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squiresjl8.bsky.social
JSquires
@squiresjl8.bsky.social
670 followers 4.4K following 530 posts
He/Him. Art. Architecture. Science. Geology. History. Always learning.
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squiresjl8.bsky.social
I’m always a sucker for PreCambrian sedimentary rocks but there’s some banger samples in the @uwaterloo.ca rock garden including a great reminder of the 1.8B yr old Sudbury impact event (a fascinating story in itself).
A Proterozoic sandstone and conglomerate with a very clean, quartz rich matrix and red and black angular clasts sorted in a fining upwards progression (my interpretation) A slightly metamorphosed conglomerate with very coarse rounded clasts of feldspar rich granites in a dark shaley matrix. “Shatter cone shock structures. Sudbury Impact Crater (Asteobleme)”
August 23, 2025 at 7:50 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
@newscientist.com is the best.
“Regrow your own teeth.” “Could there be new particles hiding in the zeptouniverse?” “Any theory that predicts the non-existence of the universe is in trouble.”
August 5, 2025 at 8:01 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
We were fortunate to acquire a couple of pieces from @davidbrace2.bsky.social
They’re even better in person, we love them. Off to get them framed.
Support local artists!
A photo showing two art works on paper. On the left is a whale in a shape mimicking the Atlantic Ocean overlying a map torn from an atlas of the Atlantic and the surrounding continents. On the right is a Godzilla standing on a map of Japan torn from the same atlas.
June 23, 2025 at 2:42 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
Devastating read. Mandatory, but devastating.
A shot of the front cover of the book “One day, everyone will have always been against this” by Omar El Akkad
June 5, 2025 at 11:25 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
Today the lake is presenting a symphony in blue.
A picture of Lake Ontario this afternoon. A beautiful sunny day. The surface of the lake is still and reflecting the blue sky. There is only a thin layer of cloud above the lake surface.
May 26, 2025 at 7:05 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
Just because you CAN do something…
An excerpt from an article in New Scientist which reads: “Hijacked cicadas play music like a cyborg loudspeaker. The chirp of the cicada - the sound of many summers - has received an electronic upgrade that turns the insects into flying speakers playing anything from Pachelbel’s Canon to the theme from Top Gun. The researchers behind the work say it could be used to spread warning messages during an emergency.”
May 20, 2025 at 4:58 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
what a graph! I don't fully understand the hydro line (surely we have data pre-2010?) but clearly we've seen the big savings. Now the game is about implementation, storage, and replacement.
a graph showing the global cost o 4 different sources of renewable energy from 1985 to present day. Onshore wind has fallen from $0.35/MW to <$0.05, offshore wind from $0.18 to $0.08, solar from >$0.45 to <$0.05 and hydro has risen slightly from $0.05 to $0.06. The source of the data is IRENA via OWID. The graph was published by Semafor.
May 20, 2025 at 12:38 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
What I think isn’t really relevant here. The article however mentions: “…humans, over evolutionary timescales, could totally and permanently lose the Y-chromosome.” And provide additional context in the side-bar I’ve captured below. You’ll note they give examples of male mammals with no Y chromosome
An excerpt from the New Scientist article mentioned in the previous post regarding whether or not the Y chromosome will disappear.
May 8, 2025 at 7:01 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
The municipal building at Venlo, NL is very cool. Both in design and utility. “The air in Venlo’s new city hall is purer than the air outside and purifies air in a 500m radius around the building.”
(Photo: Ronald Tilleman)
A picture of the municipal building in Venlo. The facade visible is mostly a living wall roughly 10 stories tall. There are glass cut-outs in both thin, irregularly spaced rectangular windows and a large central section as if cut out from the wall and revealing a glass and steel facade.
May 4, 2025 at 10:30 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
I had to read the highlighted sentence a few times before it sunk in. Then I had to fact check to make sure it was real. Then I had to take a breath. Beyond even what we do to each other, humans will have a lot to answer for in the final accounting. (Via/ Nat Geo v.247.05)
An excerpt from an article in National Geographic which states: “Meanwhile, king penguins, smaller cousins to the emperors, are in decline in Antarctica but growing in the subantarctic region, rebounding after decades of being harvested for oil.”
May 4, 2025 at 4:11 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
Also…
April 28, 2025 at 12:30 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
“…to help make it worth defending.”
Via/ @newscientist.com in an editorial entitled “The pursuit of usefulness” on government funding of scientific research.
An excerpt from an editorial in New Scientist reading “In 1969, as Robert Wilson was testifying before the US Congress to get funding for a new particle collider at Fermilab, he spoke on the topic. The senators were grilling him on how this scientific endeavour would contribute to national defence or help compete with Russia during the Cold War. He answered: “It has nothing to do with the military…it has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? … it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.”
April 23, 2025 at 2:31 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
This, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, is brilliant. Not perfect but far ahead of its time. Recommended.
An image of the cover of the novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin with a cubist painting entitled Man + Air + Space by Popova, 1915, and a large white star enclosing the title and author’s name.
April 3, 2025 at 4:01 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
This book is really fantastic. Clear, informative, and pulls no punches. I’ve been involved in the energy industry for 29 years and I learned a lot. Strong recommendation.
The front cover of “World without End”, an Illustrated guide to the climate crisis. By Jean-Marc Jancovici and Christophe Blain.
March 11, 2025 at 2:44 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
What if we finally sort this bit out and then find that human consciousness is some kind of emergent phenomenon that comes from sum of the brain, vagus nerve and microbiome or whatever? and we’re left with fancy freezers full of useless grey matter.
A brief New Scientist article from Feb 2025 describing mouse tissue that survived being frozen for a week without damage to the synapses and showed the ability to be revived. The article suggests this is a big step forward to cryopreservation of humans.
March 7, 2025 at 5:27 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
Tiepolo was born on this day in 1696. Brilliant ceiling painter. Underrated in my books.
March 5, 2025 at 2:03 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
Local library has a cool display made up of books banned across North America. It is part of their Freedom to Read Week. Don’t ban books.
A cylindrical tower of books with an open central column that is lit from below. An interior shot of the sculpture showing a mirrored base that makes it look like the pile continues below the floor.
March 3, 2025 at 5:26 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
A 1968 quote from Eldridge Cleaver in Soul on Ice. “It is not an overstatement to say that the destiny of the entire human race depends on what is going on in America today. This is a staggering reality to the rest of the world; they must feel like passengers in a supersonic jet liner who are forced to watch helplessly while a passel of drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen fight for the controls and the pilot’s seat”.
March 2, 2025 at 8:52 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
“…with one phone call Trump…committed one of the most striking acts of appeasement of the modern age.” What a precedent. Time for the international community to start to step up.
Text (from Tortoisemedia) says: Three announcements yesterday spelled the beginning of the end of the war in Ukraine. The first two were readouts from the White House and the Kremlin on a long phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, after which Trump said peace talks would begin at once. The third was by the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who ruled out Nato membership for Ukraine and said returning to its 2014 borders was unrealistic. If it seems that Nato’s leading member is seeking to reward Putin for his unprovoked war of aggression and the suspected war crimes associated with it, that’s because it is. Were the Hegseth guidelines to become the outlines of a deal, Crimea, parts of eastern Ukraine and a negotiated peace would be Putin’s reward. Trump called Ukraine’s Zelensky too, but only after hanging up with Putin. It wasn’t clear how Zelensky would feature in any talks on the fate of his own country. It was clear that with one call Trump had ended Putin’s three-year diplomatic isolation, reversed a US policy of letting Ukrainians decide how and when to end the war, and committed one of the most striking acts of appeasement of the modern age.
February 13, 2025 at 4:08 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
This is a startling statistic from China. Going to be hard to avoid the demographic drag from this without any substantive immigration into the country. (From the Sensemaker newsletter via Tortoisemedia)
Text says: China wants its citizens to wed, but it’s not working. The number of new marriages fell to a record low last year, according to data released by China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs on Saturday. Just over six million couples registered their marriages in 2024, a fall of 20 per cent on the previous year and less than half the 13.5 million who tied the knot in 2013. This is despite a decade in which China has abandoned its one-child policy, lowered the cost of IVF and encouraged universities to provide “love education” for young people. Marriage strongly informs the birthrate in China, where unwed couples and single people rarely have children. Nearly half of China’s population is over 60 years old and roughly 300 million are predicted to leave the workforce in the coming decade. Young adults seem to be in no rush to help.
February 11, 2025 at 2:02 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
This is remarkable for a number of reasons. First NVDA is much further along in creating a simulation “indistinguishable from the real world” than I had thought. Secondly, I hadn’t thought of it being designed to train robots on interacting with reality first. Fascinating.
An excerpt of a Time Magazine interview with Rev Lebaredian, VP of Omniverse at Nvidia, in which he describes a simulation tool used to train AI robots.
January 25, 2025 at 4:41 AM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
Wow. This is shocking and has to be an increasingly substantial problem for an aging society. The conflicting factor of a significant portion of state revenues associated with it is surprising.
A snapshot of a statistic from Semafor that reads “The share China’s central government revenue that comes from tobacco sales. Although tobacco consumption has fallen in much of the world since the turn of the century, sales have risen more than 35% in China since 2003, while the state-owned tobacco company now employs more than a million people. Despite attempts to phase out consumption, Beijing’s reliance on the industry’s revenues has halted most progress. “The tobacco industry was too strong for them,” an expert told the Financial Times. “It’s just massively powerful.”
January 16, 2025 at 2:41 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
The Mauritshuis is such a great little museum. There are dozens of paintings in this collection I could spend hours with.
Clara Peters represents the Netherlands better in this single still-life than almost any landscape could do.
A still-life painting by Clara Peters. It features a stuffed composition dominated by large, cut wheels of cheese. A flask and glass are on the right - the glass is ornate and painted miraculously. Notably there is a knife in the foreground (hanging off the table like trompe l’oeil) that bears her signature.
December 30, 2024 at 9:45 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
A winter storm on the lake.
A view of Lake Ontario looking south. Blue skies overhead but dark clouds over the lake obscuring the horizon.
December 22, 2024 at 4:40 PM
squiresjl8.bsky.social
John Lennon and Yoko Ono riding a snowmobile in Mississauga, Ontario. December 1969.
Photo: Canadian Press
John and Yoko on a snowmobile. John in a winter coat. Yoko covered in fur.
December 18, 2024 at 5:09 PM