interesting

There are 92 posts filed in interesting (this is page 7 of 12).

Trump’s border wall will be horrible for the planet

A new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates the environmental destruction Trump’s proposed border wall will wreak upon the planet:

A 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer) wall would require an estimated 275 million cubic feet of concrete. It would release as much as 1.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to Christoph Meinrenken, an associate research scientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. That’s more than the annual emissions from every home in Pittsburgh.

That’s just for the raw materials alone. This is to say nothing of all the machinery that will be required to put it there, as well as the displacement of indigenous creatures and associated damage.

For a great visualization of the madness, check out this short film from The Intercept that shows just how much ground there is to cover.

Women only said 27% of the words in the top 10 films of 2016

Amber Thomas, writing for freecodecamp, about seeing Rogue One:

I went into the movie theater expecting to see men and women fighting side by side. I left feeling certain that I could count every female character from the movie on one hand. While Jyn was the main character, I was profoundly aware that she was often the only woman in any scene.

It felt strangely familiar to have a lead female character be so outnumbered. Then I realized that Jyn and Princess Leia suffered the same inequality 39 years apart. I was overwhelmed with a need to know exactly how female representation in Star Wars movies has changed. But it seemed unfair to compare movies made today with movies made decades ago. So instead, I decided to look for female equality across the Top 10 Worldwide Highest Grossing Films of 2016.

The whole blog post is worth reading, as her methodology is fascinating (not to mention the findings).

The story of your life

Tell it often, and tell it to yourself and to people:

Organizing the past into a narrative isn’t just a way to understand the self, but also to attempt to predict the future. Which is interesting, because the storytelling device that seems most incompatible with the realities of actual life is foreshadowing. Metaphors, sure. As college literature class discussion sections taught me, you can see anything as a metaphor if you try hard enough. Motifs, definitely. Even if you’re living your life as randomly as possible, enough things will happen that, like monkeys with typewriters, patterns will start to emerge.

The dating crisis in two religions

Jon Birger establishes that it’s religious demographics, not values, that are upending assumptions about marriage:

Multiple studies show that college-educated Americans are increasingly reluctant to marry those lacking a college degree. This bias is having a devastating impact on the dating market for college-educated women. Why? According to 2012 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, there are 5.5 million college-educated women in the U.S. between the ages of 22 and 29 versus 4.1 million such men. That’s four women for every three men. Among college grads age 30 to 39, there are 7.4 million women versus 6.0 million men—five women for every four men.

The Decline of Car Culture

An interesting examination of why car culture is going away for millenials:

Americans drive fewer miles per year — down about 9 percent over the past two decades. The percentage of 19-year-olds with driver’s licenses has dropped from 87 percent two decades ago to 70 percent last year. Most teens now do not get licensed within a year of becoming eligible, according to a study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

One of the more interesting insights to me: How parenting has changed from an authoritarian institution into how “parents just want to be your friends,” mitigating the need for rebellion.

The Life I Chose

Some lovely reminiscing by Tim Kreider for The New York Times:

I suspect that the way I feel now, at summer’s end, is about how I’ll feel at the end of my life, assuming I have time and mind enough to reflect: bewildered by how unexpectedly everything turned out, regretful about all the things I didn’t get around to, clutching the handful of friends and funny stories I’ve amassed, and wondering where it all went. And I’ll probably still be evading the same truth I’m evading now: that the life I ended up with, much as I complain about it, was pretty much the one I chose. And my dissatisfactions with it are really with my own character, with my hesitation and timidity.