It is commonly held that if floating ice melts, then it makes no difference to sea levels.

This is true only of free-floating ice.

When a sheet of ice is attached to  land, basic principles of mechanics show that the weight is partially supported by that land.  A sheet of ice attached to land is a semi-cantilever. 
A cantilever is a beam supported at one end only.

Note:
The ideas developed here were prompted by my reading a recent blog.
Thank you Becky Jungbauer.


What you are reading is a mix of whimsy, ethics and philosophy applied to a problem in politics.  It does not offer a solution to any specific problem. It may direct the attention away from what is unimportant in current debates about evolution.
One can only live in hope.


An Essay Concerning Wings

What is Pragmatics?

This is a very brief introduction to pragmatics, intended to whet your appetite and encourage you to want to know more.

Pragmatic investigations cover the fields of both linguistics and philosophy.
I shall cover the area of linguistics, the study of how language works, first.

Pragmatics and How Language is Used.

In language studies, pragmatics is a very wide field. It examines our use and our understanding of the language we speak and hear, read and write. Pragmatics examines the importance in language studies of our general knowledge, and the importance of common-sense knowledge of our world.

A Theory of Time - Part One

The problem of time is recognised as
a problem in physics.

What is Time?

What is Time ?

" ... none of the parts of time has an abiding
existence, and that which does not abide can hardly have position.   It
would be better to say that such parts had a relative order, in virtue
of one being prior to another."

Aristotle, in Categories.

I am in process of writing a blog on this.   The purpose of the current  'Random Noise' blog is to discuss ideas about the nature of time.  My own theory of time embraces these notions:

In the former USSR there was a popular joke:

When two people sit down to conspire, one of them is a KGB agent and the other is a fool.

Behind many conspiracy and denial theories is a common flaw, which I shall attempt to show using the experimental method.

An experiment to prove that humans have landed on the moon.

You will need:
A finger.
At least one eyeball, preferably your own.
At least one brain.
Optional:
An office-type swivel chair.
and / or
A railway train or a road vehicle.

Method: