Team Trees 20 million trees goal will make no practical difference to climate change. Youtuber Thunderfoot breaks this down very nicely. So long as the ones planting the trees are mindful not to burn fossil fuel in any part of the process, i.e. shipping the sapling trees to where they will be planted it does no harm.  I first became aware of this when one of my favorite YouTube channels Linus Tech Tips made a video about making a tree planting cannon.  Their video also tells a little bit about how this started and became a real movement. I like their attitude towards it. Basically that this is mostly a fun thing to do and a fundraiser for the National Arbor Day foundation who will do the real work.

Ku Kiai Mauna protestors have branched out from being concerned with the fictitious pollution of a nonexistent aquifer at the top of Mauna Kea on the big Island of Hawaii. Some who wear their brand have been making terroristic threats up to and including raising the possibility of suicide bombing.

Reporters have a duty to report what they find out after they verify that it has a certain degree of credibility.  To shine a light on the dark corners.  That is what the media did about the allegations against Dr Tyson.  I was a part of that process.  Given what was revealed by three women serious scrutiny was called for.  Without dispassionate news reporting that would not have occurred.  While it certainly brought no pleasure to anyone who covered that, Tchiya Amet, Dr Katelyn N Allers, and Ashley Watson, deserved and still deserve to be heard. 

One map blows away the land use and desecration claim of the anti TMT protestors, the self-styled Ku Kiai Mauna (KKM), or “protectors”.

Native Hawaiians have legit land use grievances but those have nothing to do with the Thirty Meter Telescope planned and approved twice over ten years to be built atop Mauna Kea.  Astronomers globally need to stand up for this observatory or humanity will lose big.

Z, a quantity known as the partition function in statistical thermodynamics and the generating functional in quantum field theory tell us that we are exactly right about black hole thermodynamics.  Dr Craig Callender, Professor of Philosophy at UC San Diego, is all wrong about black holes.    Any theory which unifies Quantum Field Theory (QFT) with General Relativity (GR), by any means, will allow us to write such a generating functional.  When the low energy limits are taken for a large number of particles, we recover statistical thermodynamics.