"Most people know that politics is failing. That’s not a theory or my point of view. They can see it, they can feel it. The problem is they just can’t imagine an alternative. They lack confidence . . .
Then I really started to meet people – and, trust me, there is nothing as great as meeting people who are getting on with their lives, running farms, schools, shops, and even economies, in communities where no one has power."
Happy International Worker's Day from France, where I have the full day off work as a holiday. It began after workers in the US started a general strike for the eight-hour workday on May 1st, 1886 that culminated with the Haymarket massacre. The date of May 1st as a day to celebrate the labor movement was exported to Europe and other countries, but some politicians in the US thought the date would serve as a rallying point for leftist and labor movements, so they moved Labor Day to September.
Instead, in the US, we have on May 1st "Loyalty Day", "a day for declaring loyalty to the United States of America and to acknowledge American history" and "Law Day", "meant to reflect on the role of law in the foundation of the country and to recognize its importance for society".
So, happy "Real Labor Day" to My Fellow Americans™ who've been scammed out of a legitimate reason to celebrate the accomplishments of the US labor movement, like achieving the eight-hour workday.
With this catalytic funding, our small collaboration to develop an open-source flow battery for stationary energy storage can further develop. We're planning on finalizing our small-scale benchtop kit (for R&D/educational use) before going to a larger cell design.
Very grateful for their support and belief in the project.
@kirk yeah, but also, they have a terrible tendency to enthusiastically integrate business buzzwords because they think it makes things better/funding more likely. Ugh. Usually without understanding, but still.
@kirk my lab's chair was an extremely politically savvy person with the ear of a lot of government ministers, and if there was a hot buzzword that could be dropped into a paper, it would be, ESPECIALLY if it was business nonsense. Hated it 🤣
Pleased to find out that I've achieved my childhood dreams of wanting to be a scientist and electrician (electrochemistry counts??). Thanks mom for keeping those old drawings.
I volunteer for a nonprofit (https://windempowerment.org/) which is made up of many small member organizations around the world that deal with small wind turbine technology. I'd like to have a (RSS) feed on our website (which is WordPress) that republishes the RSS feeds and maybe news items/letters of our member orgs to boost their work and show their activity.
Can anyone recommend some ways to achieve this? We are on a tight budget. I have my own FreshRSS server to test with. 🙏
I'm Kirk, an engineer researching the conversion/storage of clean energy: batteries, converting CO₂ into useful chemicals, etc. I'm from St. Louis, USA, did my PhD in UK, now living in France. I'm a lot of things but anticapitalist and antiauthoritarian are good catch-alls.
I plan to transition away from academia and start a worker-owned enterprise around these technologies, with open-source at the core. Here to learn from others and find community.
@BillySmith@edumerco ah, yes! Big fan of AD systems, that's rad. Would totally try one of those planter systems if I had the space at my apartment! There's a cool French org doing micro-AD here too: https://www.picojoule.org/
Falling down the #Quarto rabbit hole, and enjoying it so far. Experimenting with it as a blog and electronic lab notebook, and am keen on the idea of having raw data + analysis + presentation cleanly in the same version-controlled repository to enable understanding and reproducibility (in my work raw data can be on the order of 10s of megabytes).
Wanting to add some more interactivity to published work in a static site, to work client-side (as a sort of interactive "paper").
The first being Bartosz Ciechanowski's blog, with beautifully done interactive visualizations and clear explanations of a number of everyday technologies, from bikes, to combustion engines, optics, watches, etc.
TIL Yi Cui's group at Stanford had a Nature Paper retracted for alleged data fabrication? S/o to the @PubPeer browser extension once again for bringing it to my attention.
Also some other not-great allegations in the PubPeer thread 😬