The Fully Charged/Everything Electric team really is one big family, and I love these photos. The London show was our 14th (inc all international shows) and every one is so exciting - so many new ideas/techs for cleaner energy and transport, and they’re already the present, not just the future. Onwards and upwards!
@mathieu_caron Fully Charged is really clear that 1-to-1 car replacement cannot be the answer. We want electrified renewable energy, better, greener systems for shared and public transport (including making cities worse for cars if that makes them better for walkers/cyclists etc). And where cars really are the only answer, they should be electric and as small as possible.
I have just discovered that those odd waste/recycling bins that are all over the oldest bits of Bergen, Norway, link to an UNDERGROUND PNEUMATIC WASTE TRANSPORT SYSTEM. The waste collects for a bit and then WHOOSH... it's off to the recycling centre. All underground. No bin lorries (garbage trucks), fewer road vehicles, less noise... amazing. @davidho says that my (considerable) excitement about this is entirely unreasonable. I disagree. https://www.envacgroup.com/how-it-works/the-envac-system/
@thiagocsf@davidho If you keep digging through all the information (I did), they say that it's such a smart system that it can sort out all the different packages when they arrive at the recycling plant. They know exactly what's going in, where it is, and when it arrives. It accumulated underneath each bin until there's enough to go in one package, and they can track those packages.
@elithebearded@davidho They say it's a smart system - they're tracking every package of waste as it moves through, so the machines can separate them out at the recycling plant. If you dig through the webpages, it's in there.
@birdutterance@helenczerski@davidho It’s been working there for 17 years…. Obviously reducing garbage is key, but this takes a lot of vehicles off the street as well as efficiently delivering separated waste (it tracks packets so it knows where to route them).
The hardback version of Blue Machine is so very beautiful but the paperback version is coming soon (May 2nd) and (ta-da!) here is the new cover, on the right. If you think ocean is only blue liquid filler, this is for you.
'Blue Machine is quite simply one of the best books I have ever read.' - Dr George McGavin
@robpike@helenczerski We were all puzzled. But the publishers were very certain - they said they knew their market. I’ve never dared ask them whether the “The” is to avoid clashing with the smoothie.
In the same way that you wouldn’t want someone to operate on your kidneys without a good general medical education covering blood, bones & the rest of the human system, I don’t think we want climate interventions trialed by people who don’t understand how Earth works & only consider the local problem and not the whole system it is an integral part of.
@SometimeHippy@adrianfry@econads@helenczerski But the point is that if you know how the system works in detail, you are more likely to understand why it isn’t neutral - it will affect other processes and feedbacks. In this case, ecosystems & animals above & below the ice, overall energy use, ice structure, and most importantly, taking time and resources away from things that might actually make a difference.
In Blue Machine, I wrote about both the Heard Island experiment (an audacious attempt to take the temperature of the whole ocean using sound) and also haddock mating calls. It was therefore very pleasing to find posters at the huge Ocean Sciences meeting a few weeks ago on those completely unrelated topics (apart from both involving sound), sitting right next to each other.
University College London shoutout! UCL is unwilling to set up a Mastodon account now, but they say that if there's lots of UCL presence here already it will nudge them in this direction. If you're at UCL or know someone who is, and you're on here, please reply to this to let us know! Current chief plotters: @sellathechemist , me and maybe more)
@WiltClan@sellathechemist Yes, this isn't a department thing - it's a whole-university thing. If they don't mind sharing who they are on Mastodon, that would be great.
@sellathechemist THANK YOU to everyone who has replied so far. This is all really helpful (and hopefully you're finding each other through the replies too). I'm not sure what the ethics are of posting full list of all the handles I collected, but if people think that's a good idea maybe I can do that. But the good thing is that there are LOADS of us here! #UCL
@GraziosiSergio@sellathechemist I don't think they need to run their own instance, except for "official" accounts. The whole point of academia is that we're the only people paid to speak our minds without any outside influence, and the vision of a university whose employees can only speak through a corporate vehicle isn't a good one. I just want them to have accounts here, and to support people in finding them and each other.