Month: July 2019

Enlarge (credit: US BLM)

Carbon sequestration is generally thought of as locking carbon out of the atmosphere semi-permanently by incorporating it into rocks or forests that are then preserved. But there's a large cache of carbon in a form that's not especially permanent: the wood we use in our buildings and other structures. Some of that lumber has been in place for hundreds of years, while other bits of wood are used temporarily and then burnt or left to decay, which rapidly releases their sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere.

So it shouldn't surprise you that figuring out how much carbon ends up sequestered through our use of wood products is not a simple task. Undaunted, Craig Johnston and Volker Radeloff of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, have decided to tackle it. By viewing that carbon as a pool that's being drained and filled at the same time, they find that the total sequestered carbon is tiny—and subject to rapid changes based on political and economic factors.

Into the woods

The secret to tracking this pile of carbon is to recognize that we're never going to have a full inventory of lumber that was put in place a century or more ago. But that lumber is going to be an ever-shrinking portion of the material that was put in place more recently. Thus, if we can track the production of lumber (and other wood products) over the decades for which we have good data (1960 and beyond), then we have a decent sense of the total inputs to this sequestered carbon.

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  Inside this concrete slab hides the biggest collection of the rarest pinball and electromechanical games ever made. [credit: Sam Machkovech ]

Pinball is dying, if it's still alive at all. The major manufacturers have moved from creating pinball machines to slot machines for casinos, a business with a much rosier future. With even larger arcades only sporting one or two pinball machines, most likely emblazoned with licensed artwork from a popular movie or TV show, enthusiasts of the game are forced to look backward for their joy, not forward.

"Pinball has seen a steady decline since the 90s. Chicago used to have many manufacturers that cranked out thousands of games each year. In the 80s and 90s, video games became popular and pinball sales suffered," Karl Marsicek explained to Ars. He knows a little bit about the lost art of pinball: his basement houses a collection of machines he has bought and restored. "There is only one manufacturer left, Stern Pinball. They put out about 4 or 5 new titles each year, just a fraction of what manufacturers were cranking out in Pinball’s glory days."

As a hobby, collecting and restoring pinball machines is tough. The machines are loud, large, heavy, and expensive. The problem is, if you can't play a game at your local arcade, the only place left is your own basement. "The many machines that were produced in the '80s and '90s have reached the end of their life cycle and are disappearing from bars and pizza joints," Marsicek said. "Strip mall arcades are just about extinct because of computer games and gaming consoles. So pinball machines are getting hard to find."