For those who live in the DC metro area or have always wanted to travel to DC to see the cherry blossoms, the National Park Service has announced that the start of peak bloom for the cherry trees around the Tidal Basin and the Jefferson Memorial will be March 27-30. Of course, if the interim weather is unexpectedly warm or cold, that timetable could be accelerated or delayed. www.nps.gov/subjects/cherryblossom/bloom-watch.htm
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These NASA satellite images capture one of the impacts of China's coronavirus quarantines: a dramatic decline in air pollution. www.engadget.com/2020/03/03/nasa-maps-show-the-effect-of-a-quarantine-on-air-pollution/
After more than 18 years, the U.S. signed a deal with Afghanistan's Taliban last week that is supposed to be the framework for a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. This article by a military historian argues that the preponderance of wars are not won and lost on the battlefield but through attrition:
"War is the most complex, physically and morally demanding enterprise we undertake. No great art or music, no cathedral or temple or mosque, no intercontinental transport net or particle collider or space programme, no research for a cure for a mass-killing disease receives a fraction of the resources and effort we devote to making war. ... Yet, traditional military history presented battles as fulcrum moments where empires rose or fell in a day, and most people still think that wars are won that way, in an hour or an afternoon of blood and bone. Or perhaps two or three. ... Modern wars are won by grinding, not by genius. ... Losers of most major wars in modern history lost because they overestimated operational dexterity and failed to overcome the enemy’s strategic depth and capacity for endurance. Winners absorbed defeat after defeat yet kept fighting, overcoming initial surprise, terrible setbacks and the dash and daring of command ‘genius’. Celebration of genius generals encourages the delusion that modern wars will be short and won quickly, when they are most often long wars of attrition. Most people believe attrition is immoral. Yet it’s how most major wars are won, aggressors defeated, the world remade time and again. We might better accept attrition at the start, explain that to those we send to fight, and only choose to fight the wars worth that awful price." aeon.co/ideas/wars-are-not-won-by-military-genius-or-decisive-battles The calima is a hot wind that begins over the Sahara Desert and carries plumes of dust and sand, visible from space, out over the Atlantic Ocean, sometimes as far as the Caribbean. The Canary Islands, administered by Spain but off the coast of Morocco, recently experienced the worst air quality on the planet when an intense sandstorm driven by the calima closed airports, fueled wildfires, and blanketed the islands in red dust. www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/world/europe/canary-islands-sandstorm-calima.html
Solar energy installations are big business. This geo-graphic looks at the states that have seen the most solar energy jobs added from 2018 to 2019. The Sunshine State had the most new solar jobs during that period: www.statista.com/chart/20899/states-adding-the-most-solar-jobs
Philosophical quote of the day, courtesy of the 11th century Persian philosopher Avicenna (ibn Sina): "Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned."
In classical logic, the law of non-contradiction refers to the rule that something cannot be both something and not that thing at the same time. In other words, "A is B" and "A is not B" cannot both be true at the same time (assuming the meaning of A and B is constant). "Jimmy is a fox" and "Jimmy is not a fox" cannot both be true at the same time, assuming what is meant by "Jimmy" and "a fox" is the same in both cases. Not all philosophical traditions hold with the law of non-contradiction, instead arguing that things can contain their opposite. This is especially true in some Eastern philosophy. For example, Zen Buddhist koans often involve seemingly illogical paradoxes. (“Without words, without silence, will you tell me the truth?”) |
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