Ice Age

On this day

1619
René Descartes has the dreams that inspire his Meditations on First Philosophy.
1793
A Goddess of Reason is proclaimed by the French Convention at the suggestion of Chaumette.
1871
Henry Morton Stanley locates missing explorer and missionary, Dr. David Livingstone in Ujiji, near Lake Tanganyika, famously greeting him with the words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”.
1975
The 729-foot-long freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald sinks during a storm on Lake Superior, killing all 29 crew on board.
1979
A 106-car Canadian Pacific freight train carrying explosive and poisonous chemicals from Windsor, Ontario, Canada derails in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada just west of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, causing a massive explosion and the largest peacetime evacuation in Canadian history and one of the largest in North American history.

***

An economy exists to make trade-offs, and a market economy makes the terms of those trade-offs plain with price tags representing the relative costs of producing different things. To have politicians arbitrarily change the price tags, so that prices no longer represent the real costs, is to defeat the whole purpose.--sowell

***

With surrogacy illegal in China, an industry of agencies, consultants and fertility clinics has emerged to connect clients with women overseas willing to carry their children. While there is no data on the number of children born to Chinese parents via surrogacy, a recent study showed nearly a third of intended parents for surrogate babies in the US were international and some 40 per cent of those were from China.

Early demand largely came from couples struggling with fertility. But there was growing interest from younger women physically capable of becoming pregnant but reluctant to accept its impact on their bodies and careers, said consultants, clients and doctors interviewed by the FT…

Other destinations include Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, where packages can cost as little as $63,000.

***

We have the Bill of Rights to protect freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the free exercise of religion, etc., not because we expect that majorities will reliably support and protect these rights but because we expect that majorities will be hostile to them.--somewhere

***

Last year, the US exported $171bn of agricultural goods according to the Department of Agriculture, just $2bn more than the export total claimed by Brazil, which many analysts say has benefited from trade disruption set in train by President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

With US exports falling and Brazil’s rising — they increased 6 per cent in the first half of this year to hit a new record of $87bn — 2026 could prove the year in which America loses its agricultural ascendancy.--FT

***

The Apollo-class asteroid 1998 KY26 is about 11 meters in diameter. Its orbit crosses Earth’s, and astronomers detected an unusual acceleration in its motion in 2023. Acceleration?

***

Calley Means, a former top aide to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., alleged in a Sunday interview with CBS News' "Face the Nation" that Ballard Partners "controlled" White House policy. Mr. Trump's former chief of staff, Susie Wiles, worked at the firm for nearly a decade as a managing partner, leaving in 2019.
Means claimed Ballard Partners' rise to become the top-earning lobbying firm "did not happen by accident." He accused Wiles and other top advisers to Mr. Trump of catering to industries that funded Republicans ahead of the midterms. Ballard and Wiles both called the claims false.
Ballard Partners' more than $88 million in lobbying revenue last year was, at the time, the most any firm had reported since the Lobbying Disclosure Act took effect in 1996, even after adjusting for inflation, a CBS News analysis of Senate lobbying disclosures found.

***

Ring Robotics is launching with two firsts: Ring Drone, a flying indoor security camera, and Ring Rover, an autonomous security robot designed for business.

***

Ice Age

The Laurentide Ice Sheet covered much of Canada and the northern United States from about 95,000 to 20,000 years ago. At its largest, it stretched from above the Arctic Circle to Illinois, and in places the ice was over two miles (3.2 kilometers) thick. Two miles thick.

The last vestige of the Laurentide still survives as the Barnes Ice Cap, now a Delaware-sized ice cap located on central Baffin Island in the Canadian territory of Nunavut.

Technically, we are still living in an ice age—the Late Cenozoic Ice Age—which started about 34 million years ago. Within it, colder glacial periods alternate with warmer interglacial ones, including the one we live in now. What people casually call an "ice age" is usually a glacial period. The last glacial period ended about 11,700 years ago. It was that period that created the Ohio River and allowed the Allegheny to reverse its flow from the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic to the Ohio and west.

Two thousand years ago, the Arctic remnants of a once-vast ice sheet started to grow again.

It would have taken thousands of years for the cooling to be noticeable, and about 30,000 years for the Laurentide to regain its continent-sprawling mass, but the next glaciation had started.

It was the beginning of a new glacial period, more commonly known as the next ice age—but by the 1960s, summer temperatures were already so high that the ice sheet started to shrink. In other words, global warming ended a period of glaciation that had already begun. 

An interglacial period interrupted a glacial period during an Ice Age. Put that in your model.