Magazine Posts

According to the Department of Labor, the first Labor Day celebration in the US took place in New York City on September 5, 1882. On that day, between10,000 to 20,000 workers marched across lower Manhattan.(image below)
Before it was a federal holiday, Labor Day was recognized by labor activists and individual states. By 1894, 32 States had adopted the holiday, and on June 28, 1894, Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September of each year a legal holiday. Read more

"The first thing to remember is that the great philosophers were only human. Then you can start disagreeing with them."...... Keeping in mind that "each giant of philosophy was a human being trying to figure out life by doing just what you do: reading, thinking, observing, writing"....  Read more

"More than 450 people are dying of COVID-19 in the U.S. each day as of late August 2022......  "When COVID-19 vaccines first became available, public officials, community organizations and policymakers mobilized to get shots into arms. including significant investments in making vaccines accessible to Black, Hispanic, American Indian and Alaska Native populations.... ....... But boosters are a different story"....... Read more

"Data from last year’s survey at this point seems to confirm that there was a massive decline in the number of young snow crab in the Eastern Bering Sea — something like 99% fewer female snow crab showed up in the survey from 2021" .... Read more

It was a nice surprise this weekend to be able to see the strange formation of these Starlink Satellites over Island County. Apparently it was the new Starlink (4-27) which launched 53 new satellites for the Starlink network on August 19, 2022

Photo taken from Camano Island.

 "Beneath Cappadocia's crumbling surface, a marvel of equally gargantuan proportions lay hidden away for centuries; a subterranean city that could conceal the whereabouts of up to 20,000 inhabitants for months at a time"   Read more

Photo credit: Halil Sayim 

"The Nonprofit, RIP Medical Debt was launched in 2014. They started raising money from donors to buy up debt on secondary markets — where hospitals sell debt for pennies on the dollar to companies that profit when they collect on that debt....... To date, RIP has purchased $6.7 billion in unpaid debt and relieved 3.6 million people of debt. The group says retiring $100 in debt costs an average of $1.... Read the full NPR article

The 53 acre Bellevue Botanical Garden was established in 1992 and It is located east of downtown Bellevue on Main Street. It consists of several smaller gardens - each of them with its own character and focus. Read more

"Since the Paris agreement, the six largest US banks – Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs – have provided $1.4tn in financing to the fossil fuel industry" Read full article

"Earth warming has not been uniform, with some regions warming at a far greater pace. One such region is the Arctic..... which has warmed nearly four times faster than the rest of the world over the past 43 years. This means the Arctic is on average around 3℃ warmer than it was in 1980....... This is alarming, because the Arctic contains sensitive and delicately balanced climate components that, if pushed too hard, will respond with global consequences" ... Read more

Few artists have articulated the dance between this “divine discontent” and creative fulfillment more memorably than the poet, novelist, essayist, and diarist May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995). In her Journal of a Solitude (public library), Sarton records and reflects on her interior life in the course of one year, her sixtieth, with remarkable candor and courage. Out of these twelve private months arises the eternity of the human experience with its varied universal capacities for astonishment and sorrow, hollowing despair and creative vitality.

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"A vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) design created at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has wound up in the hands of a Chinese company, which has since gone on to become the largest manufacturer of VRFBs in the world" The US, which owns the patent and invested $15 million of taxpayer dollars into its development, reportedly has no domestic production site for the novel VRFBs" ..... Read more at The Register