Can You Really Pump Water Without Any Electricity? | Why You Maybe Shouldn’t Write a Memoir | The West Should Give Up the Battle of Narratives | A centre-right maverick, Pieter Omtzigt, could win the Dutch election

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Can You Really Pump Water Without Any Electricity? - WIRED

I'm surprised at the number of YouTube and TikTok videos showing novel ways to pump water, but I guess it makes sense, because the whole world pretty much runs on water. If you haven’t seen these before, they often show someone sticking some pipes into water and shaking them back and forth until all of a sudden they start spouting endless quantities of liquid. It looks magical: There's no apparent power source, but the water keeps flowing, sometimes from an outdoor body of water, sometimes from a container the person keeps refilling. It’s like these devices run on “free energy,” or energy with no apparent origin.

Physics spoiler alert: There are actually two methods to move water that don't require an external power source—but that’s not the same thing as running on free energy.

The first method is the siphon pump. This one is pretty common and very easy to set up. Here's what you need for a simple demonstration: a glass of drinkable water and a bendy straw. Fill the glass almost to the top. Now bend the straw and put the short end into the glass with the longer part hanging over the rim. Here's how that should look:

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Why You Maybe Shouldn’t Write a Memoir - The Atlantic

Have you ever thought of writing an autobiography? Lots of noncelebrity people are doing that these days: Memoirs are more common, as we become more comfortable sharing intimate details of our personal lives with strangers. But before you start yours, consider this: What you think is riveting about your life might not seem so to others. As one publisher put it, too many submissions are “just the writer’s own story, which is ultimately boring.”

And now that you’re reconsidering your memoir project, you might even think about taking it a step further, and talk less about yourself in general. We like to talk about ourselves because, quite simply, for us it feels good. But like many superficially soothing habits, it comes at a cost to our social lives and overall well-being. With a few nudges, however, this can be quite easily corrected.

Roughly 30 to 40 percent of our speech is self-referential, according to a small study of university students. As for social-media use, results from an analysis of posts on one platform suggest that about 80 percent of us post about ourselves. Cat videos and complaints about airlines aside, social-media platforms are basically autobiographical microblogs.

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The West Should Give Up the Battle of Narratives - Foreign Policy

Argument: The West Should Give Up the Battle of Narratives

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Live your true life, all the self-help books tell us. Embrace who you are, own your faults, become better by turning them into strengths. It’s cheap pop psychology, but it might be liberating for repressed individuals and, we would argue, for Western civilization. It is time for the West to finally own its truth and set itself free.

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A centre-right maverick, Pieter Omtzigt, could win the Dutch election - The Economist

PIETER OMTZIGT is the most popular politician in the Netherlands, the EU’s fifth-biggest economy, in part because in 2021 the country’s leaders apparently tried to ditch him. Mr Omtzigt, an MP who then belonged to the Christian Democrats (CDA), had for years irritated the government (of which the CDA was a member) with relentless questioning over a huge benefits scandal in which tens of thousands of taxpayers were falsely charged with fraud. During coalition negotiations after the general election that year, an official was caught on camera with a sheet of notes bearing the phrase “Omtzigt: position elsewhere?” Many Dutch were outraged, reckoning that this meant that party bigwigs wanted to promote the troublesome gadfly to a harmless sinecure in Brussels.

Instead Mr Omtzigt stayed in parliament, quit the CDA and burnished his reputation as a maverick. Now, with an early general election due on November 22nd, he is the man to beat. In July, the prime minister, Mark Rutte, of the centre-right VVD party, stepped down over environmental and immigration scandals, and announced he would not run again. Mr Omtzigt quickly launched a centrist party, the New Social Contract (NSC), which shot to the top of opinion polls. It is currently at 17%, roughly tied with the VVD and a few points ahead of the combined Labour (PvdA) and GreenLeft (GL) parties, which are running together. In the Netherlands’ splintered field, with an astonishing 26 parties competing, the NSC is likely to be the kingmaker in any coalition.

The Dutch are in a rebellious mood; a Low Countries version of a wider disenchantment with established political parties visible across Europe. The cheerful Mr Rutte has led the country for 13 years. He owes his longevity to a remarkable knack for dodging blame for his administration’s scandals and mistakes, which have gradually eroded voters’ faith in government. In a survey in September by Ipsos, a pollster, just 33% of the public said they had confidence in politics, and a whopping 72% thought the country was heading in the wrong direction. Many described the government as dithering and bureaucratic, incapable of resolving insistent problems such as the benefits scandal, a housing shortage, rising numbers of migrants and a farmers’ revolt over restrictions on nitrogen emissions.

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