Life with plastics

death is drastic 😍
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Published

April 28, 2024

Some news…plastics next

Coin tosses are 50/50… Or no?

The non-ADHD ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xNg51mv-fk

Study found (47 volunteers did 350,000+ tosses - the brave ones…) that it’s actually 50.8% favoring the side facing upward.

An automated machine found an additional bias of individual side weights. I presume side aerodynamics could also play part.

Wind energy rustling up!

A pleasure to see that global wind energy capacity is rising 😌 However, with current temperature records we’ll soon have to resort to Peltier elements 🤡

Therapy for Moana

Courtesy: Midjourney and my endless craziness, erm, creativity!
  • Pacific islanders face a lot of barriers to seeking mental health help: societal stigma, culture and beliefs etc.

  • This results in suicide rates rising despite falling globally:

  • Three main reasons were named:

    • Collectivist culture: mental illness is stigmatized, can be perceived as ‘family shame’ or ‘financial burden’

    • Cultural beliefs: one should turn to religion, family or ‘warrior spirit/mentality’ and not do that ‘white people stuff’

    • Being out of context: for the therapy to be successful, therapist needs to be in the know of beliefs, culture and societal quirks of the people in question. It’s harder for smaller peoples/societies

Honey, let’s name our son Whitney Alexa GPT

  • Female newborn names had seen more experimentation in the US, stemming from society being patriarchal and religious ➡️ “only ca. 6% of all the names in Judeo-Christian scriptures are female.” ➡️

  • Less patriarchal and religious society ➡️ more name experimentation and variety

  • Parents were (and are) worried that boys will get teased and bullied over “girly” names - one example is “Leslie”, a name that became seemingly ‘corrupted’ on gaining popularity with newborn girls:

  • Presidents, singles and stars/personalities frequently spur baby names spikes, although rarely prolonged. One more example of a name becoming ‘corrupted’ is Whitney, a boys’ name turned girls’ after Whitney Houston’s rise to fame:

Plastics

Plastics production had grown from 2 Mt in 1950 to 400 Mt in 2023

Our world in data claims a lot more - 460 Mt in 2019. However, that’s statistics of plastic use, not production.

Only 9% gets recycled 😿

Around 0.5% gets to the ocean

Conclusion (IMO)

  • New alternatives to plastics emerging? Possibly, gotta be on the lookout on funding rounds.

  • Recycling at scale? No.

  • Reducing production at the expense of profits? Hell no.

  • New pandemics and insurgencies to correct increasing plastics demand? Why not 😻


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Citation

BibTeX citation:
@online{kogan2024,
  author = {Kogan, Zakhar},
  title = {Life with Plastics},
  date = {2024-04-28},
  url = {https://teleogenic.com/posts/240325-plastic-fantastic/},
  langid = {en}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Kogan, Zakhar. 2024. “Life with Plastics.” April 28, 2024. https://teleogenic.com/posts/240325-plastic-fantastic/.