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Day: 11 March 2023

Living off-grid in Manhattan

2023-03-11 /

Joshua Spodek, writing in Ars Technica »

I learned to time my activities around the sun. In direct sunlight, the panels fully charged the battery in about four hours. A cloudy day could mean the battery wouldn’t fully charge, but between planning and my NYU cheat, I missed zero meetings.

Some changes that made the experiment work included reading more books, writing by hand, choosing salads over cooked foods, going out instead of staying in, and shifting work to daytime hours. At first, I considered these changes sacrifices, but looking back, I view them more as a cultural shift, a bit like when I lived overseas and couldn’t find a good bagel. Finding the local equivalent—croissants in Paris or vegetable steamed buns in Shanghai—worked better than complaining, and it expanded my world.

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Last Updated on July 2, 2023

Singapore grades itself on its Covid-19 responses

2023-03-11 /

Salma Khalik, writing in The Straits Times »

The White Paper on the nation’s performance, released on Wednesday, was not a self-congratulatory exercise but an effort to understand how it can build on its successes and avoid the errors committed in the fog of war, when the next big pandemic knocks on its doors.

…

“Vaccination was clearly such an important way out of this pandemic for the world and for Singapore,” he added. “Overall, our whole vaccine strategy from procurement, to the rolling out of the vaccines, to the communication to actually delivering jabs to people, I think we have generally done well, and that has enabled us to get through this pandemic.”

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Last Updated on July 2, 2023

Record number of women worked in construction in Quebec in 2022

2023-03-11 /

On this year’s International Women’s Day, the Commission de la construction du Québec (CCQ) announced that a record number of women worked on construction sites in 2022—over 7,200, an increase of nearly 970 over 2021—accounting for 3.64% of the overall workforce.

Large numbers of women chose to begin a construction career, surpassing the 1,900 mark for a second year in a row and representing a peak of 9.32% of all newcomers to the industry.

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Last Updated on July 2, 2023

Timothy Snyder » The global fight for our future

2023-03-11 /

If you think democracy is some kind of inevitable, default setting for the world, then you aren’t going to have it for very long, says historian and author Timothy Snyder. From World War I to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Snyder dives into the structures that uplift and tear down political systems, offering a historical perspective on the current state of democracy around the world as well as the patterns of thought that lead to tyranny.

Timothy David Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Wikipedia

Clocks in many parts of Canada to jump forward this weekend

2023-03-11 /

Most Canadians will set their clocks forward an hour tonight before going to bed. Most provinces, as well as the territories of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, will set their clocks ahead one hour.

Yukon and most of Saskatchewan keep their clocks the same year-round. Yukon made the switch for the last time in March 2020, and standard time is now permanent there.

Also » CBC / Axios

Last Updated on July 2, 2023

A moderate amount coffee is associated with lower mortality risk

2023-03-11 /

Tina Reed, writing in Axios »

The researchers from Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, used behavioral data from more than 171,000 people enrolled in a U.K. study to understand coffee consumption patterns.

  • They found during a seven-year follow-up period, participants who drank any amount of unsweetened coffee were 16% to 21% less likely to die than participants who did not drink coffee.
  • Participants who drank 1.5 to 3.5 daily cups of coffee sweetened with sugar were 29% to 31% less likely to die than participants who did not drink coffee.

 

Last Updated on July 2, 2023

Meeting an old friend for the first time

2023-03-11 /

David Weinberger, Ph.D. writing in Phycology Today »

I ran into him a couple of weeks ago at a conference and had multiple conversations, a few of them quite extended. When it was time to leave the conference, one of us said to the other that our intermittent friendship is long, deep, and important to us. The other agreed with his whole heart.

At age 72 I have discovered a type of friendship that I did not know existed. It’s a friendship that does not correlate with the amount of time we have spent together, the frequency of the meetings, how well we’ve “kept up” with the other, or the significance of the events we’ve participated in—no weddings, birthdays, or funerals.

Last Updated on July 2, 2023

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