Snortblog

According to an article from the Independent, Lohachara, a formerly inhabited islet on the Sundarban delta in the Sundarban National Park in West Bengal, India, was wiped off the map due to climate change.

Scientists discovered that a 41-square mile ice shelf in Canada has broken off and fallen into the sea in a collapse violent enough to have been detected 150 miles away.

In what seems like another dramatic reversal of course, the Bush administration’s appointee at the Interior Department proposed listing polar bears as a threatened species in response to a lawsuit filed by three environmental groups. From scanning the headlines, it looks like the Bush administration was doing a good thing, but it looks to me like a shrewd public relations maneuver that won’t necessarily result in any immediate federal action. It’s playing off pretty well in the press, some reports make it look like the polar bear has already been listed.

Hopefully, if polar bears do get listed, corporate welfare federal funds won’t be provided to help fund Perry’s bid to mess with Texas by rushing 17 new coal plants into production within 4 years. There’s plenty yet to be done to stop the coal plants.

It’s winter solstice, the shortest, darkest day of the year. It might get colder yet this winter in the northern hemisphere, but it will only get brighter.

Show #202 of WNYC’s show, Radiolab, really messed with my head. The “Behaves So Strangely” segment, in the first 6 minutes of the show, lets you hear as ordinary speech is transformed to music in your mind. The whole show covers the blurry distinctions between language and music.

The Union of Concerned Scientists is an organization that promotes sensible solutions to social programs, pursuing science in the public interest. In an A to Z Guide to Political Interference in Science, they’ve organized a number of examples of how policy makers have distorted scientific findings into a Periodic Table of Scientific Abuses. As part of their going-it-alone strategy on forging a new reality, the White House has had a heavy hand in modifying the findings of key scientific studies, including rewrites on an EPA study on the state of the environment as reported in the New York Times.

Bruce Sterling notes, in his last column for Wired, “The Internet…crawled out of a dank atomic fallout shelter to become the Mardi Gras parade of my generation”.