or as liquid as we like to think. This is clearly going to be low quality plastic.

Burning it for its energy content is an option.

I reckon I could get a demonstration system set up for some tens of millions dollar-euro-pounds.

[andrewducker]

But does it get around the issues in the other link?

[danieldwilliam]

The issue of the potential (but not well understood) risk to microscopic marine life?

Not really.

The system I have in mind is basically some small autonomous surface vessels scooping up the plastic trash and dumping it in a larger vessel for either storage and collection by manned vessels or autonomous transport to the shore.

So it's not going to do anything to avoid the marine life getting caught up in the filters.

For a similar amount of money I could provide a demonstation system that would explore the distribution of that sort of marine life in the oceans and / or monitor some aspects of the health of those gyre ecosystems.

[frith]

I suspect that burning it would at least hamper efforts to reduce atmospheric CO2. I'd propose burying it, but that life in the gyres, it ain't all microscopic. Could be an instance of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

[danieldwilliam]

Burning it is is, I think, no different from burning oil. So not helpful from a CO2 point of view.

But if it displaced oil or gas that was going to be burned anyway it's perhaps net neutral CO2 and it might make the difference between cleaning up the plastic in the sea being too costly to be politically palitable or not.

I'm not suggesting that burning it a great solution but it might overall be a net positive.

Being able to recycle it in to plastic feedstock would be ideal but I think that is difficult.