Arctic Ice July - Update #5

The sharp decline in ice extent slowed somewhat during July.  Some people are claiming this as a sign of recovery.

If you are going downhill at full throttle and you take your foot off the gas you will slow down.  A bit.  But if the brakes aren't working you are in for an exciting time.

Loss of ice extent has slowed down.  A bit.  In plain language: loss of ice continues to be a lot more rapid than has been considered normal historically.

Almost the entirety of the main Arctic Ocean ice cover shows substantial amounts of open water.  The ice is freely mobile in most areas.  Both the North West Passage and the Northern Sea Route, aka North East Passage seem to be easily navigable by icebreakers.

Plastiki  is made out of – you guessed it – plastic. Plastiki, the plastic bottle version of Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki  , was carried from San Francisco to Sydney on a conveyor belt...._{and wind}

I remember when water bottles were introduced on the Norwegian market. It was the most stupid idea I had ever heard of and could not imagine how anybody would be willing to loose their money on this bound to fail business project. Obviously I was wrong. Even in a clean country like Norway where fresh water is abundant everywhere there was a market for bottled water. Go figure.

The concept of "primitive" is one that is very often misunderstood.

Properly defined, "primitive" means "more like a particular ancestor", refers only to individual characteristics (not whole species or lineages), and is contrasted with "derived" (not "advanced" or "more evolved").

I have covered this and other misunderstandings of evolutionary concepts in various articles and I try to clarify these in my courses. But the intuitive interpretation in which one species is deemed more primitive than another is very hard to shake, including in the scientific literature.

An example:

As I have explained in various blog posts and in this paper, it is a fallacy to assume that any one character found in a so-called "primitive" species alive today was also found in the ancestral species. All living species are modern species, and "primitive" vs. "derived" refers to characters, not whole species.

Anyway, New Scientist seems to have fallen for this in their interpretation of a recent paper.

Bellyflopping frogs shed light on evolution

John Mattick, University of Queensland, is one of the leading proponents of the idea that much -- perhaps most -- of the human genome is functional. He has been making claims along these lines for at least 15 years, but seems to always present it as a new idea. Readers of this blog may also remember the Dog's Ass Plot included in one of his publications. 

Recently Elizabeth Cunningham Perkins brought us a Weedy Rumination on the Creeping Bellflower, Campanula rapunculoides. I will now tell you about a wildflower growing in my own garden, which is full of memories.

There have been a lot of good articles lately in the dealing with the Underground Railroad. Recently, Timbuctoo was recovered in New Jersey by Temple U. and is currently under extensive survey. It’s a great find because of what Timbuctoo was, and what it came to be. As more is released about Timbuctoo the more we’ll learn about early free black communities.

The parallel sessions at the international conference on High-Energy Physics in Paris are over, and it is time for a summary of results. Of course if you are following the conference you will get it from the summary talks, but if you prefer some armchair, remote attendance of the conference, I have collected for you a few meaningful plots.

Here I wish to assemble some of the electroweak physics results produced by CMS in time for ICHEP. The CMS experiment has shown results that use up to 280 inverse nanobarns of proton-proton collisions, but for electroweak measurements -those involving W and Z signals, to be clear- the statistics used is up to 200 inverse nanobarns of well-understood data.

How To Win Any Argument (Part 1) and (Part 2)

Here's how I roll: my wife loves three-dollar bagels from

Go here for Part 1

Here's how I roll: my wife loves three-dollar bagels from the Sunday farmers' market. And so she says, "let's get a loaf of bread, some flowers, and a flat of strawberries!"

When we roll home with only bagels, I feel I've won. No more. I've armed myself with the tools of illogic, thus guaranteeing I win every marital argument from this point forward.

You can too.

Use the following brain-deflating fallacies to ensure dominance in debate club and/or with unsuspecting significant other.