blogjou
It seems like at least the European CORONA crisis is coming to an end, so I need another socially accepted excuse for never being around anywhere. A blog!Lust is the hero-villain...
Lust is the hero-villain of this night-piece of the spirit, male lust for the “hell” that concludes the sonnet, hell being the Elizabethean-Jacobean slang for the vagina. The ancient commonplace of sadness-after-coition achieves its apothesis in Sonnet 129, but at more than the expense of spirit. So impacted is this sonnet’s language that it evades its apparent adherence to the Renaissance believe that each sexual act shortens a man’s life.
I love "Sir Patrick Spence"...
I love “Sir Patrick Spence” because it has a tragic economy almost unique in its stoic heroism. There is a sense throughout the poem that heroism is necessarily self-destructive, and yet remains admirable.
Mapping the deforestation footprint of nations reveals growing threat to tropical forests
The authors provide a fine-scale representation of spatial patterns of deforestation associated with international trade. They find that many developed countries have increased the deforestation embodied in their imports Consumption patterns of G7 countries drive an average loss of 3.9 trees per person per year. The results emphasize the need to reform zero-deforestation policies through strong transnational efforts and by improving supply chain transparency, public–private engagement and financial support for the tropics.
Global maps of twenty-first century forest carbon fluxes
The authors introduce a geospatial monitoring framework that integrates ground Earth observation data to map annual forest-related greenhouse gas emissions and removels from 2001 till 2019. They estimate that global forests were a carbon sink of $-7.6\,$GtCO$_2$e yr$^{-1}$ ($-15.6+8.1$). The final goal is to support forest-specific climate mitigation with both local detail and global consistency.
From self-information to thermodynamic entropy
The goal of this post is to introduce Shannon entropy as an information theory concept with its origin in self-information of events, and then linking it to the thermodynamic concept of entropy through maximization.
Carbon cycle in mature and regrowth forests globally
The authors compile the Global Forest Database (ForC) to provide a macropscopic overview of the C cycle in the world’s forests. They compute the mean and standard deviation of 24 flux and stock variables (no soil variables) for mature and regrown (age < 100 years) forests. C cycling rates decrease from tropical to temperate to boreal forests. The majority of flux variables, together with most live biomass pools, increased significantly with the logarithm of stand age.
The pleasures of reading...
The pleasures of reading indeed are selfish rather than social. You cannot directly improve anyone else’s life by reading better or more deeply. I remain skeptical of the traditional social hope that care for others may be stimulated by the growth of individual imagination, and I am wary of any arguments whatsoever that connect the pleasures of solitary reading to the public good.
The accent of belatedness...
The accent of belatedness is cought and held perfectly, in what we finally see is the saddest kind of love lyric, one that memorializes only a drem of youth.
Self-improvement is a large enough project...
Self-improvement is a large enough project for your mind and spirit: there are no ethics of reading. The mind should be kept at home until its primal ignorance has been purged; premature excursions into activism have their charm, but are time-consuming, and for reading there will never be enough time.
Nostalgia for lost illusions...
Nostalgia for lost illusions, loves that never quite were, happiness perhaps only tasted - these are the emotions Calvino evokes. In Isidora, one of the Cities of Memory, “the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third,” but alas you can arrive at Isidora only in old age.