Where Cardboard Comes From and Where It's Going

I've never thought much about cardboard, except when I have to cut apart a box to put it into the recycling bin. But if you stop to think about all the boxes that get shipped out just from Amazon, it's worth taking a look at where it comes from and what happens to it after you're done with it.

The New York Times Magazine just published a long article about cardboard manufacturing. Like much modern manufacturing, the scale is amazing. 

Every day, Walls told me proudly, the exercise was repeated enough times to paper over a two-lane highway from the gates of the mill almost to El Paso, Texas, 1,350 miles. Impressive in itself, but to get a real sense of the scale of the modern corrugated industry, you have to do some extrapolation: Take those 1,350 miles and add the output of the 25 other paper mills I.P. maintains from Georgia all the way out to Washington State. Add again the yield from the dozens of paper mills owned by the company’s competitors. Suddenly, you’re no longer talking about thousands of miles of paper, but millions of miles.

And it’s barely enough to meet demand: Cardboard manufacturers broke production records in 2021, and they’ve been breaking them basically every quarter since. By 2025, according to one estimate, the size of the international market for corrugated packaging will reach $205 billion, commensurate with the gross domestic product of New Zealand or Greece.

As well as describing the manufacturing process, the article describes the environmental impact. It may not be as much as you might suspect, as most of the trees are now farmed and about 91 percent of cardboard is recycled. 

I've gifted the article from my subscription so it is outside of the paywall.  

Changing the Order of Styles in Word's Style Gallery

Microsoft has never prioritized the use of styles in Microsoft Word. I've always used them and found them to be a great timesaver, but in my long experience with Word, I've found few people who use them often and consistently (most of them are fellow technical writers). 

When Microsoft introduced the ribbon in Word 2007, I thought that having a chunk of the ribbon devoted to styles would get more people using them, but that turned out no to be the case. After working with the ribbon for a while, I found out how to modify the styles displayed in my Gallery. That made it easier to show people how to use them.

Office Watch has published a good article on how to change the order of the styles displayed in the Style Gallery. Setting this up properly is key to helping people use styles. As the article shows, Microsoft doesn't make it obvious, but it's easy enough to do once you see how.

If you aren't using styles in Word, why not start now? It will save you a lot of time and help to keep your document formatting consistent. I've published quite a few articles about styles; find them in the Microsoft Word topic on this blog. 

Featured Links - November 28, 2022

Links to things I was interested in but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Frenchman's Bay 

Canadian carrier apps include trackers from Facebook, Google, more. "DuckDuckGo's App Tracking Protection feature blocked hundreds of tracking attempts from carrier apps on my phone." I am definitely going to have to look at this. 

A {Twitter] thread for those who think we're going to be importing lots of hydrogen over vast distances. Hydrogen is not like LNG, propane, or gasoline. Transporting it is difficult, expensive, dangerous, and energy intensive. 

Some Very Basics Basics About Writing Novels. Advice from Margaret Atwood who does know what she is talking about.

Google Is About To Stop Answering Your Stupid Questions. "This actually seems like a pretty good idea."

Archaeologists reveal the white supremacist nonsense behind Netflix's "Ancient Apocalypse". Just in case you're thinking there might be something to the show. 

Should I join Mastodon? A scientists’ guide to Twitter’s rival. "The open-source platform has added nearly half a million users in little more than a week — but should scientists make the leap? We examine the pros and cons."

Tonga's strange volcanic eruption was even more massive than we knew. "The ferocious 2021 explosion blew out 2.3 cubic miles of rock, unleashing a 35-mile-high plume and a global tsunami that sent scientists racing to understand the blast. Now they're finally putting together the pieces."

Photo of the Week - November 27, 2022

I am fascinated by the shapes and patterns made by the bare branches of the trees now that all the leaves have fallen. Taken with my Pixel 4a.

Bare branches

 

Saturday Sounds - TajMo': The Taj Mahal & Keb' Mo' Band Live at Jazz San Javier 2017

Here's a lovely concert featuring two great musicians, Taj Mahal and Keb Mo, filmed at Jazz San Javier in Spain in 2017. This is a professional recording with great sound highlighting the considerable talents of these two musicians and their crackerjack band. 

We're Toast 32

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Fallen Trees

Industrial Meat and Dairy Is Destroying the Planet. "Just 15 of the world's biggest meat and dairy companies are responsible for an overwhelming amount of methane emissions, a new report has found."

Sea level rise to dramatically speed up erosion of rock coastlines by 2100.* "Rock coasts, which make up over half the world's coastlines, could retreat more rapidly in the future due to accelerating sea level rise."

Beyond Catastrophe.* "A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View."

I’m No Longer Sure New York Will Protect Itself From Rising Waters.* "What I’ve learned over the past 10 years is that we have the ability to defend our city in the face of climate change. But what is also clear, given the funding gaps and ever-extending deadlines, is that we won’t do it in time. In that case, is it better to be realistic?"

World close to ‘irreversible’ climate breakdown, warn major studies. "The climate crisis has reached a “really bleak moment”, one of the world’s leading climate scientists has said, after a slew of major reports laid bare how close the planet is to catastrophe."

380 Million Tons of Plastic Are Made Every Year. None of It Is Truly Recyclable. "Not even water bottles and milk jugs meet standards for recyclability, a new report finds."

A MAGA America Would Be Ugly. "If America descends into one-party rule, it will be much worse, much uglier, than what we see in today’s Hungary.” An opinion piece by Paul Krugman. 

What Happens When a Cascade of Crises Collide?* "Today’s mess is better understood as a global polycrisis, a term the historian Adam Tooze at Columbia has recently popularized. The term implies that humanity is dealing with a complex knot of seemingly distinct but actually deeply entangled crises. Precisely because these crises are so entangled, they’re causing worldwide damage much greater than the sum of their individual harms."

* Paywall free-article gifted from NY Times subscription. 

Did Pandemic Fatigue Make Political Dissatisfaction Worse?

It does seem like politics has gotten angrier and uglier during the last few years. Certainly, ever since Trump got elected in 2016, US politics has gotten kind of crazy, and that's spilled over into Canada, most notably with the "Freedom Convoy" earlier this year. 

I just saw a clip on the TV news about a school board meeting in Ottawa that turned into an angry fracas over masking, of all things. 

Did the pandemic have a negative effect on politics? Based on this journal article, perhaps it did. 

Health authorities have highlighted “pandemic fatigue” as a psychological consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic and warned that “fatigue” could demotivate compliance with health-related policies and mandates. Yet, fatigue from following the policies of authorities may have consequences far beyond the health domain. Theories from the social sciences have raised that real and perceived costs of policies can also drive sentiments of discontent with the entire political establishment. Integrating theories from the health and social sciences, we ask how pandemic fatigue (i.e., perceived inability to “keep up” with restrictions) developed over the pandemic and whether it fueled political discontent. Utilizing longitudinal and panel surveys collected from September 2020 to July 2021 in eight Western countries (N = 49,116), we analyze: 1) fatigue over time at the country level, 2) associations between pandemic fatigue and discontent, and 3) the effect of pandemic fatigue on political discontent using panel data. Pandemic fatigue significantly increased with time and the severity of interventions but also decreased with COVID-19 deaths. When triggered, fatigue elicited a broad range of discontent, including protest support and conspiratorial thinking. The results demonstrate the significant societal impact of the pandemic beyond the domain of health and raise concerns about the stability of democratic societies, which were already strained by strife prior to the pandemic.

More details are in this Twitter thread. 

Moving on from Twitter

Somewhat to my surprise, Twitter is still up and running despite losing more than half of its staff. I have noticed occasional glitches and dropouts in my feed, which leads me to suspect that not all is well in the dark, fetid recesses of the server rooms. All is certainly not well in the moderation department, especially now that troglodytes like 45 and Marjorie Taylor Greene have been allowed back on the service. (To his credit, Elon Musk draws the line at reinstating Alex Jones).

I'll keep following my Twitter feed for now, but I have set up an account on Mastodon: @ksoltys@twit.social. I've been laying low there, just following what people are posting, but I expect to be more active in the future. So far, Mastodon seems easy enough to use and many of the people I follow on Twitter have set up accounts there. Mostly I've been using the web interface because the Android client is rather limited in its features. Given that Mastodon is open source, I hope that will eventually change.

Although superficially similar to Twitter, Mastodon has a very different architecture. In this article, the original developer, Eugen Rochko, explains the philosophy behind Mastodon's development and what the future might hold for it.

If you're thinking about leaving Twitter for greener pastures, Mobile Syrup describes several of the alternatives. 

If you follow a lot of people on Twitter, it's likely that many of them will have accounts on Mastodon. If they've included their Mastodon account as part of their Twitter profile, it's easy to transfer them from your Twitter feed to Mastodon. There are a couple of utilities that will help you do this. You can use Feditfinder or DeBirdify. You'll have to allow them to access your Twitter account, but after that, the process is straightforward and documented on the apps' pages. 

How TikTok and the Pandemic Changed Language

A couple of articles recently have highlighted how fast our language is changing. 

First, the New York Times describes how users of TikTok have created their own jargon to get around TikTok's content moderation. I've gifted from my subscription so there's no paywall. 

TikTok creators have gotten into the habit of coming up with substitutes for words that they worry might either affect how their videos get promoted on the site or run afoul of moderation rules.

So, back in 2021, someone describing a pandemic hobby might have believed (perhaps erroneously) that TikTok would mistakenly flag it as part of a crackdown on pandemic misinformation. So the user could have said “panoramic” or a similar-sounding word instead. Likewise, a fear that sexual topics would trigger problems prompted some creators to use “leg booty” for L.G.B.T.Q. and “cornucopia” instead of “homophobia.” Sex became “seggs.”

On Twitter, Margaret Atwood pointed me to a new book, Pandexicon, that looks at how the pandemic has changed our language over the last couple of years.  

When the pandemic struck in early 2020, Wayne Grady started collecting the words and phrases that arose from our shared global experience. Some, such as "uptick" and "pivot," had existed before but now took on new meaning, and others, such as "covidivorce," "quarantini," "covexit," and "shecession," appeared for the first time, their meaning instantly clear. Through this new vocabulary, we became more able to adapt to change, to domesticate it in a sense, and to reduce our fears.

Moving from the very beginning of the pandemic (the "Before Times") and our early response to it through the peaks and troughs of the various waves in countries throughout the world, and ending with a contemplation of what the "After Times" might look like, this book takes us on a journey through the pandemic and illuminates both how this new language has unfolded and how it has changed the way we think about ourselves and each other.

Pandeixcon won't be published until March 2023, but you can pre-order it from the publisher. 

Featured Links - November 21, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Meet CJ, one of the two feline heads of my family.

• Apple AirPods Can Work as More Affordable Hearing Aids, Study Finds. I wonder if Google Pixel Buds would work as well? Please leave a comment if you are using them as a hearing aid. 
• The Framework is the most exciting laptop I've ever broken. "An exciting concept, a laptop you can repair or upgrade yourself."
• Was Kurt Vonnegut a nice man? "A good writer doesn't have to be a saint." That also applies to artists and musicians.
• The mysteries of the astronaut biome. "How might space travel change the human microbiome, which is linked to so many ailments?" This is what Elon Musk should be spending time on, not screwing up Twitter.
• Futura Doctrina: A New Hope. "A continuing discussion about war, competition and building effective military institutions." I have been following Mick Ryan on Twitter since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and he is very much worth reading.
• Your Cat Might Not Be Ignoring You When You Speak. "Cats have a reputation for being aloof, but a new study has found that their relationships with their owners may be stronger than we thought." All cat owners know this. 
• How a hunt for secret nuclear weapon tests led to the discovery of the most violent explosions in the Universe. There is a good reason for studying gamma-ray bursts. They are so powerful they can affect the Earth from millions or even billions of light years away. 

Greg Bear, RIP

SF author Greg Bear died yesterday after suffering a massive stroke after heart surgery. He was 71. 

Bear began publishing sometime in the 1970s and I remember reading several of his early novels when they appeared in paperback. He was a very successful author and won several Nebula and Hugo awards. Of all his books, I would recommend The Forge of God, which is one of the best first contact/alien invasion novels. 

Photo of the Week - November 20, 2022

One more picture of the last of the fall flowers, getting buried in leaves, and likely to be buried in snow tomorrow.

Fujifilm X-S10 with Fujinon 27 mm F2.8 WR at F9, 1/125 second, ISO 320, Velvia film simulation

 

Saturday Sounds - Bill Frisell - Four

Bill Frisell is a jazz guitarist who I've been listening to for quite a long time. Describing him as a jazz guitarist might be a bit of a misnomer as, like John Scofield, his albums have crossed several musical genres. 

His latest album, Four, is definitely jazz, in the small combo mode and it's wonderful. As well as Frisell, players on the album include Gregory Tardy: tenor saxophone, clarinet, and bass clarinet; Gerald Clayton: piano; Johnathan Blake: drums. 

From JazzTrail.net:

The unmatchable American guitarist and composer Bill Frisell soars his six-string chords in the company of long-time collaborator Gregory Tardy on reeds, and recent partners: pianist Gerald Clayton and drummer Johnathan Blake. Four is Frisell’s third outing on the Blue Note imprint, and consists entirely of originals - nine newly composed and four taken from two previously recorded albums. They form a wonderful set of folk-rooted meditations on loss, renewal and friendship.

The record is dedicated to the late cornetist Ron Miles, but some specific tracks pay tribute to some of Frisell’s recently departed friends. The opener, “Dear Old Friend (for Alan Woodward)” is a solo-less, far-from-overwrought country song with a lullaby-ish melody. There’s also the gently persuasive “Waltz for Hal Willner”, and the wonderful collective work of “Claude Utley”, which celebrates the amazingly colorful painter of the same name, a native from Seattle who passed away in September 2021. This piece, carrying a post-bop leverage, incorporates the tenets of the bandleader’s style. Clayton gets the spotlight in the introductory section, after which an inducted three time feel stimulates Frisell and Tardy (on clarinet) to provide counterpoint.

This is beautiful contemplative music made by musicians who know how to listen as well as play. I like it very much and I hope you do too.  

Photography Links - November 18, 2022

Here are some articles about photography that I found interesting or useful.

Backlit trees

• Demolition Photographer Uses Large Format Camera to Capture Explosive Images. "A photographer who has been capturing demolitions on large format cameras for 15 years only gets one shot to capture the one-off explosion."
• The Best Printers for Making Professional Looking Photos at Home. "The best photo printers produce detailed, high-quality images that stand the test of time." 
• How to Edit Landscape Photos in Black and White. If it was good enough for Ansel Adams, it should be good enough for me.
• How to Combine Focus Stacking and Exposure Blending for Better Photos. More post-processing tools to play with. 
• 7 Tips for Better Cityscape Photos. I will read through this again before the next time I take my camera to Toronto. 
• A Deeper Understanding Low and High-Key Photography is Essential for Creative Photography. "They can change the ordinary to the extraordinary. However, there is a lot more to creating low- and high-key photographs than just under- and over-exposing. Discovering how they work can dramatically improve our photography. It's also the reason why cameras should have one specific feature."

Giving Up on Shadow Captain

I haven't posted much about what I've been reading recently, mainly because I haven't been reading much fiction. Most of my reading these days has been news-related or magazines from the library via the PressReader or Libby apps. I have been trying to catch up on the To Be Read collection on my Kindle, but without much success.

The latest book I've been reading is Shadow Captain by Alastair Reynolds. It's the middle book of a trilogy that started with Revenger, which I read a couple of years ago, and Bone Silence. Here's the précis of Revenger from Wikipedia.

Tens of millions of years in the future, sisters Adrana and Arafura ('Fura') Ness are skilled bone readers—the primary method by which spaceships communicate with one another. Their skill at bone reading leads them to be taken on as apprentices aboard Monetta's Mourn, a spaceship captained by Pol Rackamore. Rackamore and his crew engage in the practice of finding ancient technological artifacts, called "baubles". While in search of these artifacts, Monetta's Mourn is attacked by the infamous space pirate Bosa Sennen, separating the sisters and leaving Fura adrift on a ship in empty space.

I enjoyed Revenger, mostly for the setting that Reynolds developed. But Shadow Captain was another matter. I just couldn't get into the story and found the pseudo-archaic style that Reynolds used annoying. Halfway through the book. I gave up. Reynolds is one of my favourite authors, and I've read most of his books and enjoyed them. But this series just didn't work for me. 

So now I'm on the A Memory of Empire by Arkady Martine, winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2019. My initial impression is quite positive.

Understanding Word's New Commenting Features

I've been seeing references to Microsoft Word's new "modern comments" for a while now, but since I am still using Word 2013, I didn't know much about them. I'll probably have to upgrade my version of Word next year (or switch to Libre Office) when Microsoft stops supporting Office 2013, so I was glad to see this long explanation of the new commenting features written by Russel Harper, an editor for the Chicago Manual of Style. 

If you use Word, and especially if you are planning to upgrade to the new Office 365, this would be a good article to read or bookmark for future reference. 

The Demise of Twitter and the SFF Genre

I've been online since the 1980s, starting with BBSs and Compuserve. Following that were Genie, Usenet, and eventually FaceBook and Twitter. Of all of those, Twitter has been my favourite social media service. There's nothing else that comes close to it for following things I'm interested in, and of course, that includes science fiction and fantasy. 

I use Twitter to follow authors I like: John Scalzi, Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, Elizabeth Bear, Mary Robinette Kowal, N. K. Jemisin, Paul McAuley, and several others. I am not sure what will happen to Twitter in the near future, though based on what's happened in the last couple of weeks, I don't think it will be good. I will be very sad indeed if Twitter goes away as it's been a big part of my life the last few years. 

Andrew Liptak has a good article in his latest newsletter about social media, the infrastructure of the Internet, and the science fiction and fantasy fan communities. It provides some much-needed perspective on what's happening now with Twitter. 

In particular, there's been quite a bit of introspection amidst the SF/F community, which has used Twitter as intended: an open square where we can talk about the books we like, shoot the shit, raise issues within the community, and so forth. They're understandably worried: Musk doesn't have a great track record with his online presence, and Twitter's long been a haven for trolls and bad-faith actors who stir up trouble, cause problems for everyone, and it doesn't seem like we have the best role model for dealing with this. Online communities are hard: there are a lot of things that go into it to ensure that users are protected and safe, and that bad habits don't get rooted into the community. The SF/F community has had an up and down relationship with Twitter over the years, but it's been a pretty constant thing, which makes this entire shift so notable.

I think it's safe to say that the Twitter that was around in 2009-2022 is gone, and what remains to be seen is what Twitter of 2022-beyond will look like. A social media platform is a tool like any other — it's just been a particularly useful tool for publicists, authors, fans, and everyone in between, which is why this feels like a real bookend to an era within the community.

Featured Links - November 14, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Last of the fall leaves

• Looks Like We're Going to Have to Get Used to China's Crashing Rockets. "The core stages of the rocket have performed four uncontrolled reentries to date, posing a potential threat to human lives and property.
• Russia’s New Cyberwarfare in Ukraine Is Fast, Dirty, and Relentless. "Security researchers see updated tactics and tools—and a tempo change—in the cyberattacks Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency is inflicting on Ukraine."
• Giles Martin says that he could only remix The Beatles’ Revolver album in stereo because of Peter Jackson’s AI-powered audio separation technology: “It opened the door”.  The stereo remix is truly remarkable and the technology is a perfect example of Clarke's Law in action. 
• Who Is Working to End the Threat of AI-Generated Deepfakes, and Why Is It So Difficult? "MIT researchers say they have a way to guard pictures from AI image generators, but some experts argue that no fix can stop the march of progress."
• 14 Ways to Make Windows 10 Faster and Improve Performance. It's not hard to make Windows 10 faster. Here are several methods to improve the speed and performance of Windows 10.
• How to Bypass Windows 11 Minimum Installation Requirements. "Try these alternative solutions when your device does not meet Windows 11 minimum system requirements to install the latest OS."
• CRISPR cancer trial success paves the way for personalized treatments. ‘Most complicated therapy ever’ tailors bespoke, genome-edited immune cells to attack tumours."

Photo of the Week - November 13, 2022

This week's photo is from the last day of the three-day fog event that we had earlier in the month. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4 at 24 mm., F8, 1/340 second, ISO 640, Velvia film simulation

 

Saturday Sounds - Gasoline Alley - Rod Stewart

This week's post is another blast from the past, Rod Stewart's second album, Gasoline Alley. I'm not a big fan of his later music, but his first few albums were brilliant. Every Picture Tells a Story had the big hit ("Maggie May") but I prefer this one. Standout tracks are the title song, "It's All Over Now" and "Cut Across Shorty". The songs feature an all-star list of musicians, including Ronnie Lane, Ron Wood, Ian McLagan, Pete Sears, and Kenny Jones.