Saturday, January 04, 2025

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."

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