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Sunday, March 31, 2019

News Factoids for First Quarter 2019

CLIMATE NEWS

The oceans have been setting high-temperature records for several years now, according to a study published in the journal "Science" in January 2019. And what's more, they're getting about 40 percent warmer than a United Nations panel estimated back in 2014. Earth's oceans absorb up to 93 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases — and as they get warmer, adverse effects such as loss of marine life, vanishing ecosystems, and worsening storms are bound to ramp up.

Antarctica is melting 6 times faster today than it was in the 1970s.

Antarctica is losing its icy covering at an unprecedented pace, according to a study published jan 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Antarctica's glaciers may have melted at a rate of 40 billion tons per year in the 1980s, but that total increased more than six-fold from 2009 to 2019. In the National Academy's most recent measurement, Antarctica's ice sheet lost 250 billion tons of ice every year. It takes 360 billion tons of melting ice to produce a millimeter of sea level rise, so sea levels have gone up by nearly 7 millimeters due to Antarctica's melt alone. At the world's current carbon emissions rate, global sea levels could rise 3 feet by 2100.

The jet stream is moving so fast right now that commercial planes are traveling faster than the speed of sound.

OTHER NEWS

"President Trump made 8,158 false or misleading claims in his first two years."
— per Washington Post in 21 January 2019

Report: Americans got 26.3 billion robocalls last year, up 46 percent from 2017.

Donald Trump version of the 'I'm with stupid' T-shirt has the arrow pointing UP !

Cong. Adam Schiff's wonderful 'smackdown' speech of 28 March 2019
watch speech from C-SPAN [5:13] on YouTube

Copyright 2019 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

Friday, March 15, 2019

HEY, GOOGLE:

Nice of you to announce the algorithm changes that make it more difficult for small websites to appear in search results, but you are damaging any chance of a 'free market' of ideas or products. Google is a monopoly helping other monopolies.

HERE'S AN IDEA: Plan a day of bottom-ranked results each year or quarter or month that gives startup entrepreneurs and struggling vendors a leg up. This could be to celebrate something or somebody, such as a U.S. President who was elected by Congress after placing third in the national election.

SECOND IDEA: You could set this up as an option on the basic search box page, i.e.'bottom-ranked results'.

THIRD IDEA: Some internet entrepreneur could build a search engine that reverses the algorithm and displays the least popular results first, for people who are tired of seeing the same sites on every search (Facebook, Fox, HuffPost, CNN, Amazon, Twitter).

Google's motto "Don't be evil" was replaced in 2015 by "Do the right thing", but your algorithm practices have violated that fake ethos for a long time.

~~~ G.E. Nordell at www.genordell.com

Copyright 2019 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved