Posts Tagged ‘Morte d’Arthur’
Causa Mortis…
It’s no wonder, what with Fukushima and all, that there’s renewed worry about the safety of nuclear power. As that tragic episode demonstrates, it’s an altogether justified concern. But what of the alternatives?
The Lifeboat Foundation‘s Next Big Future did the homework, quantifying the inclusive mortality rates from the use of coal, oil, natural gas, biomass/biofuel, peat, solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear to generate electricity. The detailed results, with supporting research, are here; that detail is graphically portrayed here…
By way of putting nuclear into context, Seth Godin summarizes the comparison:
There are objections one might raise to the research used (it doesn’t, for instance, take into account the implications of the long half-lives of radioactive contaminants, nor less-than- or indirectly-fatal effects like impact on the endocrine system). But in any case, the point is not, of course, that one shouldn’t be concerned with nuclear safety; the events of the last couple of weeks are ample evidence that it’s critical.
Rather (and graphically obviously) the point is that one should be even more concerned about– and active in addressing– the risks of fossil fuel generation.
The title of Seth’s post: “The triumph of coal marketing.” Indeed.
As we hustle to harness the wind, we might might recall that it was on this date in 1855 that Canadian physician, geologist, and inventor Abraham Gesner received the first U.S. patent for a process to obtain oil from bituminous shale and cannel coal for the purpose of illumination (No. 12,612); he called the product “kerosene.”
Judd the facts, ma’am…
Donald Judd, was an artist, designer, and teacher whose work (largely grouped with the Minimalists, though Judd hated that label) has been featured at the Tate Modern and other museums around the world, and is on display at the Judd Foundation, in both Manhattan and Marfa, Texas.
In addition to Judd’s art, the Foundation displays, and via a “subsidiary” sells, furniture manufactured to Judd designs… and it displays Judd’s library.
And even cooler (especially for readers who can’t make it to the Spring Street location), the library is searchable online. One simply clicks on a shelf in the diagram of the layout…
… and sees the shelf in question….
… Mouse over a shelf (on the site), and a tab pops up identifying the theme of that part of the collection; click on a volume to see the bibliographical details of that book.
As remind ourselves of Groucho Marx’s insight: “outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend; inside of a dog it’s too dark to read,” we might recall that this is a bid date in the annals of English letters… It was on this date in 1842, that Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published Poems. While the future Poet Laureate had been writing for a decade, it was this two-volume release (which included “Ulysses” and Morte d’Arthur”) that made his name.
And on this date in 1925, Virginia Wolfe published the story of a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway– one of Time‘s “100 Best Novels since 1923” (2005).
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