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Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?

The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!

This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.

Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:

Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or

Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.

The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.

The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).

Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.

As you touch your lips say the following blessing:

ברוך אתה יי אלהימותינו רוח אשר יצרה את האדם בחכמה ובראה בה נקבים חלולים

Transliteration:

B’ruche ateh ‘’, elohimoteinu, ruach ha’olam

Asher yatzreh et ha-adam b'chochmah

Uvareh ve, n’kavim, chalulim

Translation:

Praise the Source of Life, who creates our bodies with Wisdom, creating openings and closings.

Blessed is the One

For letting me see the holiness in others

The sacredness of scars on a chest

The holiness of one who has learned to love themselves

Who renew their creation

The mitzvah of my lips on their body

Gloriously exploring each other

I'm gonna be really up front with everybody in a way that I'm usually not:

This year so far has been really rough, in a way that kinda has me worried. Bear with me, and there will be dog pictures along the way and pictures of new swag at the end, ok?

Running a small business is always rough, and with everything going on - with me being down-and-out struggling to get my hysterectomy approved, with everything going on financially & politically, with Jake moving out here - we knew that this year probably wouldn't be a banner year, but...

... when I pulled reports at the end of May, I was kinda shocked and gutted because at the start of June, we were actually down a considerable amount year over year. I knew the year wouldn't be great, but like, oof.

Pride is usually where we make our money for the year - we call it "gay Christmas," because where other retailers count on their holiday season, we count on Pride to make sure that our employees get paid during January of the following year.

Pause for Ser Davos Seawoof:

This Pride has started ... slowly. Not terribly, but a little more slowly than I'm comfortable with, and slowly enough that I'm nervous. We invested a lot of money in new stock and equipment, and that's got to pay off. Right?

So here's the pitch:

We need to make at least $60K in sales this month to make sure that we're in good shape for the upcoming year. We are currently at $8100, and we have a two-day event coming up in Seattle at the end of the month, but that still gives us an awful lot of ground to make up.

If we hit our sales goal for this month, NerdyKeppie will donate 1% of our net profit for June to @queerliblib.

Just hitting that goal would both make it possible for us to know we can make it through the year & even if we have the worst profit margins this month, it'd be a minimum $250 donation.

We just added Express delivery as a shipping upgrade on most of our t-shirts (limited color and size options on that, which isn't under our control) so if you need something quick, we've got you, and everything from our Portland HQ collection ships usually within 2 business days.

Everything in our Bottoms & Tops collection is Buy 2, Get a 3rd 69% off with code TOP2BOTTOM until midnight tonight:

And as always, NerdyKeppie is 100% trans-owned and queer-run. We start all of our employees at a minimum of $25/hr, and all eligible employees are IWW members. We have no investors, and we have no shareholders to please. Big box corporations screw over small artists and drop Pride the minute it gets hard or controversial, but this is our life.

We're here for the long run. Help us stay and help us build resources for today & tomorrow, and get some cool-ass swag while you do.

We believe in what y'all do, and Spider saw one of your fundraising posts yesterday and did some quick napkin math on what it would take to cover us for next winter and be able to guarantee a donation and just... ran with it.

We hope you don't mind us reblogging this, @cobrilee, but this is such a cool thing to do and totally in the spirit of this push. <3

icarian task: when you have a task you know you’re going to fail at anyways, so why not have some fun with it before it all comes crashing down

cassandrean task: when you have to deal with people you KNOW won’t listen to you, despite having accurate information, and having to watch them fumble about when you told them the solution from the start (most often witnessed in customer service)

Odyssean Task - a straight forward task that only becomes an epic burden because so many other things keep interrupting, or because your adhd brain distracts you with too many sidequests

Orphic Task - a deceptively simple-sounding task your actually doomed at

Achillean Task - a task you aren’t going to do until people appreciate you or you get the compensation you believe you deserve [a striking worker’s normal job is an Achillean Task]

icarian task: when you have a task you know you’re going to fail at anyways, so why not have some fun with it before it all comes crashing down

cassandrean task: when you have to deal with people you KNOW won’t listen to you, despite having accurate information, and having to watch them fumble about when you told them the solution from the start (most often witnessed in customer service)

Thesean Task: a difficult, if straightforward, task made needlessly difficult by the many, many confusing lesser steps required to arrive at the ability to tackle the primary task

Achillean Task: any task you for which you personally have aptitude that renders it simple, though it regularly impresses others, but for which you unfortunately have one (1) personal trait that, if left unmanaged, can bring the whole thing crashing down

Persean Task: an arduous or unpleasant task that you can only complete because you view it as Your Duty, regardless of personal risk or revulsion

(Above is the artist @/nickelpin)

I've been collecting as many of these customizations as I can find, and I think they fall into a few categories:

The first is the colorful distraction, where it seems like the aim is to make the mask colorful and cheerful — less scary — which distracts from the apocalyptic / gas mask vibes, while still being simple enough for everyday wear.

2. The second is make it fashion, where the aim is to just make something that looks so incredibly cool that you feel beautiful wearing it, and it feels like a stylish accessory. These use lots of shiny elements and swirling patterns (all of the below by @/nickelpin)

3. And the third is punk where the mask customization embraces and enhances its non-conforming / resistance undertones. My favorite in this category is by @/andrewshumate, who installed a CO2 monitor and set it up so the filters change color based on the CO2 levels in the space.

Covid awareness flyers I made!

The image descriptions are in the alt texts!

Reblogs are tremendously appreciated, and please feel free to share them wherever you can! Print them, hang them up in your school, hang them up in your neighborhood, hang them up in public transportation, repost them, etc., etc., etc.!!!

Also me: HUGO THREE TIME AWARD WINNER AND FAMOUS AUTHOR NK JEMISIN?!?

LOL. Well, yeah. I wrote a script last year (before the strike) for "The Fifth Season" film that Sony/Tristar is currently developing, so I'm now qualified to join the WGA. (Haven't done it yet bc of the strike, but I will when I can.) And even if I weren't qualified, writers are writers, and I'm always gonna show solidarity with my fellow creatives when they're fighting The Man.

(ID: A rainy sidewalk. N. K. Jemisin stands in the foreground holding a picket sign that reads WRITERS GUILD ON STRIKE! Handwritten underneath: Book Writers Stand for WGA. Jemisin is wearing shorts and a black shirt that reads "PENCILS THE F*CK DOWN". In the background are several other people carrying picket signs, text blurry.)

Also. ::cough:: It's, uh. Five Hugos. 😅

and also if we can just:

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a responsibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

I may be the actual only human being on Tumblr with a post this popular that I not only don’t regret making, but am actually HAPPY whenever I notice a surge in its circulation. 

I never intended this to gain any traction at all (you’ll notice there’s no sources or anything–this was a personal ramble, prompted in good humor by a friend after I jokingly said that I wished someone would give me an excuse to cry about Carpathia on Tumblr so I could get it out of my system.) I literally expected to get, like, maybe 20 likes and a reblog, from friends, indulging me in my nonsense.

It just….means a lot to me that it’s touched so many people. I see a lot of tags to the effect of “HOW DARE YOU HURT ME LIKE THIS AND MAKE ME CRY ABOUT A BOAT” that are often really funny, but overwhelmingly the tags on this post are from people saving it for a rainy day, or remarking in a sort of quiet awe that they never even really thought about her role in the story–and God knows I never did, I learned it by complete accident much as most of the people who’ve found this post. 

And so many of you guys are taking strength and reassurance from the reminder not only that people are capable of amazing things together, but simply that kindness matters and that a simple, tiny act of compassion is never wasted. I’m just really glad to have been able to do that for some folks.

If I can just add one personal note. I need to emphasize something I only touched on in the original post.

I need to emphasize that Carpathia failed.

A lot of the tags and comments have a tinge of…despair, or guilt, or wistfulness about things like this happening so rarely. Or inadequacy, or just being overwhelmed or unhappy about not being in a position to step up in a comparable way. And I want to gently bring up the fact that this is still the sinking of the Titanic. 

They did not get there in time. They did not save the ship. It can be argued that they may not even have saved a single life; we have no way of knowing. This was still a horrific maritime disaster mired in arrogance and incompetence and a lack of care.

If the response to this story shows anything, it shows this: It matters that they tried. 

Even though they got there too late, even though the ship still sank. It matters that they tried. The difference between making the best reasonable speed after confirming the seriousness of the situation, and the miracle they pulled off–it matters. It makes all the difference. Even if it made no difference at all. Not one of you read this and concluded that I was stupid for caring so much when the Titanic still sank and all those people still died.

You don’t have to fix the world. You’ll likely be cold and sick and miserable and testy and scared, and unprepared, and in over your head, and entirely too small to be of any real use. It feels stupid, passing out blankets and coffee in the middle of an ice field knowing what just happened. It’s hard to feel anything but useless when all you can do is tap a wireless transmitter and promise help that you know will come too late.