Daily Archives: January 7, 2021

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On Wednesday, the United States arrived at peak disinformation singularity. The lines between right-wing conspiracy internet forums and physical reality disappeared. Pro-Trump extremists stormed the Capitol as online trolls who had spent years threatening violence fully realized themselves, making it clear that they had never really been just trolling.

The mob that stormed the capital manifested years worth of posts lodged into unhinged, far-right, conspiracy-laden corners of the internet. Such rhetoric crept toward the mainstream, crossing over into right-wing media, eventually coming out of Trumps own mouth. It won new converts and spread more widely. It finally broke loose on Wednesday, as they did what theyd always said they would.

Through their farcical but all-too-real siege, Trump extremists turned the Capitol into something indistinguishable from the wild plots envisioned on their forums and groups. In the days leading up to the riot, people claiming that they were coming to Washington on Wednesday posted on the thedonald.win like it was 1944 and they were about to get on landing craft headed for the shores of Normandy. Today I had the very difficult conversations with my children, that daddy might not come home from D.C. one wrote. My husbands not happy, and hes going to with me, but I told him that if I say go and leave me behind, that he must do it. No questions asked. I look forward to standing with you on the front lines, another wrote in response.

On similar forums, extremist Trump supporters have been publicly outlining such plans for years: that they will take justice into their own hands by trying to start a second civil war or carrying out citizens arrests.

Ahead of today, experts thought the convening of a broad range of Trump supporters, including extremist groups,would radicalize attendees evenfurther toward the hard right. Their storming of the Capitol all but ensures that will come true, while illustrating the power they have already amassed.

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At Today's Riot, Trump's Trolls Turned Their Violent Fantasies Into Reality - Mother Jones

Air travel is one of the worst contributors to global warming, burping out nearly a billion tons of CO2 a year. But what if we could close that circle by converting those greenhouse gases back into jet fuel?

In the face of phenomena like climate change, plastic pollution, deforestation, and land degradation people are increasingly questioning the short-term thinking that underpins our societies. Some have dubbed our current approach a linear economy where we extract raw materials, process them into products, and then dispose of them once theyve outlived their usefulness.

As the global population grows, this strategy is becoming increasingly unsustainable. Thats prompting growing interest in a different model known as the circular economy. Rather than simply discarding our waste, we find ways to reuse it or recycle it into something more useful.

For years now, chemists have been trying to apply this idea to one of the most environmentally damaging sectors of our economy: the aviation industry. Not only do planes emit huge amounts of CO2, they also pump other greenhouse gases like nitrogen oxide directly into the upper atmosphere, where their warming effect is greatly increased.

The fossil fuels they burn to create all these emissions are hydrocarbons, which means they are made up of a combination of carbon and hydrogen. Thats led some to suggest it might be possible to create synthetic versions of these fuels by capturing the CO2 planes produce and combining it with hydrogen extracted with water.

If the energy used to power these reactions came from renewable sources, their production wouldnt lead to any increase in emissions. And when these fuels were burned they would simply be returning CO2 captured from the atmosphere, making the fuel effectively carbon neutral.

Its a nice idea, but the process of turning CO2 into useful fuels is more complex than it might sound. Most efforts so far have required expensive catalystssubstances that boost the speed of a chemical reactionor multiple energy-intensive processing steps, which means the resulting fuel is far pricier than fossil fuels.

Now though, researchers from the University of Oxford have developed a new low-cost catalyst that can directly convert CO2 into jet fuel, which they say could eventually lay the foundation for a circular economy for aviation fuel.

Instead of consuming fossil crude oil, jet aviation fuels and petrochemical starting compounds are produced from a valuable and renewable raw material, namely, carbon dioxide, they write in a paper in Nature Communications.

Within a jet fuel CO2 circular economy, the goods (here the jet fuel) are continually reprocessed in a closed environment, they add. This would not only save the natural fossil resources and preserve the environment, but would also create new jobs, economies, and markets.

Creating jet fuel is particularly challenging because most routes for synthesizing hydrocarbons from CO2 tend to produce smaller molecules with only a few carbon atoms, like methane and methanol. Jet fuels are made up of molecules with many long chains of carbon atoms, and there have been few successful attempts to produce them directly from CO2 without extra processing.

But by combining findings from previous research, the group was able to create a low-cost iron-based catalyst that could produce substantial yields of jet fuel from CO2 and hydrogen. Iron is already commonly used in these kinds of reactions, but they combined it with manganese, which has been shown to boost the activity of iron catalysts, and potassium, which is known to encourage the formation of longer-chain hydrocarbons.

They prepared the catalysts using an approach known as the Organic Combustion Method (OCM), in which the raw ingredients are combined with citric acid to make a slurry that is then ignited at 662F and burned for four hours to create a fine powder. This is a much simpler processing technique than previous approaches, which means it holds promise for industrial applications.

Scaling up this process to meet the demands of the aviation industry wont be easy. Boosting the efficiency of the synthesis step is only one part of the puzzle. Collecting large amounts of CO2 from the air is very tricky, and splitting water to make hydrogen also uses a lot of power.

Plans are already afoot to build a pilot plant that will convert CO2 into jet fuel at Rotterdam Airport in the Netherlands, but as Friends of the Earth campaigner Jorien de Lege told the BBC, scaling up the technology will be a herculean task.

If you think about it, this demonstration plant can produce a thousand liters a day based on renewable energy. Thats about five minutes of flying in a Boeing 747, she said.

Nonetheless, developing a cheap, high-yield catalyst is a major step towards making the idea more feasible. Getting our planes to fly on thin air may sound like a wildly ambitious idea, but that goal has just come a little bit closer.

Image Credit: Free-Photos from Pixabay

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Scientists Just Created a Catalyst That Turns CO2 Into Jet Fuel - Singularity Hub

Did your New Years resolution include reading more? But do you sometimes find that you have trouble focusing on your reading, especially books in their entirety in ways you did not before? Given the times we live in, I have to say this is quite natural. We can still be passionate readers but our expectations from the practice of reading might just have to shift a little to get attuned to our reality.

I started thinking about this while chatting with one of my students. A first-year in college, born in the 21st century, she is a digital native, someone who has literally not seen a time when the internet wasnt around. She told me that she used to love reading, but in the last couple of years, shes found it hard to focus on her reading. The distractions always steal her away.

Once in a while, digital natives and digital immigrants have the same kinds of problems especially as we move through different phases in our relationship with technology.

Were still trying to read like we used to in the old times; this is true even of the digital natives who are beginning their reading lives in this new reality. There is an existing mode and discourse of reading the only one we have and everybody who reads, especially so-called serious readers, must get initiated into that mode. But what is that mode?

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Reading:Transforming any space into a private place.(Shutterstock)

The social phenomenon of private reading, as we know it is fairly recent in the history of humanity. While printed texts played a role in ancient China, mainly as scripture and SparkNotes for their version of UPSC exams, ancient and medieval Europe only saw books as rare and precious handwritten manuscripts owned by churches, royalty, and wealthy aristocrats. Sustained reading on a mass scale would have to wait for the popular spread of printed books in the 18th century. Capitalism, by then, would expand to create the modern middle class, who had the literacy, leisure, and purchasing power to buy books on a large enough scale to create and sustain a publishing industry. Hence, was born a modern practice sitting in isolation and reading quietly for a long time, to finish a whole book.

Reading as entertainment reached its peak during the Victorian age especially of long books such as the novel, which eventually went from being a popular genre to the status of high art, unfortunately (but understandably) losing its popularity in the process. Excitement over novels reached a stage where people crowded the New York harbour to pounce on people arriving from England with questions about the next instalment of the serialised Dickens novel that had not yet reached America: Is Little Nell dead? It was the kind of popularity enjoyed by the soap opera in the 20th century and the web-series today. The first techno-generic challenge to the dominance of books as popular entertainment would come in the early 20th century, from the art form of cinema. Cinemas most direct threat was not to reading but to its performative precedent, theatre. But just as the newer art form of photography, with its superior capture of reality, drove the older art of painting to Impressionism, cinema inspired theatre to experimental forms such as epic and expressionism, drawing attention to the flesh-and-blood presence that made it unique.

The 20th-century challenge to the primacy of reading was different in one important way from what would come in the 21st. The former needed full attention, especially back in the days when the only way to watch a film was to enter a dark hall, leaving everything else behind. Real and metaphoric equivalence was offered by the single-screen cinema hall. Multiplex theatres inside shopping malls made movie watching one possibility among many, offering several movies from which one could choose.

That is, possibly, the defining character of culture in the digitized and disembodied 21st century: consuming multiple cultural experiences at the same time. I remember an editorial argument in n+1 magazine from a few years ago that said something similar: that we are now more likely to read something while also listening to music, enjoy a joke or a debate on social media in between a movie streaming on our iPad. Its a technologically-curated version of older pleasures such as enjoying fine wine with poetry, or mead with the minstrels. The print-era singularity of the artistic experience will be replaced by a more pluralized, fragmented, and differently fulfilling experience.

Author Saikat Majumdar(Tribuvan Tiwari)

That is what I told my student: that I, too, have lost the old-world concentration I had from the time multisensory digital distractions were in my case unavailable (as opposed to her situation of usage-restriction). My body is too restless. Its used to multiple activities, multiple buttons, multiple screens. But my personal solution to the problem has been lasting and effective. I walk around the house with my book or e-reader. The restless energy gets channelled in my movement while I keep my mind drowned in language. For those who are able to do this, I highly recommend it!

I think we need to accept that the way to read in an older world with long, undivided attention, as a singular activity wont be available to us most of the time. Its okay to read while finishing a 45-minute lap on your cross-trainer; its okay to read with music in the background, our mind swimming between sound and sentence. Its okay to love the beauty of physical books while actually doing most of your reading with e-readers, with multiple options stored in its screen. All of this not because were busier because thats always an excuse but because something fundamentally has shifted in our sensibility, and it needs to contain multiple energies even while it tends to a classic love, that of reading.

The modernity of print gifted us the singularity of a beautiful artistic and intellectual experience. To celebrate it in our restless present, we can turn that restlessness into multiple windows of experience, simultaneously enjoyable.

Saikat Majumdars books include the novels The Firebird and The Scent of God, and the nonfiction, College.

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Essay: How to read in a restless world - Hindustan Times

BTS member V is one of the most distinguishable voices in the group and has been praised by critics for his deep, husky baritone. Recently, a member of the Selection Committee for Korean Music Awards, Kim Young Dae, praised BTS for his amazing vocals.

(Photo : BTS Twiter)

In a detailed review that goes deep in-depth on the individual contribution of all seven members of BTS to their success, Kim Young Dae gushes about V's voice, claiming it is an integral part of the boy band's identity.

To start his comments on BTS member V, Kim Young Da e talks about wishing this period with the coronavirus would pass so that he could listen to his solo song, "Inner Child", in a large stadium with many fans. He claims that the song is a hymn of youth, a beautiful confession that he knows has to be satisfied listening through his headphones.

(Photo : BTS Twitter)

He goes on to say that while BTS's songs are not remembered due to one overpowering voice, V has something special about him. The idol has a gifted tone and vocal, solidifying his importance in BTS's musical identity. He goes on to say that he, as a man, envies V's deep baritone voice. His voice was described as low but too low, full of volume and texture that stuns people with its crisp clarity, and is undeniably soulful and is impossible to mimic.

It is difficult to find the words to explain V's voice, but it only takes seconds to identify the tone of his voice. V's solo song, "Singularity," is both sensual and captivating. It is a song that cannot be heard anywhere else. It is a neo-soul that is unconventional, eliciting a new interest in V as a vocal.

(Photo : BTS Twitter)

V's emotional vocals in "Epilogue: Young Forever", a song that is said to embody BTS's identity itself, and his fervent voice in "Save Me", are some of his remarkable moments in BTS as a vocalist. In songs like "DNA", V's low, stable, and pure voice became an important element to people listening to the song, as he perfectly practices musical narrations.

In a group, where each member has a limit and needs to take in their own part, it is difficult to know V's charms just from BTS's music. That is why it is vital to listen to V's solo song, which gives us a sense of winter. Songs like "Scenery" or "Winter Bear" show V's charm perfectly; not only his vocals or his deep baritone, it also shows how he effortlessly shows his feelings and his sensitivity.

(Photo : BTS Twitter)

Kim Young Dae praises V as having a voice that is perfect for a movie soundtrack, as he is able to calmy deliver the emotion of the song. "It is just like his personality", the music critic concludes.

Kim Young Dae is not the only critic who has praised V's vocals. Bianca Mndez praised V's solo song "Singularity", which was the opening track of BTS's "Love Yourself: Tear", saying that the song was a prominent "tone-setter" on the album. Katie Goh of VICE has also praised "Singularity", saying that it was one of V's best vocal performances to date.

Do you like V's voice? Tell us in the comments below!

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Written by Alexa Lewis

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Music Critic Praises BTS Vs Voice + Says He is a Vital Part of The Groups Musical Identity - Kpopstarz