““The Great Pacific Garbage Patch can now be cleaned,” announced Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat, the wonderkid inventor who’s spent a decade inventing systems for waterborne litter collection.

Recent tests on his Ocean Cleanup rig called System 002, invented to tackle the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic pollution, were a success, leading Slat to predict that most of the oceanic garbage patches could be removed by 2040.

Intersections of ocean currents have created the massive floating islands of plastic trash—five slow-moving whirlpools that pull litter from thousands of miles away into a single radius.

The largest one sits between California and Hawaii, and 27-year-old Slat has been designing and testing his systems out there, launching from San Francisco since 2013.

GNN has reported on his original design for the floating device, but his engineering team improved upon it. System 002, nicknamed “Jenny,” successfully netted 9,000 kilograms, or around 20,000 pounds in its first trial.

It’s carbon-neutral, able to capture microplastics as small as 1 millimeter in diameter, and was designed to pose absolutely no threat to wildlife thanks to its wide capture area, slow motion, alerts, and camera monitors that allow operators to spy any overly-curious marine life…

Slat estimates ten Jennies could clean half the garbage patch in five years, and if 10 Jennies were deployed to the five major ocean gyres, then 90% of all floating plastic could be removed by 2040.” -via Good News Network, 10/19/21

How much you wanna bet the State of California will “prohibit” use of this system, because “reasons.”

If it’s in international waters they can’t do anything about it. And I’m pretty sure the federal government decides what can and can’t go on off our coasts too, not local or state.

Slat has been working on this since he was literally a child. I remember the first posts, articles, and I think there was even a fundraising campaign at one point.

I am so, so proud of him holy shit.

^^^ me too!! I remember the first news yeaaars ago that some kid had thought up a brilliantly simple method of cleaning up the oceans, and even that first prototype was amazingly efficient in solving a problem that the grownup world seemed to have given up on. It was so simple I couldn’t believe no scientist or engineer had thought of it before.

And he’s just been refining it and making it better and better? Amazing news!

Well done, sir, well done and thank you <3

My big memory of this is that every time he sent out a prototype, people would overwhelmingly go “AH HA! See? It didn’t work as advertised because a storm broke it/it didn’t filter as much as he predicted/etc.”

And every time, Boyan would analyse what went wrong, tinker with it, and send a stronger version back out.

There are still issues with it, like, but this guy isn’t some shitty billionaire - he’s a normal man walking the walk to clean up an international problem that everyone else is just wringing their hands over. I have no clue why everyone is desperately waiting for him to fail. He’s picked his hill, and he plods along, and if the latest design hasn’t met expectations, he creates a new one.

Their website is here, btw, in case anyone wants to have a look; they still accept donations

Lol whoops THIS is the website

Neurodivergent people love pacific rim bc its basic theses are “two besties who share a braincell can pilot a mecha” and “what if crab was big”

i haven't seen this here yet so heads up

Here’s the link with instructions on how to opt out of arbitration.

i haven't seen this here yet so heads up

the relevant passages:

This policy was published on June 15, 2023 and will take effect on July 24, 2023. The previous version of this policy can be viewed here.

...

Please note that Section 11 of the Terms below contains a binding arbitration agreement and class action waiver for users in North and South America. By agreeing to the Terms, you and Etsy agree to submit any disputes between us exclusively to individual arbitration and not to sue in court, except in the limited circumstances described below.

...

11. Arbitration Agreement and Class Action Waiver

If you’re upset with us, let us know, and we’ll work together in good faith to resolve your issue. But if we can’t work it out, then you and Etsy (including our employees, officers, directors, agents, subsidiaries, and affiliates) agree to submit our disputes exclusively to binding individual arbitration, and we won’t sue each other in court before a judge or jury, except in the limited circumstances described below.

This Section 11 (which we’ll also refer to as the “Arbitration Agreement” or “Agreement”) applies only if you are a user in North or South America, and applies to the fullest extent allowable by law.

...

G. Opt out. You have a limited right to opt out of this Arbitration Agreement (excluding Section 11.I). Specifically, if you are a new user of our Services, you can opt out of this Arbitration Agreement within 30 days after you first accept the Terms. If you are an existing user of our Services, you can opt out within 30 days after the effective date (listed above). To opt out, you must send a timely email to arbitrationoptout@etsy.com with your name, the email address for your account, your username and your shop name (if applicable), and a request to opt out of arbitration. If you validly opt out, neither Etsy nor you will be required to arbitrate as a result of this (or any prior version of the) Arbitration Agreement, but the Terms (and any other agreements between us) will otherwise apply to you. If we update the Terms after you validly opt out, we will continue to respect your opt-out, but such updates do not provide a new opportunity to opt out of arbitration.

christ thank you i forgot about Hellmo's no-unlogged-in views bs

the new yorker (left) vs new york times (right) explanations of this particular factoid are like such a perfect microcosm of why so much journalism sucks so bad

Fantastic comparison between the solid investigation work by the New Yorker compared to the NYT's glorified press release.

If you are concerned that this means OceanGate will be able to get away with their manslaughter and gross negligence, I have good news! There is a STRONG chance that this is fraud (I'm not a lawyer so I'm not gonna talk in certainties) since they were in fact not crew there for a specific job but were in fact paying tourists, so if anything this attempt to protect themselves from legal action will most likely just cause them to face more charges

like this post to run over elon musk with a 1993 renault twingo

reblog to put it in reverse and run him over again

A heart’s a heavy burden 🤍✨

i didn’t forget to post this here what are you saying

they should solve gendered awards by adding a third award for best lgbt performance but there's no definition of what makes an lgbt performance so theoretically this category includes straight actors playing gay, gay actors playing straight, all non-binary people, and anything that just has a little bit of Vibe. obviously this barely solves the problem and creates a lot of new problems while also being offensive and the twitter discourse would be hell but it would be entertaining to me and therefore worth it.

wanted to draw them!

I watched the movie last week, it was so amazing ;v;

Pequeño pero matón

I have never felt so validated in never having given up on Tumblr.

IT GETS WORSE!

So he artificially limited the number of tweets you can see per day with a "free" account.

Once you hit your limit, it stops you from loading the page. But it also doesn't know WHY it isn't loading, so it keeps TRYING.

Twitter is literally hitting itself in the face ten times per second per user.

This is so completely amateurish it's unbelievable. It's like putting your car in neutral and slamming your foot on the gas until your engine redlines and then wondering why it's making a horrible noise and a terrible smell but not going anywhere.

Christopher Eccleston would be so good as Sam Vimes it’s not even funny.

Consider also: he plays opposite Siddig El Fadil as Vetinari

I’m not even in Discworld fandom but I need this like air omfg.

had a surreal experience at work this morning. i was the only person on the floor when we opened and a customer came over and was like "do you mind if i ask you for help with something?" and when i jokingly said "i don't think you have much of a choice to be honest" he replied "we always have a choice" and then we both just stood there opposite each other like rival wizards of light and dark for several moments.

it literally felt like this

Did you ever just feel so lucky for knowing someone you met online? Like.. I was one click away from not following you. I was one second away from never even knowing of your existence.I would never have been this happy!!!...

Oh lots of people, but especially the one I'm sat next to right now as we drive to our first home together.

reblog the money pigeon for a financially stable future

I reblog  the money pigeon because I love him.

I reblog the money pigeon because its a dinosaur

prefacing this post by saying that I am a big enjoyer of “this site has poor reading comprehension” jokes on here, but I think there needs to be better and more precise language about this sort of thing that isn’t bound up in like, the ability to parse text, which is always going to be tied to class and ability. I’m not saying every joke about this site not being able to read is classist/ableist, and I don’t think anyone is making any grand ideological proclamations when dunking on a stupid reply to their post, but the backing behind that kind of joke is, ultimately, “haha you’re an adult that can’t read.”

And aside from some potentially troubling baggage, I don’t even think that’s what’s going on in the first place! I think the more precise (but admittedly less catchy) term for “poor reading comprehension” is something along the lines of chronic incuriosity, or a rigid adherence to normative thinking. if you see a post saying, for example, women shouldn’t have to wear makeup to be viewed as human beings, and the comments are filled with “actually you can just wear some winged eyeliner and foundation it’s not that hard to wear makeup and also women love makeup stop gatekeeping,” what is happening is not a failure to comprehend the text in front of them. these responses are not made in ignorance, as in, they are not the result of a failure to understand the sentence they just read. these responses stem from a refusal to challenge base assumptions, and reacting emotionally to the mental dissonance this causes (probably something along the lines of “I think of myself as progressive but this person is challenging something I like doing and this threatens my weak political instincts”). These people are rejecting the opportunity to analyse the habits and behaviours they previously assumed to be non-political (eg, wearing makeup), and then externalising that rejection as a defence mechanism. That is not a failure to read a sentence, that is a demand to be intellectually coddled, which is very different.

Again, I’m sure people are already aware of this. I enjoy being a hater, and having people constantly swarm your posts with ridiculous and hysterical replies is incredibly frustrating (speaking from a lot of personal experience here lol). This is also not me saying you have to do the coddling and explain to them that they’re being ideologically incurious about the world, you don’t have an obligation to do any of that. but I think framing a person’s failure to be curious about their own biases as “they don’t know how to read” situates the problem as an issue of ignorance or lack of technical skill, instead of the much more prevalent problem of people refusing to be challenged or reconsider things in their life they didn’t think about before. Calling these kinds of people ignorant is just letting them off easy

I’m sorry. I’m just. Everyone shut up about the ethics of celebrating/mourning billionaires who die in outrageous ways. This is now the funniest thing: an article mentioning that James Cameron once visited the site of the Titanic

You are well known movie director James Cameron. You make a box office hit about a sunken ship. You visit the sunken ship in a once in a lifetime experience. It is amazing. Awe inspiring. Soul changing. Your submersible surfaces. The radio crackles to life. You are about to hear that you missed a Pretty Big Event

Okay but it gets even wilder than that because they were filming a documentary about deep sea diving at the time and they have actual film footage of this moment!

I think he learnt about it in the best possible way (having it calmly explained to him in a soothing voice by beloved actor Bill Paxton).