Ice Cap Melting, Plastic Patch Growing

A Swiftly Melting Planet

You know those articles that you vaguely recall reading since the third grade about global warming with graphs of predicted temperature, carbon dioxide levels, sea levels rising, and arctic ice melting... usually with three models- the less bad and seemingly likely scenario, a worse scenario, and the extremely bad hypothetical worst case scenario that nobody thinks will actually happen, and even then not something that would become apparent until maybe around the year 2100.

Apparently, the arctic ice has already melted way beyond that worst case scenario that was never going to happen. That's a very large predictive error and it's only 2007. Scientists are scrambling to revise their models. The negative feedback loop was probably extremely underestimated.

Come See Our Giant Toxic Stew! 1,500 miles wide, floating in the Pacific, made of all your plastic crap. Bring the kids!

Mark Morford seems to have done a good job of publicizing this unknown phenomenon.

Some pictures.


Some unrelated articles I'm bookmarking here:

What Google, Whole Foods Do Best

An interesting look at new management practices, and some discussion about how what we know as corporate management today was developed during the industrial era and haven't changed much since. Interesting approaches such as workers deciding who gets to be a leader, a flattened hierarchy due to having managers have fifty people reporting to them (Of course Google engineering would implement its management hierarchy like a B-tree, maximizing the number of child nodes for efficiency.), and workers deciding what to do with their time. Kind of like a spontaneously self-running amoeba of an organization for the Internet era.

Stay Globally Competitive

This article suggests that creativity can be taught and developed in the right environment.