More Evidence Needed

 A citation from LiveScience.com informs us that,

"Dotson Ice Shelf is a 30-mile-wide (50 km) chunk of floating ice seven times the size of New York City, located on the coast of Marie Byrd Land in West Antarctica. It is part of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which has dramatically calving glaciers that could cause sea levels to rise by approximately 11 feet (3.4 m) if they eventually drive the entire sheet to collapse."

Since the ice shelf is presently floating in the ocean, the melting (or collapse) of the entire thing will not raise sea level by a single inch. Floating ice displaces precisely as much water as the weight of the ice, so when it melts, it leaves the water level unchanged. You can test this by putting some ice cubes in a glass of water and observing what happens to the water level when the ice cubes melt.

There is a theory, not mentioned in this article, that ice shelves serve to block the advance of glaciers, so if they are removed the glacier will advance quickly into the ocean and raise sea level rapidly and by great amounts. I have searched for any explanation or actual evidence which would back up this theory and have never found any.

Government at Work

I was notified that I can no longer log in to my Social Security account online using the username and password that I have been using for some fifteen years, as they are transitioning to a government-wide system at "Login,gov." The notice provided a link for me to use to create an account at the new log in portal.

I just spent almost fifteen minutes attempting to create that account without success. I can design and create websites, but I cannot create an account at Login.gov. 

It did accept my email address for the username, which is a seriously insecure method of entry into a sensitive account. The old SSI portal did not allow use of the email address for the username, and neither does Medicare, so the government is going to a new system which is less secure than the old one. Interesting.

The even more interesting part of the exercise came when trying to create the password. The only requirement is that it be twelve characters long and that it matches when you type it twice. Twelve characters is pretty short, and why does it not require a mixture of upper and lower case? Special characters? Numbers? Again, where is the concern for security?

In the end, it didn't matter, because it would not accept anything I entered as a password. We get the government we elect.

It Gets Even More Weird

I watched the first fifteen minutes or so of the NBC interview with President Biden during the opening hours of the Republican Convention. I don't recall an American President ever trying to steal thunder from an opposing party's convention before, and if he did so this time it was likely because a lot of people wanted to see if he would fall on his face.

Imho, he did, but that's just my opinion. It is clear to me that the emperor has no clothes, but is weirdly trying to claim that it is his opponent who is naked.