I was relaxing out back, watching fireflies flash, when a buddy, dad to boy and girl 11 year old twins, called to catch up with news and relate a funny (still unfinished) story.

Growing crankier by the weekend with trespassers holding court on the porch steps and sneaking around bushes on the property (to pee or worse) after bar-closing-time, he and the kids opted to make fun of this annoyance and concocted a silly yet safe deterrence plan.

Jakobshavn Glacier Second Calving ?

The calving front of Jakobshavn glacier has retreated dramatically since about 1850, to the point that the two main outflow ice streams can be seen as separate calving fronts, Jakobshavn North and South.

Jakobshavn North recently calved a large floe which was widely reported by Arctic watchers and then picked up by the news media - and hyped up. 

For a non-hyped report I recommend http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/.../jakobshavn...

Humans are very, very bad at being random. In roshambo, aka rock, paper, scissors, this leads to probabilities and patterns which you can exploit to give your RPS opponent(s) severe and repeated thumpings. There are two ways to go about this: knowing the psychology and creating new psychology.

Benguela-goby, or bearded goby, is a fish species that has adapted to a hostile environment poisonous to most other organisms.  

This little goby-fish (Sufflogobius bibarbatus) reaches a maximum length of 13 cm and is only found in the Benguela ecosystem, the anoxic continental shelf outside Namibia and South-Africa,  and one of the world’s most productive fisheries areas.   Since the collapse of the sardine fisheries, this goby has become the new predominant prey species for larger fish, birds and mammals in the region.

Arctic Ice July 2010 - Update #3

An update and a bit of Arctic history.

Despite the extensive cloud cover over much of the Arctic it is possible to see some interesting patterns of behavior.

Around the Siberian side of the Arctic the ice has already retreated from shore or is in process of retreating.  The same goes for the Alaskan and Canadian shores as far as Prince Patrick Island.  Ice in the fjords and passages from the Beaufort Sea to Nares Strait is melting.