Status Updates From The Reality Bubble

“According to an article in the South China Morning Post, concealed in regular safety helmets or uniform hats, lightweight wireless sensors constantly measure the wearers brainwaves and stream the data to AI to detect emotional spikes such as depression, anxiety or rage.”

OMG this is frightening. 😳

The neighbouring towns of Baarle-Herzog and Baarle Nassau the borders between Belgium and Netherlands are like a plate of scrambled eggs. There are 22 mini Belgian enclaves in the Netherlands and seven of these have parcels of land within them that are mini Netherlands.Some borders but right through bars and restaurants.

Crazy. Gotta visit next year! 🇧🇪🇳🇱

“It was the French, however, who came up with the first “universal” standards of measurement.”

In 1792 two astronomers surveyed the distance (meridian arc) from the equator to the North Pole using platinum rods and discovered, by extrapolation, that the distance was 10 million metres. The metre was then inscribed by two points on a platinum iridium bar.

Fascinating!

“Something strange is happening to nature’s clock, because everywhere around us the timing is off.”

Here, here…

“In the documentary Riverblue, fashion designer and activist Orsola de Castra can be overheard saying, ‘There is a joke in China that you can tell the “it” colour of the season by looking at the colour of the rivers.”

Hmm another documentary for the hit list…

“The average hunter-gatherer only worked 3-5hrs per day,”

“In 1972, a geologist named Michael Siffre agreed to take part in a NASA-funded study where he would spend six months alone in a cave in Del Rio, Texas. He had not external cues like sunlight or the seasons to mark his time inside. by day 79, Siffre had not only begun to lose track of time, he had begun to lose his mind. Siffre began to contemplate suicide and on day 179 he was brought out.”

“During the Song Dynasty(960-1279), the Chinese built incense clocks to tell the hours passing…by knowing the time it took and the order in which the scents burned, observers could tell the time of day by the smell in the air.”

Love this! ❤️👃

“The Swedes are so good at converting their garbage that only 1% of its citizens household waste ends up in landfill.”

“Today the average person in North America uses 100kg of plastic every year, most of it is in the form of packaging which gets thrown out.”

Gobsmacking!

The average tank of petrol holds what used to be more than one thousand tonnes of ancient life.

Fuckk me!

“Three large tablespoons of oil contain about the same amount of energy as eight hours of human manual labour.”

Gobsmacking reality check statistic!

“As solar cells increase in efficiency and drop in price, they, along with lithium batteries to store the energy, are our greatest hope for humanity transitioning to anon-polluting energy.”

This book is disconcerting! It’s laying out all the inconvenient truths of the world I live in and the hypocrisy of my lifestyle, the framework of views that I’ve built to allow me to function with minimal sacrifice. But fractures are appearing.

Last night I was invited out to a work dinner in Melbourne. I chose vegetarian 🥗 but the food lacked integrity, I was disappointed. Idealism is hard!

“Fish health inspectors examining farmed salmon in Scotland, regularly find evidence of “bloody lesions, eye damage, deformed organs and plagues of flesh-eating sea lice,” and more. “The mortality rate on Scottish salmon farms is 26.7%.”

So gross. Maybe they should dump antibiotics directly into their lochs like we do in Tasmania. Such a compromised industry.

“Cognitive dissonance now really just a name for the discomfort we feel when we both know something and avoid knowing it. In the case of where meat 🥩 comes from, the case is a wilful blind spot big enough to hide a mechanism of death so grisly, so gruesome, and so huge it has changed the planet beyond recognition.”

“Today, 70 percent of salmon in the global market is farmed, and all of it artificially coloured with canthaxanthin and astaxanthin, which are synthetic carotenoids made from petrochemicals.”

I saw this being fed to Salmon 🍣 in fish pens in Scottish lochs 35years ago, hence why I avoid the stuff.

“Our bubble is the belief of human exceptionalism: that we are the only species aware enough to feel, think and speak 🗣️.”

This book is quite interesting, very different from the novels I’ve been reading. I’m enjoying learning how the myriad of different animals and insects view the world beyond our perception. The whole concept of Pidgeon being able to see the magnetic fields of the earth is fascinating…

“The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that ‘the aspect of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.’”