Interesting Links for 18-07-2021

[andrewducker]

Should you never want to see your children again, this will do the trick

(tags:children fairytale )

I had not realised that Joss Whedon was also transphobic

(tags:transgender JossWhedon OhForFucksSake )

The mountains that are older than fish (and stretch from America to Norway via Scotland)

(tags:mountains prehistory viaNancyLebov )

GM Will Suck Lithium From the Salton Sea to Make Batteries

(tags:batteries sea )

American gender roles are a trauma reaction to WW2

(tags:ww2 society gender )

£20m for research projects to improve treatment and mitigation of long Covid

(tags:pandemic research )

The Covid vaccine has been offered to all UK adults

(tags:UK vaccination )

New Anthony Bourdain documentary deepfakes his voice

(tags:AI voice )

Comments

[nancylebov]

For what it's worth, _More Work for Mother_ has it that the earlier version of "no wife of mine is going to work" dates back to the early 1900s, when housework and most paid jobs were so physically taxing that working for money outside the home on top of doing housework meant an early death from exhaustion.

I wouldn't mind knowing more about gender roles in the US before WW2.

[movingfinger]

The "American gender roles started after WWII" thing makes no sense. Just looking at the '30s, the ideal was a SAHM although economics made that increasingly out of reach for the middle class. Women's domestic labor underpinned male participation in the American and European external workforces for years before that and even in regional populations at times with normalized working women (the example I am thinking of is Lowell and mill workers), there was a recognized thing where young women would work in factories for long enough to save up money for their own household establishment before marrying, but after marrying would be employed running their home (I wouldn't call it dowry, but it demonstrated prudence, good management skills, etc.) which was, as Nancy says, a prodigious amount of work in itself. To state flatly that 1946 is some kind of transformative event seems to ignore all previous ebb and flow of [white] middle-class women working outside the home.

I hate "buckle up Twitter."

[andrewducker]

I think you're in violent agreement with the thread.

They are saying that post WW2 there was a boom that made SAHM a possibility for people it hadn't been before, and that combined with a reactionary push against the changes that had happened during WW2 meant that things regressed further than they had been in the 30s, as an enforced fantasy.

So before WW2 there had been a whole range of approaches, things loosened up during WW2, and then afterwards there was a push back into an "ideal" state, which affected things for a long time afterwards.

Which seems to be lining up with what you're saying.

[dewline]

2. Whedon just seems to keep digging, doesn't he?

4. I hope this doesn't backfire ecologically.

5. I could see that as a distinct probability. Maybe not formally organized, but highly probable.

[andrewducker]

Whedon just keeps disappointing me. It would be really lovely if he'd stop.

[alithea]

I do not have the spoons for reading more of his dumbfuckery, I just keep telling myself that Alyson Hannigan and Sarah Michelle Gellar are still lovely.

[anna_wing]

My first thought upon seeing the mushroom photo was "I wonder if they are edible?" It turns out that many species form rings, so one would have to check.

I visited Inverewe Garden many years ago, and was sitting on the Poolewe beach in the evening enjoying the concept of a long sunset (night falls with a crash in tropical latitudes, especially near the equator; invitations for a sunset cocktail need to be kept with absolute punctuality), reading a local guide pamphlet. Which told me not to bother looking for fossils among the pretty, dark red, limestone pebbles that I was sitting on, since the rock from which they had been worn down was 2 billion years old, and predated multicellular life. That was my Deep Time moment.

The Historical Time moment was in Istanbul, looking at the obelisk and realising that it was already a thousand years old when Herodotus wrote about Egypt...that put Middle-earth into perspective too.

[andrewducker]

The sign in the garden is quite mindblowing.

[anef]

I have been reading Herodotus Book 2 this last year and although the travelogue of temples and beautiful gardens could get a bit dull I would occasionally remember "This is Egypt before Alexander, before the Romans." And every time it sent that frisson down my spine. Also the story of How Helen Never Went to Troy was deeply entertaining.

[danieldwilliam]

That's a big increase in lithium production compared to current demand but I think a drop in the ocean (sorry, I'm so, so, so sorry) compared to future global demand I think.

We currently require lithium for 100% of smart phone and laptop batteries, about 1% of automotive transport and 1% of electricity storage. By 2030 that going to look more like 200% of smart phones etc, 10% of automotive transport and 5%* of electricity storage and growing.

I think the CTC scheme uses the same technology as the lithium mines in Cornwall - but bigger and with a better resource. So that's extracting water laden with salts from fissures in the rock, stripping out minerals and the heat and re-injecting the water rather than processing the surface water from the Salton Sea - which would be like the seawater extraction methods you linked to not so long ago.

Looking at the CTC website they look like they are gearing up for quite a large geo-thermal energy scheme in the end. Ironically this may reduce demand for the lithium slightly by reducing overall energy storage requirements or maybe not. I don't understand California's winter to summer electricity demand changes that well.


*totes guessing on this but given that lithium-ion batteries are not great for bulk storage of electricity I think we'll see alternative batteries used more and more use of hydro-schemes and CAES and more use of Costa Rica as a storage system. Therefore less lithium-ion batteries in use on the grid than current activity might suggest.

[andrewducker]

Oh yes, if Vanadium Flow batteries, or some other energy storage, isn't going to take over for bulk storage then we're going to need a hell of a lot more lithium. As it is you're right, we're going to need a lot more.