Sylvain Miermont @miermont@qoto.org
- Topics of interest
- electronics, open hardware, communications, energy, climate, mobility
- Location
- Grenoble, France
- Other account
- @miermont@mastodon.social [mostly fr]
Extremely online electronics engineer, PhD in #microelectronics (low-power digital systems architecture), #LoRa pioneer.
Co-founded a #hackerspace, co-founded an industrial #company, interested in #manufacturing (traditional and distributed), frugal innovation, durable and resilient sociotechnical systems.
Joined Oct 2022
Sylvain Miermont
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Okay, so here's my specific bone to pick with brand marketing on social media.
If you're a brand, you're a brand.
If you're a personality, you're a personality.
I don't want to know if Subway is having a bad day -- they're not.
I don't want to know about your fake aspirational lifestyle that doesn't even exist.
Stop being fake. We know who you are.
Sylvain Miermont
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@Meyerweb The scale of the destruction is hard to grasp. Arte did a short video last year. Starting at the 2:18 mark, you can see in the background the #lignite power plants that are burning all this extracted carbon and putting it directly into the atmosphere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7xRkyTwr5A
Sylvain Miermont
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People don't understand how hope works. It doesn't come from downplaying scary truths or from false optimism. Everyone sees through that. Instead, it comes from hard work, from solidarity, from courage. Hope comes from joining together and doing something. Hope comes from action.
Sylvain Miermont
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Frequent flying is a BIG problem in academia! Let’s get our #CommonDestination guide in the hands of scientists who can lead the way in ditching flights! Thanks @JKSteinberger@twitter.com for spreading the word! #ScienceStayGrounded @DoctorAnanas@twitter.com @RenovateEurope@twitter.com @Renovate_CH@twitter.com @SanjaHakala@twitter.com
Have you seen this pair of videos about what is means for an electric grid to collapse and what it takes to bring it back up?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OpC4fH3mEk & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOSnQM1Zu4w
It's not about controlled shedding, the time-limited regional outages that are used to preserve an electric grid balance, but what happens after the balance is lost.
I think it's important that we all understand that:
- large outages are deadly industrial accidents, not just minor inconveniences
- it takes power to create power
- switching back on some generation capacity means also switching back on some consumers, and that's a delicate dance that requires time to ramp things up slowly
- most electrical infrastructure is remotely operated, with a limited backup capacity. Past a certain outage time, people need to be send to physically operate grid controlling devices, while transportation and communication are in a state of chaos, making the restart process exponentially more difficult and slower
- reliable and controllable power sources are key for the restart process, large hydroelectric dams are awesome for that, wind turbines are not
Sylvain Miermont
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Contrary to the western individualist, reductionistic worldview, some problems are easier to solve when you bundle them together than when you tackle them in isolation.
After all the boundaries between sub-systems are in our minds not in the systems themselves.
It's a #WholeSystems thing.
It's a #Multisolving thing.
Sylvain Miermont
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C'était il y a 10 ans : Aaron Swartz se suicide le 11 janvier 2013 à l'âge de 26 ans !
It was 10 years ago: Aaron Swartz committed suicide on January 11, 2013 at the age of 26!
Reddit, Open Library, RSS, Creative Commons, academic papers free of charge, open-access, transparency,...
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
Sylvain Miermont
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Sylvain Miermont
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This bombshell from @jtemple points out so many things that are wrong about Make Sunsets, a startup that claims to have released sulfur particles into the atmosphere for solar geoengineering and is trying to sell “cooling credits” on its website.
Sylvain Miermont
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One tricky thing about the #mastodonmigration: leaving ranking behind. It's convenient to have platforms predict what we want to see. They're good at it! But we're probably better at it.
Still, curating your own TL takes work (which we are not used to)! I'm doing this largely through building out lists, which I wish we could share/follow, as you can on the other app. It would also be great to have a "priority follow" option, too (short of turning on notifications for a profile).
Sylvain Miermont
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I can get as excited as the next person at cutting edge clean technologies. But I also love the simple solutions, the folk wisdom, the public domain knowledge that we can apply to live well and equitably within planetary limits. Here are a few of my favorites - what are yours?
- the bicycle
- the cover crop
- the compost pile
- the hand-me-down chain
- the mending circle
- the live music evening
- the repair cafe
- the library
- the shade tree
- the rain garden
- the sidewalk
Sylvain Miermont
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"The only way to be sustainable is to fly less!
This is a message the aviation industry wants to hide from us using greenwashing."
– @CharlotteBraat@twitter.com from @FVReclame@twitter.com
Sylvain Miermont
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This seems like it could be good. If it checks out it might be worth the heat of my personally vetting and selling Far-UVC fixtures.
RT @chrischirp@twitter.com
New preprint from the UK Far-UV air sterilisation team (inc @CathNoakes@twitter.com & @EwanEadie@twitter.com), successfully simulating removal of airborne pathogens, matching previous experimental data.
Concludes that Far-UV even more effective than thought - this could genuinely be a gamechanger! 1/2
🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1604784154134319104
Sylvain Miermont
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In a world of scientific misinformation that can lead to nationwide vaccine refusal, climate change denial, and any number of other problems, we need to do more than train a subset of the population for scientific careers. We need everyone in the country to be fluent in the sphere of science.
Sylvain Miermont
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But the reason that we should trust science over other forms of knowledge is not because someone follows a particular set of steps in the laboratory. It's because the social institutions of science have proven highly effective at developing (at a bare minimum) empirically adequate theories to the explain the world.
Sylvain Miermont
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What we don't teach is how science functions as a social institution that allows tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals to work together collectively to undercover the workings of the physical universe. Everything we teach about the process of science involves that which one can do alone at night in an empty laboratory.
Sylvain Miermont
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To dispell disinformation about science, we need to teach people why science is trustworthy. Right now, I think we're failing to do that in the K-12 classroom and even at the college level. We teach the settled facts of science: how does photosynthesis work, what is special relativity, what explains the often exquisite fit of organisms to their environments.
Sylvain Miermont
boosted
In addition to all of these, I think that there reasons specific to science why people struggle to see through lies like these. I believe that misinformation and disinformation about science spreads because our current system of science education is inadequate. Last year I joined a Moore Foundation working group charged with identifying the ways in which science education needs to change to adapt to our current misinformation environment.
Sylvain Miermont
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Switzerland (finally) gets a nice energy dashboard.
Late, but thankfully very nice bonus points for including lake levels for hydropower, gas import/export flows, savings target, EU gas storage levels …
Sylvain Miermont
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"12 ways to reduce cars in cities" ranked by effectiveness.
Really interesting combination of carrots and sticks, with the sticks having higher overall effectiveness. Most likely, need to use both in combination. HT @BrentToderian , @giulio_mattioli FYI https://theconversation.com/12-best-ways-to-get-cars-out-of-cities-ranked-by-new-research-180642
- Topics of interest
- electronics, open hardware, communications, energy, climate, mobility
- Location
- Grenoble, France
- Other account
- @miermont@mastodon.social [mostly fr]
Extremely online electronics engineer, PhD in #microelectronics (low-power digital systems architecture), #LoRa pioneer.
Co-founded a #hackerspace, co-founded an industrial #company, interested in #manufacturing (traditional and distributed), frugal innovation, durable and resilient sociotechnical systems.
Joined Oct 2022
