Category: Construction / Building
Peace & Justice History for 2/17
| February 17, 1958 The first meeting of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was held. CND developed the peace symbol which became its logo.  CND history |
| February 17, 1975 Several hundred residents of Wyhl, Germany, occupied the site of a nuclear power plant with the intent of halting construction. The contractor had begun building despite a court order to suspend doing so. Police responded to the protesters with dogs, water cannon, and arrests. By the following week, however, over 25,000 had joined the occupation, and police withdrew for eight months. This is believed to have been the first such nuclear plant site takeover in the world. The occupation was nonviolent, and a sort of village sprang up with a “Friendship House” and a “popular university.” Local farmers supported the occupiers with food.  Stand-off between anti-nuclear activists and police at Wyhl, Germany Following the negotiated withdrawal of the occupiers, a panel of judges permanently banned construction of the plant, and the land is now a nature preserve. |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryfebruary.htm#february17
Two For Science On Sunday
Fully recyclable solar cells – just add water
February 14, 2025 Richard Musgrove
Swedish researchers have invented a fully-recyclable perovskite solar cell that may provide a solution to the growing problem of solar panel waste.
All renewable technologies have a life span — with solar panels it’s 25 to 30 years — which means our solar waste pile is rapidly becoming mountainous. Just 17 % of solar panel components were recycled in Australia in 2023, specifically the aluminium frames and junction boxes. The remaining 83% (glass, silicon and polymer back sheeting) was shuttled out to landfill. Other countries do better; France’s ROSI was an early starter in what could be a $2b market by 2050.
Linköping University researchersmay have a solution — fully recyclable perovskite solar cells.
These cells are also flexible, transparent and inexpensive — who needs aluminium frames when your PVs are stuck to your windows?
“There is currently no efficient technology to deal with the waste of silicon panels. That’s why old solar panels end up in the landfill,” says coauthor, Xun Xiao, at the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM) at Linköping University (LiU).
“Huge mountains of electronic waste that you can’t do anything with.”
Perovskites used in photovoltaic solar cells are ‘metal-halide perovskites’ — made from organic ions, metals and halogens. Such cells’ active layers are much thinner and cheaper than those of conventional silicon PV and show efficiencies of more than 26%, comparable with silicon PVs (20% – 22%).
But perovskite PVs are not yet produced at scale.
Recyclability is the key.
“We need to take recycling into consideration when developing emerging solar cell technologies,” says Professor Feng Gao, also at IFM at LiU and a co-author. “If we don’t know how to recycle them, maybe we shouldn’t put them on the market at all.”
(Snip-MORE, and they can recycle them!)
Pressing pause: how a unique insect survives Antarctica
February 14, 2025 Ariel Marcy
The inhospitable Antarctic Peninsula hosts only one native insect, and scientists from Japan have just identified an unprecedented combination of adaptations that allow it to thrive in the extreme cold.
The Antarctic midge is a tiny, flightless insect that lives most of its two-year life as a larva, the grub-like stage that follows the egg stage. (Complete metamorphosis in insects includes egg, larva, pupa, and adult stages).
How these larvae overwinter in Antarctica could have implications for cryopreservation technology but, perhaps more pressingly, better understanding of the species’ response to climate change. Previous researchers have suggested that the Antarctic midge be developed as a model organism for survival in extreme and fluctuating temperatures.
The Japanese research team led by Shin Goto of Osaka Metropolitan University studied the unique midge after developing a specialised rearing method, which took them six years to establish.
The team then tracked the growth and physiology of the midge larvae through their natural lifecycle. In a first for science, they documented two distinct forms of dormancy used as seasonal survival adaptations.
In general, dormancy is a state of inactivity, suspended development and reduced metabolism, but insect scientists distinguish between two types: quiescence and diapause.
In the first winter, the Antarctic midge larvae adapted via quiescence, a form of dormancy triggered by external conditions, such as cold temperatures. This means all the midge larvae go dormant at the same time. Quiescence ends when the temperature rises.
(Snip-MORE; it’s fascinating and worth the click. Also not long.)
What kept me busy today.
So today I started out by posting a bunch of memes because I couldn’t sleep. Good and great. Then I went for a nap in the morning totally worn out. However my husband had determined to keep going with the sink pipe break under the house repair. However when I got up and seen how far he had come to removing the stuff in the room with the idea to redo the flooring / put in a new toilet. I had to hit him with my idea of remodeling the bathroom.
See that hallway bathroom was added as first as a toilet and sink, and had its access from the kitchen. But we needed the kitchen access door space for cupboards in our new kitchen so we moved the doorway to the hallway. But when James moved in he needed a place to shower and as he worked nights and coming in late in the evening to shower often got awkward. He would interrupt Ron and I being romantic … is a nice way to put it. I did not care, I had been in the US Army where if there were three people in a room it was understood that guys were going to have sex and we just pretended not to see or hear. James said he was OK with that. But my husband was freaking out. The third time it happened while we were in the throes of passion nude on our bed and James knocked on the door … Ron had enough.
He carved a large portion of our own bedroom master bathroom we had planned to use for a large shower to put a shower in the hallway bathroom. He then built our own much smaller bathroom shower in the space left. Now that James has been gone for years Ron simply has been too tired to deal with changing anything. The leak of the sink gave me the opportunity.
Ron has been in the middle stage of finishing the Florida Room I am moving out to so we can have a spare bedroom where my pink palace office is. Due to the kitchen sink leak I still plan to post on but it is not yet finished as you can see. See that one I really wanted to do a video on with the new program I spent so much money buying. It will show if it really was worth the money to buy and use. However I have to say even without using it I had an issue and the company stepped in and solved it along with a decade’s old one. So they seem a rock solid company.
So remember that Ron is now this year 70 and I am very disabled but I am willing to help him all I can. But during the attempt to fix the sink leak Ron struggled to get his legs to bed around the pipes and to get himself around the tight spaces. Turns out he has not got the flexibility he once had. Well damn it I knew that from our bedtime and the rest of our life. His is a muscle bound 70 year old man who has lost all flexibility.
So while we had everything removed except the shower I spend a lot of time convincing him that hey, if we shifted this there and that here and did this … we could have the bathroom of our dreams we originally planned on. Took a while. About two hours until he came back to me and said enthusiastically … YES, that is a great idea. But Scottie the work and effort. He told me he remembered how it was so hard for him and I to force that current shower into the room and twist it to the point it would fall into where it needed to be. I was not so disabled then and he was much younger.
I said yes I remember but also this is different. See it is only us living here, no one needs to access the bathroom or shower yet. Plus we don’t have to use any existing spaces. We can remove the walls around the current shower and just work on it as we move forward. We can even cut this shower into pieces and get a new one to put in there as it was a simple cheap 36 by 36 shower anyway. Once he realized that he was all for it. He even was online looking at extra tall elongated bowl toilets. I may regret this, I created a monster. LOL. So below are the pictures of the bathroom and I am going to bed. Love everyone and thanks for following the blog. This saga of remodeling is only beginnings. Hugs
Now all that need to be done is plan out where to put each item and run the needed piping. Hugs
Weathered: It’s Way Worse …
I have been ill so all I could do is mostly save stuff, post news from my bed, and watch videos, one after another. Most of what I watched I did not remember. This one I had watched and liked, and saved to the video computer. I am so glad I did. As I rewatched the video I began to realize how vast and immediate the impacts are to us right now. The entire things regions are known for will have to shift. In the now wetter areas that business and housing take up the majority will have to give way to growing food crops if we want to eat. Sadly meat consumption will have be drastically cut until ways to mitigate the damage food animals do at all levels of production. Plus these methods of water reclamation and returning water back to the aquifers. Love it. Thanks to Ten Bears for posting it. Hugs.
This is so much how I feel after being sick for a few days
Here’s An Important Resource!
Hells bells and tortious shells as I once heard the curse.
*** Posting from me will be sparse or disjointed as will me responding to comments. More on that later ***
I had everything set up to answer all the comments I have saved. I have like 70 open tabs of all the comments I really want to read and address. I know a few have said never feel like you need to respond to me, but I really like to. I don’t have the ability to get out and see many people is because I am disabled, so I love interacting with people online. Maybe I get the community / personal interaction to them people who interact with other people get.
I also had cued up 8 tabs from Male Survivor I was trying to read and respond to. Understand that reading and responding to those posts are very draining to me. But before I could get to much of that, Ron wanted to take a walk before he went to his doctor’s appointment.
Please notice the change of color. I am very tired as I write this and Ron is cooking the supper we worked on during this crisis. But I need to get this written and eat then I fall into bed exhausted.
For weeks or months I have been telling my wonderful husband I smelt sewer shit smell. He kept telling me it was the wind on the air vent for the toilets. But it got worse and worse. So he said turn on the vent fans and see it will go away. But then it did not. I kept telling him there was a leak under the house. He was telling me I was just being reactionary … sound familiar, just what the republicans accuse the democrats of being. Turned out I was correct.
So today after he got home from his doctor’s appointment, he walked into the house a said wow this place smells like shit. I replied I kept telling you that. It did not go over well. But I convinced him to take up our bathroom floor which has a trap door to the underneath of the house. When he did that he came to me and admitted he was very, very wrong. We had a large pool of sewage under our home. Oh fuck, fuck. It appears one of our toilets has been dumping all its waste on to the ground. But worse the break was not under our second bathroom toilet. It was between the bathrooms. He would have to take up both bathrooms to fix it. Oh be still my racing heart.
I spend the entire afternoon showing him how if he had to rip up everything to fix the sewage leak, I had long been wanting a change to both bathrooms. See the second bathroom was added as only a sink and toilet but when James moved back in he needed a bathroom shower so he did not come into our room to get a shower … sometimes in the middle of us having sex. I did not mind, and James said it did not bother him, but Ron being old school was mortified. So he carved a large chunk out of our bathroom to put a shower in the “guest” bathroom.
So I have chafed about that intrusion preventing me from having the bathroom I wanted in my own bedroom. But it has been years since James moved out. I have told Ron we could have a much better bigger shower and the rest … as I have been telling him for years. But now that he has to rip it all out anyway … he suddenly seen the light. So I spent the last part of the time I have awake showing him my vision of the two bathrooms and helping him do the measurements to show I was correct. He agreed with me and that is the plan moving forward. Then he shut down. And so will I. I am going to bed. If I post it will be hit or miss or reply to comments it will be even more sporadic than what I already do. Trust me to put the comment in an open tab backed up by my computer program. I will some year get to them. Best wishes, Hugs, and lots of love. Scottie
Julia Hare in “Wee Pals” Today
Hopium PM in the AM
(Because I live in a later time zone than many readers here.)
Hopium PM – Court Blocks Trump’s Dangerous Power Grab, New Reuters Poll Shows Trump Taking A Hit, Keep Making Calls!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! by Simon Rosenberg
Kennedy and Gabbard Hearings Tomorrow, Patel Thursday Read on Substack
Good evening peeps. A federal judge has blocked Trump’s outrageous suspension/cancelling of Congressionally mandated funding for programs of all kinds across all 50 states. From the Washington Post:
A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump from imposing a sweeping pause on trillions of dollars in federal spending, capping a frenetic day of disruption to government programs that fund schools, provide housing and ensure low-income Americans have access to healthcare.
The order prevented the new restrictions from taking effect until at least Feb. 3, buying time for a coalition of public-health advocates, nonprofits and businesses — represented by the left-leaning group Democracy Forward — to proceed with a case that may test Trump’s claims of expansive power over the nation’s fiscal trajectory.
The decision arrived amid a wave of chaos and confusion in Washington, where few appeared to understand the scope and intention of a White House memo that had directed agencies to “temporarily pause” the disbursement of key federal funds. Even before it could officially take effect at 5 p.m., thousands of government services — many dedicated primarily to Americans’ health, safety and well-being — appeared to be at risk of interruption or shutdown, at least temporarily.
The NYTimes has a good backgrounder on “impoundment” – Trump’s attempt just to cancel government programs he doesn’t care for and “impound” the money (gift article). I also found this article by Russell Berman in the Atlantic helpful in understanding where we are.
Yes, in the first few weeks of Trump’s Presidency we are already facing one of the gravest Constitutional crises in America history as Trump is attempting to seize a level of control over our government no President has ever had.
If there was an upside to this dark day Democrats across the country at all levels of government loudly rose up against the latest acts of our Mad Orange Wannabe King. It appeared to have woken us from our collective slumber, as the threat Trump clearly represents became impossible to ignore. Can we compete with Trump, contest his out of control Administration, score some wins in the coming days?
First, a new Reuters poll suggests Trump has already overreached, as his approval rating has already taken a 9 point hit:
- Jan 21 – 47% approve, 39% disapprove (+8)
- Jan 28 – 45% approve, 46% disapprove (-1)
We will see if these results are replicated in other polls but this one sure shows that Trump is struggling out of the gate. Note below how unpopular many of his early actions/proposals are (but also note the broad public support for “downsizing the federal government”): (snip-MORE; go see it! It’s free and you don’t have to log in.)
Scottie's Playtime 