Meanderings, 20 August 2022
Good morning! May your weekend be refreshing and your fellowship wide.
Photo by Erika Giraud on Unsplash
School districts across America continue to face a school bus driver shortage as the new school year begins. But one Florida man decided he would do what he could to recruit new drivers as well as spread messages of positivity and bus safety.
Escambia County Public Schools bus driver and 2010 Pine Forest High School alumnus Cor`Darius Jones was in between jobs after his grandmother died in 2018. While driving around to clear his head, he saw a sign advertising a bus driver job.
Jones said his grandmother’s passing put him in a dark place, and driving around was one way he coped with the loss.
“You know, I kind of use just driving around to, you know, get myself together. And I saw a sign that says now hiring school bus drivers,” Jones said.
After seeing the sign twice, he told himself if he saw the sign one more time, he’d apply for the position. One sign later, Jones applied and found himself “stuck and loving it ever since.” Now, he is widely known as Mr. Bus Driver.
Jones said that with COVID-19, his bus district experienced a bus driver shortage, which doubled routes for the drivers still driving. He explained that people are hesitant to drive buses because of kids, not driving a bus.
“I tell them it’s what you make it and I’m the example for that, you know, all of my students love me. They hate to go home because they don’t want to get off the bus,” Jones said.
Jones encourages kindness and fun on his bus. He decorated his bus to catch people’s attention, encouraging other drivers to make it their own. Jones explained that it invites kids onto the bus and reassures them that a bus is also a place for learning.
New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church’s art:
The praise dancers, dressed in black, moved in a sea of color, surrounded by the jewel tones of the sanctuary’s rose windows and the parishioners’ attire. In a space now shared with their ancestors, the girls embodied the strength and resilience they had inherited, their choreographed movements amplifying the message of a song from the movie “Harriet.”
“I’m gonna stand up, take my people with me … I hear freedom calling, calling me to answer.”
Members of Chicago’s New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church, where the young women danced, are well-practiced in telling their story through art. That includes the trio of 25-foot rose windows, through which the church has embraced the tradition of stained glass as a teaching tool while depicting the unexpected.
The Maafa Remembrance, North Star and Sankofa Peace windows capture narratives from the past and present. In this season when the Christian church celebrates resurrection, the people of New Mount Pilgrim visibly honor both pain and promise through them in ways that are heartbreaking, breathtaking and unavoidable.
“To be spiritually healthy, a person has to have a healthy sense of remembrance,” said the Rev. Dr. Marshall Hatch Sr., the church’s pastor.
To celebrate the Lord’s Supper is “to remember the places where we have fallen and been lifted, the suffering and sacrifice it has taken,” Hatch said. “We often deal with the abolition of slavery movement and liberation for black people from bondage in America and the way the exodus or the Passover story undergirds the Lord’s Supper.
“We’re part of a continuum of that liberation narrative of God.”
I’m hoping sooner rather than later, and I just may need it!
Joint pain is a common ailment of aging, thanks to cartilage’s tendency to wear out. Now, researchers at Duke University have developed a new hydrogel that’s stronger and more durable than the real thing, which could make for longer lasting knee implants.
Natural cartilage plays an important role in cushioning joints, but unfortunately it doesn’t regenerate itself very well after damage by age or injury. Current treatment options are usually limited to pain medication, physical therapy, or if things progress too far, a total knee reconstruction. But if the Duke team’s new work pans out, a better option might soon be available.
Soft and flexible, hydrogels have been investigated as potential cartilage replacement materials, but most of them have been too weak to support much weight. In 2020 the Duke team created a hydrogel that had properties that were as good as natural cartilage – and now they’ve developed a version that surpasses the real thing.
The new hydrogel is made up of cellulose fibers, which make the material strong while being stretched, infused with polyvinyl alcohol that helps it return to its original shape. The team also tweaked its manufacturing method too – rather than freezing and thawing it like most hydrogels, they annealed it like glass, which triggers more crystal formation in the polymer network.
The end result is a hydrogel with a tensile strength (withstanding stretching) of 51 Megapascals (MPa), and a compressive strength (withstanding pressure) of 98 MPa. That’s 26% higher tensile strength and 66% higher compressive strength than natural cartilage, the team says. It’s also five times the tensile strength and twice the compressive strength of other hydrogels made by freezing and thawing.
It starts with a single mushroom-shaped cloud the world hoped to never see again.
Retaliation prompts tit-for-tat attacks, each intended to end this latest War of All Wars, until a week or so later Earth begins to shiver beneath a pall of soot and dust.
Scenarios mapping and calculating the devastation of a nuclear winter are nothing new, dating back to a time when the Cold War was nightly news.
Decades on, we know a lot more about the finer effects of particulates in the atmosphere on our agriculture. And the sums remain as grim as ever.
Using the latest data on crop yields and fisheries resources, a group of scientists from around the globe have proposed six scenarios approximating what we might expect of food supplies in the aftermath of a rapidly escalating nuclear conflict between warring states.
Setting aside the immediate casualties in the attacks, which could be in the hundreds of millions, the mortality rate from a calories shortage crisis alone could wipe out most of the world's population.
The researchers used the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Community Earth System Model to predict how weather patterns might change with the addition of soot and dust churned up by nuclear blasts.
This was then used to inform estimates on how yields in crops and marine stocks would react to shifts in surface temperature, direct and diffuse light, and precipitation.
The results weren't pretty.
Interesting sketch of the social media of teens:
If you watch any show featuring teenagers that's set in present day, you’ve probably seen some variation on the joke that comes up when Facebook is mentioned. The kids either say, “No one uses Facebook anymore,” or even, “What’s Facebook?”
Is that an exaggeration? Perhaps, but not by much. The Pew Research Center(Opens in a new window) conducts regular updates of tech-usage surveys, and from April to May 2022, it asked 13- to 17-year-olds in the US about their favorite social media platforms. The results (above) are telling, and the clear loser is Facebook. Seven years ago, it was used by 71% of teens(Opens in a new window), but that number has now dropped to 32%. Twitter and Tumblr usage is also down, but each had a less egregious drop.
TikTok didn’t exist until 2018, but it's now even more popular than Instagram and Snapchat with teens. Both of the latter services saw growth, especially Snapchat, which grew from 41% to 59%.
Of course, no platform comes close to YouTube. It's used by 95% of the surveyed teens. Pew also asked how often the kids are using the sites, ranging from “ever” to “constantly.” YouTube is again at the top, for constant use (19%), and TikTok is number two, at 16%.
A new study reveals the emergence of an "extreme heat belt" from Texas to Illinois, where the heat index could reach 125°F at least one day a year by 2053.
The big picture: In just 30 years, climate change will cause the Lower 48 states to be a far hotter and more precarious place to be during the summer.
The findings come from a hyperlocal analysis of current and future extreme heat events published Monday by the nonprofit First Street Foundation.
The new report is unique for examining current and future heat risks down to the property level across the country, and joins similar risk analyses First Street has completed for flooding and wildfires.
As average temperatures increase due to human-driven greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels for energy, instances of extreme heat are forecast to escalate.
This report makes clear where households will be vulnerable to what would now be considered almost unheard-of heat indices, which show how the air feels from the combination of air temperature and relative humidity.
Threat Level: The report, which is based on First Street's peer reviewed heat model, shows that the number of Americans currently exposed to "extreme heat," defined as having a maximum heat index of greater than 125°F, is just 8 million.
However, due to the anticipated warming during the next three decades, that number is expected to balloon to 107 million people, an increase of 13 times over 30 years.
The developing "Extreme Heat Belt" forms a region of vulnerability from northern Texas to Illinois, and includes the cities of St. Louis, Kansas City, Memphis, Tulsa and Chicago.
By 2030, some coastal areas in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic may also experience days with a heat index above 125°F, the report found.
In case you didn’t see this, Mike Bird takes down Kevin DeYoung’s defense of patriarchy.
Babylon is one of the most famous cities of antiquity. Babylon was the capital of the southern Mesopotamia (Babylonia) from the early second millennium to the early first millennium BCE, and it was the capital of the Neo Babylonian (Chaldean) empire in the 7th and 6th centuries when it was at the peak of its glory. Its extensive ruins lie near the modern town of Al-Hillah in Iraq on the Euphrates River about 88 km south of Baghdad.
Babylon's development as a significant city was late by the Mesopotamian standards as there is no mention of it existing before the 23rd century BCE. The city became the nucleus of a small kingdom established in 1894 BCE by the Amorite king Sumuabum. It happened after the fall of the 3rd dynasty of Ur, under which Babylon was a provincial center. King Sumuabum's successors consolidated Babylon's status. The sixth and most famous of the Amorite dynasty, Hammurabi (1792 – 50 BCE), conquered the surrounding city-states and turned Babylon into the capital of a kingdom comprising all the southern Mesopotamia and part of Assyria. The city's favorable location and its political importance made it the main commercial and the administrative center of Babylonia. …
The eighteenth-century witnessed an increasing flow of travelers to Babylon. The archeological site is famous as a unique testimony and remains of one of the most influential empires of the ancient world. Babylon nowadays is an archeological site that possesses cultural and symbolic associations of universal value. The property represents the remains of a multifaced myth that functioned as a model, tale, and symbol for over two thousand years.
The 2003 warfare in Iraq had a devastating effect on several archeological sites and antiquities, many of which were damaged or even looted. In January 2009, the World Monuments Fund, with funding from the U.S Department of State and in collaboration with Iraq's State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, announced a new conservation plan for the site of the old city of Babylon.