Doing some material recovery work a few months ago I got a pile of balustrades from a business moving out of their space. Otherwise everything was going into the rubbish.
Since they're all uniform in length and shape, my first thought was to make all the regular polyhedra.
Here are the first 3.
"If 30 percent of New Zealand's fleet were V2G-enabled, the combined output would be comparable to all of New Zealand's power stations running at full capacity."
What kind of benefit/payback would you need to use your EV battery for grid support?
Today marks our Māra Kokatoha-versary. 4 years since we became caretakers of this land.
Here are some photos of some of the changes over time.
Caption details here.
A website tracking how much legislation has been pass "under urgency" by recent governments as a number and as a proportion.
Note that as of right now, almost 60% of the bills passed by this government have been "under urgency."
Video recording of Marama Davidson addressing the Oxford Union.
Watch Marama Davidson speaking at the Oxford Union debate: 'The Sun Should Have Never Set on the British Empire', on why accountability, redress, and a reset of power are essential to repairing our relationships with each other and building a more just future."
OK, this isn't much different from before, but ohmygosh they're just too cute.
We've been tracking bat data (roosting behavior, weather, call activity (AR4s)...) and usually put a check mark for 1, and 2 for, well, 2. We keep hoping maybe we'll see more, but that seems a bit optimistic.
This morning when we checked it wasn't really clear. It's dark in there. It looked like one big lump so we put a note (BIG!) but I checked again when we had a little bounce light in there this afternoon and it was definitely 2!
As ever, if you want to follow our reforesting and organism tracking, you can do that here. It's all available for free.
A rewilding update showing nearly 4 years of regrowth at Māra Kokotoha, a regenerating forest site in Northland, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Basically shows the undergrowth coming up in a forest that had been constantly grazed for at least 80-100 years by sheep, cows, or horses.
The primary regenerating shrubs are kawakawa, puriri, karamu, mahoe, and others. The tallest ones are now 4 meters tall.
A photo panorama pan at the end shows the initial state of a nearly empty forest floor in October 2022.
The bird's nest are so great!
We got a video of a basket fungus literally in the middle of inflating itself. Unfortunately the file ate itself.
We love to join our friends on a weekly walk just looking at and identifying fungi. Does anyone else just go for mushroom walks?
We've just done the first pass on the data from the AR4 bat monitors that we hosted for a couple weeks. This is all un-reviewed data done through AviaNZ, so take it with a grain of salt, but out of 15,000 (!!!) collected data files, ~9,000 were found to have likely long-tailed bat calls in them.
We're continuing to gather data on their observed roosting behavior and correlating it with weather (bats appear to be quite good at predicting rain for the day.)
Very exciting!
If you want to follow along, you can do so here.
Hey all,
I made a subreddit that recreated the intention of another community I used to follow: "Wow, the car did that all by itself?" r/OhTheCarDidItByItself/
The intention behind it is to share, shame, bitch about, and hopefully change the journalistic standards around these stories. With the eventual hope that it will change the culture around motonormativity AKA "car-brain."
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How many times have you seen a headline like "A car mounted the curb" or "A cyclist was struck by a vehicle"?
When journalists use language that treats 2-ton machines as autonomous actors, they remove the person behind the wheel from the story. This is a safety issue.
Research from the Road Collision Reporting Guidelines shows that "disappearing" the driver and using passive language can increase the blame placed on vulnerable road users by up to 30%.
What we do:
Language shapes public perception, and public perception shapes infrastructure. If we want safer streets, we need the media to stop pretending cars drive themselves and start holding the people operating them, and the culture that allows this harm, accountable.
