History. Art. Culture. The Written Word. Comedy. Curiosities. Nature and The Sciences. Anything Else That Holds My Attention. Combinations Thereof. And The Occasional Disjointed Personal Post.
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"Queen of the Cultured Wilds. Empress of the Empty Space between Words. Grand Duchess with Dominion over Damasks" - shilohta
"The best mystery I've ever discovered" - R a n d e h
The Reception Room of Grand Duchesses Olga and Tatiana at the Lower Dacha in Peterhof
The rooms had a diverse range of colors to create cheerful, upbeat mood. All the children’s rooms were decorated with porcelain and glass products: decorative vases, dishes, numerous animal figurines made by Russian and Danish masters of the late XIX-early XX centuries, the walls were decorated with paintings and watercolors by popular authors at that time, but most often with icons and photographs.
You can see a series of photos of Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna taken here in 1902 (x).
For many years, wealthy places like the United States and Europe have had the biggest historical responsibility for global warming and have been tasked with taking the lead in stopping it.
China’s astonishing rise is upending that dynamic.
Over the past three decades, China has built more than 1,000 coal-fired power plants as its economy has grown more than 40-fold. The country has become by far the largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.
The United States has still pumped more total planet-warming pollution into the atmosphere since the 19th century, in part because the country has been burning coal, oil and natural gas for longer. But China is quickly catching up.
Last year, China for the first time passed Europe as the second-largest historical emitter, according to an analysis published on Tuesday by Carbon Brief, a climate research site.
When humans burn fossil fuels or cut down forests, the resulting carbon dioxide typically lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, heating the planet all the while. That’s why historical emissions are often used as a gauge of responsibility for global warming.
China, for its part, has promised that its emissions will peak this decade and then start falling. The country is installing more wind turbines and solar panels than all other nations combined and leads the world in electric vehicle sales. But even with China’s shift to low-carbon energy, the Carbon Brief analysis found, the nation’s historical emissions are projected to approach those of the United States in the coming years.
China’s historical responsibility for climate change has become a major point of contention in global climate politics.
This week, diplomats and leaders from nearly 200 countries have gathered at the United Nations climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, to discuss howto raise the trillions of dollars that vulnerable nations will need to shift to clean energy and to cope with droughts, heat waves, floods and other hazards of a warming planet. One big question is where that money should come from.
Traditionally, the answer has been that wealthy, industrialized countries — like the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia and most of western Europe — should pay up.
Under a United Nations framework originally written in 1992, these developed countrieshave been called upon to provide financial aid. Countries like China, India and Saudi Arabia, as well as every nation in Africa, are classified as developing by that framework, and have not been required to chip in.
Today, however, many wealthy nations say this distinction no longer makes sense. Leaders from both the United States and European Union have called on China to contribute more climate finance to poorer countries as part of a final deal at Baku.
For centuries, the image of a monk hunched over a manuscript, painstakingly copying text by candlelight, has dominated perceptions of medieval book production. However, a recent study has provided the first quantitative analysis of female scribes’ contributions to manuscript copying, revealing that women played a small but steady role in this field. Published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, the research estimates that at least 110,000 manuscripts were copied by female scribes during the Middle Ages, with around 8,000 still surviving today.
Climate startups are going quiet about the climate.
A generation of companies that launched in recent years promising to wean the economy off fossil fuels are revamping their pitch to be more in tune with the zeitgeist.
Companies developing climate-friendly metals, cement and fuel are now emphasizing how their products benefit national security as global trade disputes increase. Other green-technology developers are seeking a niche in the hot artificial-intelligence market.
Many got their start when economic and political forces were aligned behind climate action. The pivots come as those forces wane.
The Trump administration has vowed to boost oil-and-gas production, ax environmental regulations and suspend the Biden administration’s green-funding programs. Even before the election, many companies had been walking back environmental goals amid investor and political pressure.
Financial conditions are also tough, with higher interest rates undermining the investment case for capital-intensive green projects. Equity funding for climate-tech startups fell 40% to $50.7 billion in 2024, a third year of declines, according to research firm BloombergNEF.
“There’s a lot of reflection and trying to anticipate the future,” said Jacob Bro, a partner at venture-capital firm 2150. “Everyone is already relabeling things a little bit.”
One company adjusting to the new reality is Magrathea Metals, which is developing a process for extracting magnesium from saltwater.
The Oakland, Calif.-based startup’s sales pitch used to focus on the climate benefits of its technology, but the references to decarbonization have recently vanished from its home page. Now it warns that the dearth of domestic magnesium production is a national-security emergency, and says Magrathea can secure material for products including jet fighters and drones.
“Getting the West’s magnesium supply base off of China—that is the problem we’re solving,” Chief Executive Alex Grant said in an interview. Magrathea’s potential customers, such as automakers, still want to reduce emissions but the risk of supply disruption is more pressing, he said.
Surveys of the “how many movies on this list have you seen” variety are a fiddly proposition for me because I grew up pre-Internet-video, so there are a lot of classic films where I’ve seen, like, the last thirty-five minutes of the TV edit, and I’m never sure exactly how much of a film you need to have caught for it to count.
Oh damn, I feel this hard. And how many movies I might have seen in toto after seeing different parts of them at different times. Sometimes I’ve edited them into a whole movie in my memory, and then get really surprised at supposedly classic scenes that is absent from “my” version of them. Sometimes this changed the plot dramatically.
Yeah, that’s why the oft-suggested answer of “if you’ve seen enough of it to understand the plot, it counts” doesn’t work for me. There have been any number of occasions where I genuinely thought I did understand the plot, only to later discover that I was missing some vital piece of context – or, worse, that I’d unwittingly conflated the first thirty-five minutes of one movie with the last thirty-five minutes of a completely different movie, and basically hallucinated a missing middle of the film that made the transition make sense!
