Saturday, January 04, 2025

Where Are The....


Seems Musk is mostly a narcissistic drug addict.

Maybe he thinks he's doing his part by impregnating any woman who will put up with him (put up with his billions).

Stuff I've Read or Heard (in some cases, both)

Last month was the lowest Arctic sea ice extent (among Decembers) in the record. [it's an Excel file]

For the year, Arctic SIE ranked at 7th lowest, according to the NOAA data. Antarctica SIE ranked as 2nd lowest, above only last year (but 5.5% above).

Two-thirds of the world’s food comes today from just nine plants: sugar cane, maize (corn), rice, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, oil-palm fruit, sugar beet, and cassava. (Atlas Obscura)

Finland has more saunas than cars. (Between the Benches, YouTube 8:50)

Never knew this: the Mediterranean Sea was dry when the Strait of Gibraltar closed off 6 million years ago due to tectonic activity. It stayed dry for about 500,000 years until the Strait opened back up again.

Today I heard on a podcast that the EU allows 300 additives to its foods, while the US allows 10,000.

On this same podcast the name Nicholas Scarfetta came up, the well-known climate denier (by every means possible). It was about a paper he wrote, I don't know when, showing that, while the income distribution by percentile follows a power law (something like this), it's apparently not true at the lowest percentiles. I think. I haven't found the paper yet. But the economist who mentioned it seemed to think it was good and important work. (It may have been a physics-like paper using a model of people, somehow like Brownian motion or an Ising model, I'm still not sure, but want to look it up.

How cats say Happy New Year:

https://www.facebook.com/reel/2241518019552267

"They haven't started, and we're almost done."