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- the world is massively more connected now than it has ever been, naturally groupthink is on the rise
from Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat - 9/10/24
Ben Clemens from Fangraphs on groupthink in an interconnected world
- Parts of California’s Central Valley have fallen by nearly thirty feet as the aquifers beneath them have emptied, and areas of Louisiana, robbed of the Mississippi River sediment that once counteracted erosion, are sinking by as much as three-quarters of an inch per year.
from Our Very Strange Search for “Sea Level”
- A gravity anomaly in the Indian Ocean means that a large swath of its waters—an area nearly as large as India itself—has a top level that’s as much as a hundred and six metres lower than the global average.
from Our Very Strange Search for “Sea Level”
- We know that, because of the way the Earth bulges as it spins, the water levels of equatorial seas are some twenty-one kilometres higher than the sea ice at the North Pole. (This bulge also complicates how we think about mountain heights, since the peak of Mt. Chimborazo, rising close to the equator, is actually farther from the center of the plane... See more
from Our Very Strange Search for “Sea Level”
- The quest to find a mean sea level for the whole world was part and parcel of the quest to make the world governable. And thus, von Hardenberg writes, did our idea of sea level as a benchmark emerge from a very specific time and place, becoming intertwined with the colonial project and “a long-held perception of holocenic stability.”
from Our Very Strange Search for “Sea Level”
- Lyell turned out to be right: the Scandinavian peninsula was, and still is, rising relative to the sea, as a result of the phenomenon known as “postglacial uplift”—the slow bounce-back of land that was long compressed by the great weight of earlier glaciers.
from Our Very Strange Search for “Sea Level”
- People sometimes marked these extremes with rocks that could stand as warnings for a future that was in danger of forgetting the past. We know them now as tsunami stones and hunger stones. A famous one in the Elbe, commemorating a terrible drought, is carved with the words “If you see me, then weep.”
from Our Very Strange Search for “Sea Level”
- Between Nils’s time and Celsius’s sketch of the rock, in 1743, the water level had dropped nearly eight feet. Nils’s island was gradually becoming part of the mainland; today, it is a peninsula. In 2012, the scholar Martin Ekman located the rock that made Nils rich; by then, it was no longer in the sea at all. It stood in a young forest, surrounded... See more
from Our Very Strange Search for “Sea Level”
- The goal is making stuff. And not just large things: a book, a business, a side project, but the shape you give this afternoon, a conversation between two friends, a meal.
from Make something wonderful.