zalia

[zalia]

"With “green corridors” that mimic the natural forest, the Colombian city is driving down temperatures — and could become five degrees cooler over the next few decades.

In the face of a rapidly heating planet, the City of Eternal Spring — nicknamed so thanks to its year-round temperate climate — has found a way to keep its cool.

Previously, Medellín had undergone years of rapid urban expansion, which led to a severe urban heat island effect — raising temperatures in the city to significantly higher than in the surrounding suburban and rural areas. Roads and other concrete infrastructure absorb and maintain the sun’s heat for much longer than green infrastructure.

“Medellín grew at the expense of green spaces and vegetation,” says Pilar Vargas, a forest engineer working for City Hall. “We built and built and built. There wasn’t a lot of thought about the impact on the climate. It became obvious that had to change.”

Efforts began in 2016 under Medellín’s then mayor, Federico Gutiérrez (who, after completing one term in 2019, was re-elected at the end of 2023). The city launched a new approach to its urban development — one that focused on people and plants.

The $16.3 million initiative led to the creation of 30 Green Corridors along the city’s roads and waterways, improving or producing more than 70 hectares of green space, which includes 20 kilometers of shaded routes with cycle lanes and pedestrian paths.

These plant and tree-filled spaces — which connect all sorts of green areas such as the curb strips, squares, parks, vertical gardens, sidewalks, and even some of the seven hills that surround the city — produce fresh, cooling air in the face of urban heat. The corridors are also designed to mimic a natural forest with levels of low, medium and high plants, including native and tropical plants, bamboo grasses and palm trees.

Heat-trapping infrastructure like metro stations and bridges has also been greened as part of the project and government buildings have been adorned with green roofs and vertical gardens to beat the heat. The first of those was installed at Medellín’s City Hall, where nearly 100,000 plants and 12 species span the 1,810 square meter surface.

“It’s like urban acupuncture,” says Paula Zapata, advisor for Medellín at C40 Cities, a global network of about 100 of the world’s leading mayors. “The city is making these small interventions that together act to make a big impact.”

At the launch of the project, 120,000 individual plants and 12,500 trees were added to roads and parks across the city. By 2021, the figure had reached 2.5 million plants and 880,000 trees. Each has been carefully chosen to maximize their impact.

“The technical team thought a lot about the species used. They selected endemic ones that have a functional use,” explains Zapata.

The 72 species of plants and trees selected provide food for wildlife, help biodiversity to spread and fight air pollution. A study, for example, identified Mangifera indica as the best among six plant species found in Medellín at absorbing PM2.5 pollution — particulate matter that can cause asthma, bronchitis and heart disease — and surviving in polluted areas due to its “biochemical and biological mechanisms.”

And the urban planting continues to this day.

The groundwork is carried out by 150 citizen-gardeners like Pineda, who come from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds, with the support of 15 specialized forest engineers. Pineda is now the leader of a team of seven other gardeners who attend to corridors all across the city, shifting depending on the current priorities...

“I’m completely in favor of the corridors,” says [Victoria Perez, another citizen-gardener], who grew up in a poor suburb in the city of 2.5 million people. “It really improves the quality of life here.”

Wilmar Jesus, a 48-year-old Afro-Colombian farmer on his first day of the job, is pleased about the project’s possibilities for his own future. “I want to learn more and become better,” he says. “This gives me the opportunity to advance myself.”

The project’s wider impacts are like a breath of fresh air. Medellín’s temperatures fell by 2°C in the first three years of the program, and officials expect a further decrease of 4 to 5C over the next few decades, even taking into account climate change. In turn, City Hall says this will minimize the need for energy-intensive air conditioning...

In addition, the project has had a significant impact on air pollution. Between 2016 and 2019, the level of PM2.5 fell significantly, and in turn the city’s morbidity rate from acute respiratory infections decreased from 159.8 to 95.3 per 1,000 people [Note: That means the city's rate of people getting sick with lung/throat/respiratory infections.]

There’s also been a 34.6 percent rise in cycling in the city, likely due to the new bike paths built for the project, and biodiversity studies show that wildlife is coming back — one sample of five Green Corridors identified 30 different species of butterfly.

Other cities are already taking note. Bogotá and Barranquilla have adopted similar plans, among other Colombian cities, and last year São Paulo, Brazil, the largest city in South America, began expanding its corridors after launching them in 2022.

“For sure, Green Corridors could work in many other places,” says Zapata."

-via Reasons to Be Cheerful, March 4, 2024

[zalia]

Oh to be a Ghost cooling down among a pile of ice cream sandwiches... 💙🩷🤍

& Glint wanted buddies 🥹

(I wanted chicken LOL)

[zalia]

Rainbow cooling bowl 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

[zalia]

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

[zalia]

Yarn recently finished. BFL and silk spun worsted and then plied as a two ply.

[zalia]

Finally finished the poem last night!

Silk embroidery on cotton muslin

Original poem by @roxygobyebye

[zalia]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Destiny (Video Games) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: The Drifter & Saint-14 (Destiny), Minor or Background Relationship(s) Characters: Saint-14 (Destiny), The Drifter (Destiny) Additional Tags: Game: Destiny 2: Season of the Deep, Drinking, Alcohol, Developing Friendships, Teasing, Titan philosophy, Dredgen Yor - Freeform, Memories, Past Relationship(s), The Darkness (Destiny), Light Angst, Nightmares, Hive (Destiny), The Last City (Destiny), Hope, Hope vs. Despair, Regret Summary:

Drifter has met a lot of people in his time, but none of them have been as earnestly sincere as Saint-14.

A Dredgen and a Saint share a drink.

[zalia]

It's another "so hot you could fry burgers on an exo" day yippee

[zalia]

[zalia]

Iranian photographer Hossein Fatemi, offers a glimpse of an entirely different side to Iran than the image usually broadcasted by domestic and foreign media. In his photo series An Iranian Journey, many of the photographs reveal an Iran that most people never see, presenting an eye-opening look at the amazing diversity and contrasts that exist in the country.

[zalia]

i love adhd. i have a lot to do at work today. i take my meds. i open the word document. i immediately misspell “benzodiazepines.” i go on tumblr to post “benzodiazepenis….” for the mutualés. and then it’s 45 minutes later and ive caught up on tumblr and checked the weather and read a fic and texted an ex and ordered new pens and looked up a recipe for chicken pot pie and posted about adhd and done zero work.

[zalia]

Then there's the animals from the Deptford Mice/Deptford Histories books, which neither know nor care about the monarchy because they're too busy fighting eldritch gods or ritually sacrificing other animals to those eldritch gods...

I don't know what paddington is doing on that list, but it made me think of the time someone drew a picture of the queen with paddington after she died, and we had scores of people losing their minds at the idea that paddington bear wasn't the same kind of communist as them

[zalia]

comments are turned off on this and i know it was a bloodbath in there

[zalia]

The CloudArk's Relation to the Vex Network

"You're in the VexNet's quantum entangled pointer directory."

"Any damage done to a pointer will be reflected on the data it's entangled with. CloudArk data, I presume?"

There's a common misconception in sci-fi that if you have two entangled particles, and you destroy one, the other particle instantly ceases to exist also. I'm sure that when most of the audience heard this dialogue, if they noticed it at all, that was where their mind went. That's not how quantum entanglement works. It isn't a medium by which to transfer physical characteristics. It's a state in which characteristics are inherently correlated. When no outside influence forces a particle to do something, it exists in a quantum state, called a superposition. It's both a particle and a wave. It's spinning in every direction and none at all. It's an undefined variable. It exists like that until an outside influence - such as a scientist taking a measurement - acts on it, which forces it out of that superposition and into a single, determined position, doing that one job. Let's say we measure an electron, forcing it out of that quantum state, and find that it's spinning down. That electron has another electron entangled to it. Across any distance, when that second electron is measured using the same frame of reference, forcing it out of that superposition, we will find that it, too, is spinning down. The information about the states of those two electrons is entangled. Now, let's say we "destroy" the first electron. We introduce a positron; the positron and the electron annihilate and become two photons. The quantum entanglement has been transferred. That second electron is now entangled with the photons. Then the photons are absorbed. The electron is now entangled with the system that absorbed the photons. Entanglement is transferred. We can no longer measure one electron and see the same result on the other, but that information hasn't been destroyed. Quantum information is never destroyed. It's been spread through systems and dispersed to a point where it can no longer be measured. We call that "lost to decoherence." Side note: This is what becomes of people who are infected and taken over by the Vex. Their consciousness is lost to decoherence in the Vex network. It isn't destroyed- but it's no longer confined to a body or other focal point that others can meaningfully interact with. So, what does this statement actually mean? Any damage done to a pointer will be reflected on the data it's entangled with...? First, we have to understand what a pointer is. A pointer, in computer programming, is a variable that stores the location of another variable. It tells the computer where to look to retrieve some information that it needs to do its task. The dialogue suggests that the CloudArk keeps vital information - such as the separations between its citizens' consciousnesses, and the structures of its virtual world - in order by using entangled particles in the Vex network as pointers. If those entangled particles are then disentangled from each other, and the information being used as pointers is lost to decoherence, the CloudArk data that is organized by those pointers would be unusable, like a corrupted hard drive.

What I find interesting about this whole thing is, the CloudArk isn't just reverse-engineered from the Vex network... They are using the Vex network as a resource with which to do the data compilations necessary to run the CloudArk. We also have this little dialogue clip: https://youtu.be/uy9q373FqG8

"The Vex network uses cascading quantum entanglement..." (data is added to it via the interactions of elementary particles) "...and the CloudArk is a psychoreactive Nth dimension." (it expands infinitely in response to the consciousnesses/information added to it) The Vex deal with particle interactions... The CloudArk deals with information. Those two things are linked.

[zalia]

I am a WHORE for “the love is requited, they’re both just idiots”

[zalia]

so osiris was known for his reflections right. and he presumably can’t make them anymore because they were of his light right. and threadrunner hunters can make clones of themselves with threaded specter right. well all of this to say i believe in osiris Strand Man