#vaclav smil

[blue-cray0n]

#malcolm gladwell #outliers #freakonomics #steven levitt #rich dad poor dad #robert kiyosaki #the subtle art of not giving a f*ck #mark manson #blink: the power of thinking without thinking #steven pinker #enlightenment now #the better angels of our nature #TED Talks #bill gates #vaclav smil #richard dawkins #the selfish gene #david brooks

[lovelanguageisolate]

I have still not found anything as soothing to listen to while going to bed as Vaclav Smil audiobooks. The man's work is just so riveting and so boring at the same time. The way he quantitatively and historically charts the long techno-ergo-environmental journey humanity has undertaken is so comfy. The way he hedges his answers and cuts through so much horseshit does so much to quiet the critical parts of my brain. There is a kind of civics and politics at work, but it's so antithetical to tribal sloganism that it never activates any of my malware detectors.

Richard Rhodes and Oded Galor are the only people I've found with a similar breed of bedtime suitability, but their stuff is quite different.

#vaclav smil #smilpilled #bedtime

[sustainableyadayadayada]

Vaclav Smil

New Yorker has a long profile of Vaclav Smil. His books have been on my list of too-many-books-to-read-before-i-die for a long time, and have occasionally been semi-finalists, but I have not yet gotten to any of them. The latest is called How the World Really Works. Basically, he sees himself as bringing relentless rationality and quantitativeness to discussing the world’s energy situation, and…

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#energy #renewable energy #vaclav smil

[walrusmagazine]

Vaclav Smil Is Fed Up with Climate Activism

The acclaimed environmental scientist is annoyed with the eco movement and shunning media—just when we need him most

There is a pronounced orthodoxy of opinion among the progressive left that sometimes reminds me of Soviet propaganda—imagine how it makes someone like Smil feel. Minister of environment and climate change Steven Guilbeault, himself a former activist, has made enemies of many former allies for embracing the compromise that comes with democratic governance; so too has US president Joe Biden, whose passage of the most significant climate legislation in history—the Inflation Reduction Act—hasn’t spared him the full-throated denunciations of environmental activists for opening new oil fields. This hostility toward complexity and compromise is, I believe, part of what’s driven Smil into the arms of the right. Because whether he knows it or not, that’s where he is today.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

Photography by David Lipnowski (davidlipnowski.com)

#Environment #Vaclav Smil #Climate change #Climate crisis #Activism #photography #January/February 2024 #Arno Kopecky #David Lipnowski

[onenakedfarmer]

Currently Reading

Vaclav Smil INVENTION AND INNOVATION A Brief History of Hype and Failure

#reading #human history #Vaclav Smil #philosophy #human follo #innovation #human achievement #hubris #2023

[dipnotski]

Vaclav Smil – Enerji ve Medeniyet (2023)

Bu kitap, tarih boyunca enerji ile insanların ilişkisine dair en güvenilir tek kaynak. Vaclav Smil, tarım öncesi toplayıcıların pratiklerinden fosil yakıtlara bağımlı ve iklim değişikliğinin etkisindeki bugünkü yaşantımıza kadar pek çok konuyu disiplinlerarası bir bakışla ele alıyor. İnsan, en basit aletlerden içten yanmalı motorlara, hatta nükleer reaktörlere dek muazzam bir çeşitliliği olan…

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#2023 #Ebru Kılıç #Enerji ve Medeniyet #Vaclav Smil #İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları

[realhankmccoy]

Cuz somebody needs to know. Musk and Trump have no clue and so, so much power in their hands in spite of it.

book is arrogant and way too status quo tho. meh.

#vaclav smil

[gbbook]

숫자는 어떻게 진실을 말하는가 - 바츨라프 스밀

1. 

전기자동차가 좋은 것일까? 에너지를 전환할 때, 손실은 어쩔 수 없고, 이 과정이 반복되면 효율은 낮아진다. 직접 휘발류를 태우는 자동차에 비해서 화력,수력,원자력발전을 통해 전기를 만들고, 그 전기를 멀리보내서 다시 축전을 해서 쓰면 효율이 낮아지게 되지 않을까? 

캐나다 매니토바주에서는 99퍼센트의 전기를 대규모 수력발전소에서 생산하기 때문에 이곳의 전기 자동차는 깨끗한 수력발전 자동차이다. 프랑스... 대체로 핵발전 자동차이다.... 인도,중국...전기 자동차는 거의 전부가 석탄 발전 자동차이다. 

 숫자에 근간해 세상을 해석하고, 미래를 전망하는 솜씨가 매우 뛰어난 글들이다.

2.

무어의 저주 : 왜 기술의 진보는 우리 생각보다 오래 걸리는가?

무어의 저주 : 왜 기술의 진보는 우리 생각보다 오래 걸리는가?

옥수수 평균 생산량 1950년대 이후 연간 2% 증기터빈 효율 20세기 동안 연간 1.5% 조명효율 지난 140년간 실내조명 2.6% 실외조명 3.1% 여행속도 배에서 1958년 보잉707 연평균 5.6% 그러나 그 이후 정체 승용차 연비 1973-2014 연간 2.5%향상 강철제조 에너지 비용 1950년 이래 연간 1.7% 하락 마이크로칩이 지배하는 세계 밖에서의 혁신은 무어의 법칙을 따르지 않고 훨씬 더 느리게 한 자릿수의 속도로 진행된다

미래는 생각보다 늦게온다!

3. 태양광발전은 … 2018년에는 2.2%까지 상승했다. 하지만 수력발전… (2018년에 약 16%)에 비교하면 미미한 수준에 불과하다…. 범세계적 차원에서 에너지 전환이 일어나려면 시간이 필요하다 우리는 너무 쉽게 세상이 바뀔거라 생각하고, 무슨 이슈가 나타나면 급하게 달아오른다. 그러나 미래는 천천히 온다. 마이크로칩 세상을 제외하고….

4. 하버-보슈의 암모니아에서 파생한 합성 질소비료가 현재 세계 작물 재배에 필요한 질소의 거의 절반을 차지한다. 나머지는 콩과 식물과의 윤작, 거름과 작물 잔해 같은 유기물의 재활용, 대기 침적으로 얻는다. 현재 농작물이 모든 음식 단백질의 약 85%를 제공하고, 나머지는 축산물과 수산물이 제공한다. 지구 인류가 70억이 넘을 수 있었던 것은 질소비료 덕분이다!

(2022.05.15)

#Vaclav Smil #바츨라프 스밀 #gbbook

[probablyasocialecologist]

You can’t think of the degrowth shift as an “austerity” move. That’s bad marketing and it’s not even true. When we ease off of consumption and production, what we end up with is something much more positive, what the economist Tim Jackson calls “prosperity without growth,” and the anthropologist Jason Hickel calls “radical abundance.” This is a bounty captured not in material metrics like GDP, but in things like basic income for all, universal medical care, the decommodification of goods like housing that people need to live dignified lives. That kind of abundance can be the new foundation for culture going forward, says Kohei, because it is about equality. It’s about unlocking the commons, and unleashing a flood of new value many people did not realize was there.

[...]

Even the most ardent exponents of degrowth allow that it can’t be cookie-cutter dogma. We have to suppress growth, yes, but selectively. “In some places (rich industrialized nations) we have to foster de-growth, but in other places (much of Africa) we have to foster growth,” says Vaclav Smil. The developing world is just now climbing out of this lobster pot. Degrowth does not say it should fall back in and die. It’s rich countries that are overshooting the most so need to shrink the most. But to Jason Hickel there’s an element of historical redistributive justice in the mix too – the Global North has most of the cumulative damage to the climate, so it’s incumbent on them to pull back more, in order to allow poor nations to keep growing.

#degrowth

[cliozaur]

The contrast is striking: from the beautiful and romanticized deaths to the inventive escape, and then to profound reflections on the utility of human faeces. Here we find ourselves in the sewers, surrounded mostly by that. Hugo laments how Parisians squander this resource by discarding it into the sea instead of utilizing it as fertilizer.

Some years back, I translated Vaclav Smil's book on energy and civilization, so I'm afraid I know more about fertilizers than I'd like. In short, using human waste directly as fertilizer isn't a great idea. It can contaminate the soil and pollute it with alkali and salt. Additionally, its nitrogen content is quite low. That's why Europeans paid a premium “to collect the dung of petrels and penguins,” to be precise, to collect guano from islands like Ichaboe—during Hugo's time, more than 300,000 tonnes of guano were exported from there, as it contained a much higher percentage of nitrogen.

And it’s so amusing to read that “Parisian guano being the richest of all.” But I’m afraid, it was not rich enough in terms of nitrogen content.

Nevertheless, the last few paragraphs describing "Paris beneath another Paris" are enthralling. The subterranean world of sewers with its own streets, squares, and crossroads—it's both organic, like coral, and artificial, akin to a city or a man-made labyrinth. This bleak depiction slightly echoes the digression about mines and miners, although that focused on intellectual and moral subversion rather than material mines. But it still feels as if there is a connection between sewers and mines.

#les mis letters #lm 5.2.1 #les miserables #sewers digression

[lemd]

Trước khi về HN thì anh đã đọc xong quyển Thần thoại Sysiphus của Albert Camus. Thành thực mà nói thì chả biết đọc là Ca-mút, Ca-mu, hay là Ca-mui nữa. Nhưng có lẽ tên gọi không quan trọng. Người ta gọi anh là Đức hay là Lemd thì anh vẫn trả lời.

Truyện thì là một thần thoại nổi tiếng về Sysiphus, vì có lỗi với thần ở Olympus mà bị đày là phải vác đá lên đỉnh núi, rồi nó lại rớt xuống, cứ thế vác lên rồi nó lại rớt xuống muôn đời. Câu chuyện bản thân nó thì đơn giản. Nhưng bài học của nó thì không hề đơn giản. Tại vì Camus nói là dù trải qua khổ đau, dày vò thế nào, thì con người cũng sẽ tìm được niềm vui.

Nhưng người ta gọi nó là quan điểm vô cùng phi lý (absurb): buồn đau như thế, làm sao mà vui được. Nhưng, thật sự mà nói thì, con người chúng ta vốn phi lý. Có logic, có nguyên tắc, nhưng rồi cũng có làm theo logic và nguyên tắc đâu, vẫn luôn tự làm đau mình, làm đau người khác đấy thôi. Nhưng khổ đau đến mấy, rồi cũng vui, kể cả khi cái khổ đấy không bao giờ chấm dứt.

Lúc đấy vừa khổ, vừa vui.

Quan trọng là có vui.

PS: Về HN anh chỉ mang theo 2 quyển, How the world really works của Vaclav Smil, và Behave của Robert Sapolsky. Sau 3 tháng thì cũng sắp đọc xong sách của cụ Smil rồi. Đã mang sách đi đọc ở Đinh, cafe Hai Bốn, Berryfield, và Soul Specialty. Cảm ơn các bạn đã giới thiệu quán cafe ngon nhé.

[sunderlust]

whatcha up to tag game! 😤

tagged by @softspiderlingmain lisi ur a star ty for the big pressure

currently reading: Numbers Don’t Lie by Vaclav Smil! and on and off Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

last song:

last movie: I have watched bullet train 4 times in the past week (the latter three just as background noise) but it’s fully a comfort film at this point idk if that’s lame

currently working on: getting my life back together and that includes my tumblr 😭 might work on a part 2 for my feet can’t touch the bottom of you? I am ideating

tags: you! whoever’s reading this!

#tag games #lisi 💎 #aw shit here we go again #ill get to my asks sometime I promise #Spotify

[nevinslibrary]

Totally Random Non-Fiction Tuesday

This was a really cool book. It takes stuff like, undersea cables, airplane turbulence, or happiness levels and brings them to life both with words and graphics. I mean, who doesn’t love a good infographic (Really though, this is a library blog on Tumblr, we all already knew that we’re all nerds!)

You may like this book If you Liked: Adrift by Scott Galloway, Ways of Being by James Bridle, or How the World Really Works by Vaclav Smil

Atlas of the Invisible: Maps and Graphics That Will Change How You See the World by James Cheshire

#totallyrandomnonfictuesday #nmlRA #nevins memorial library #atlas of the invisible #james cheshire

[lovelanguageisolate]

I'm browsing books at Barnes and Noble, resisted the urge to buy a physical copy of a Vaclav Smil book I own as an audiobook and use 50% as a sleep aid, and thumbed through the first page of King Lear. It goes:

Gloucester: I'm raising this kid who isn't mine.

Kent: I can't conceive of you.

Gloucester: His mom could, which is why she got pregnant again.

I'm not sure how the popular image of Shakespeare as dry and stuffy ever gained the coin that it did (maybe from bowdlerization of his work once upon a time?), but the man absolutely loves sex jokes. This must be common knowledge among...anyone who's read him, which I thought high school students had, so I'm not sure how the myth lives on.

#Shakespeare #english-lit

[hayingsang]

What I read in 2023

2023 was a funny year for reading. I didn’t finish that many books – just 43 altogether, including one I read twice, and only one of them in Chinese.

There were various reasons for this. One was that among the books I did read were Ulysses and almost all of The Brothers Karamazov, both long, slow reads. I loved The Brothers Karamazov (my note on it here) – among the most fantastic tales I’ve ever read (actually reread – this was the second time round). Ulysses I also liked a lot. I wouldn’t go as far as Anthony Burgess, who in the blurb on the back declares it to be the greatest novel of the 20th century, but it’s one of them. It also laid down a standard for experimentation which more writers since Joyce should have tried to surpass; reading it made me think how conservative 99% of novelists are.

Another reason for my low books-finished total was that a good part of my reading time was spent on four text books – for International Baccalaureate physics and IGCSE physics, chemistry and biology – all part of trying to get a handle on what two of my kids were meant to be learning, and none of which I actually finished (though I did finish the IGCSE trio a few days ago; I’ll add a note on them soon). All four required close attention, frequent rereading of definitions and dense paragraphs. If it hadn’t been for the Internet and especially many YouTube videos, I wouldn’t have been able to handle the IB book; the IGCSE ones were more my level. I think I could pass all three subjects, though I wouldn’t score particularly highly.

As for the Chinese, I did read most of another book and spent more time reading news. But I also took a bit of a break. And the one book I did read, Selected Essays by Zhou Zuoren, was tough going (as I noted here).

As in 2022, I didn’t manage to keep up my 2021 practice of writing around 250 words on each book I read – again, I’ll blame my textbook reading. The ones I did have links. This year I’m going to give it another go.

The standouts

Non-fiction

Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War – a tremendous global history of the 1945-90 period.

Pamela Kyle Crossley, The Manchus – the unlikely people behind China’s last imperial dynasty.

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands – the terrible history of Ukraine and the other lands around it from the 1930s to just after the end of the second world war.

EB Sledge, With the Old Breed – a Marine’s experiences on two islands in the second world war.

Napoleon Chagnon, Noble Savages – an anthropologist in the Amazon in the 1960s whose findings upset a lot of other anthropologists.

John Gribbin, The Reason Why – that intelligent life exists at all is miraculous; we should care about it (ie, us) a little more.

Bas van Bavel, The Invisible Hand? – why markets can’t be the answer when they make people rich and powerful.

Colleen Carney & Jack Edinger, Insomnia and Anxiety – a book that has made me sleep better and worry less.

Fiction (aside from Ulysses and The Brothers Karamazov)

Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man – a masterpiece in just 180 pages.

Annie Ernaux, A Man’s Place/The Years/A Woman’s Story/“I Remain in Darkness” – more than worthy of the Nobel prize.

Honorary mentions

Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization – Smil is right: energy underpins everything (though it’s not the only thing).

Chris Miller, Chip War – exactly how books should be written about big, important topics.

The list in full

Patricia Lockwood, no one is talking about this (I loathed this book)

Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man

Sean Carroll, Something Deeply Hidden

Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, I

Frank Fraser Darling, Island Years

Milo Beckman, Math Without Numbers

Chris Bernhardt, Quantum Computing for Everyone

David Morgan, The Mongols

Doris Lessing, Ben in the World

Annie Ernaux, A Man’s Place

Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child

Avram Alpert, The Good-enough Life

Joseph Angelo, Gaseous Matter

Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization

Chris Miller, Chip War

Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

Annie Ernaux, The Years

Bruce Dickson, The Dictator’s Dilemma

Napoleon Chagnon, Noble Savages

Annie Ernaux, A Woman’s Story

Annie Ernaux, “I Remain in Darkness”

Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends

Pamela Kyle Crossley, The Manchus

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands

Jin Keyu, The New China Playbook

Ursula Le Guin, Gifts

EB Sledge, With the Old Breed

Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance

Frank Dikotter, China After Mao

Catherine Lacey, Pew

James Joyce, Ulysses

John Gribbin, The Reason Why

Christine Brooke-Rose, Amalgamemnon

Zhou Zuoren 周作人, Selected Essays 散文選

Bas van Bavel, The Invisible Hand

Shibani Mahtani & Timothy McLaughlin, Among the Braves

Colleen Carney & Jack Edinger, Insomnia and Anxiety

Ursula Le Guin, Gifts

Wang Xiaobo, Wang in Love and Bondage

For the record

I never got round to posting What I read in 2022 until two days ago. It’s here – just the bare list.

#books #reading

[zorknogg]

Books I Read in 2023

Ranging from the terrible (Altered Carbon) to the great (Elena Ferrante is one of the GOAT) to the Hunger Games.

The List:

-Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy

-The Road by Cormac McCarthy

-The Hunger Games 1-3 by Suzanne Collins

-Soft Inheritance by Fawn Parker

-Strong Towns by Charles Marohn Jr.

-Speech Acts by Laura McCullough

-Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré

-The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

-Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

-The Trouble With Being Born by Emil Cioran

-The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

-Salmon by Sebastian Castillo

-The Moan Wilds by Caroline Rayner

-The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power by Robert Caro

-The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent by Robert Caro

-The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan

-I'd Rather Be Lightning by Nancy Lynée Woo

-The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart

-Politics by Aristotle

-The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton

-No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

-Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

-Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan M. Metzl

-June 30th, June 30th by Richard Brautigan

-Real Life by Brandon Taylor

-Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork by Richard Brautigan

-Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados

-Normal People by Sally Rooney

-Jack by Marilynne Robinson

-Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett

-All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

-Passing by Nella Larsen

-Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

-The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

-The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

-Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

-(re-read) The Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring by J.R.R. Tolkein

-Stalinist Confessions by Igal Halfin

-A History of Russian Thought by William Leatherbarrow

-Dream Work by Mary Oliver

-House of Light by Mary Oliver

-Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan

-Call for the Dead by John le Carré

#lit #books #reading #reading list #reading goals #fiction #goodreads #hunger games #new year