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Understanding The Voynich Manuscript #4

Understanding The Voynich Manuscript #4 If not Latin, then what? Please see the links at...

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #3

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #3 Plants and the moon. For thousands of years, people...

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #2

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #2 An i for an i ? Not nymphs: women! There are...

Understanding The Voynich Manuscript #1

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #1 Tom, Dick and Harry explain a statistical method. ...

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Patrick LockerbyRSS Feed of this column.

Retired engineer, 73 years young. Computer builder and programmer. Linguist specialising in language acquisition and computational linguistics. Interested in every human endeavour except the scrooge... Read More »

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Arctic Ice June 2010


This article describes the current state of the Arctic sea ice and makes some predictions for the month ahead.  The predictions are based on my visual analysis of hundreds of satellite images. 

I begin with some background and explanatory materials and then show how satellite images can be analyzed to show the mechanisms of  ice consolidation and fracture.  In the concluding part I show some images of the Arctic ice at the time of writing and point out what I think will happen to that ice during this month.

Getting Steamed Up About Nostalgia

The term nostalgia describes a yearning for the past.


As a child, I would travel to school on a steam train.  I have always loved the power and the beauty of the steam engine.  The steam trains are mostly gone now, except for a few historic  lines run by and for enthusiasts.

One of my many hobbies is to examine satellite photographs and rediscover old railroad routes using the visual skills of the aerial archaeologist.  When the 19th and early 20th century engineers called their routes 'permanent way' they certainly knew what they were talking about.
A Global Warming Scam Exposed

A favorite trick of scammers is to pick a phrase that is widely used and then use it to draw in site visits via Google searches for that phrase.1

If you search for "global warming scam" you will likely find a search result "global warming scam exposed".  The site is earthpro.info and you will find a complete piece of BS that starts off with:

Global Warming Is A Total Scam

COMMENTS ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING

By John Coleman

it is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM.

But that article is not what I am complaining about.
Love Thine Enemy


It is exceedingly rare that the scientist and the believer can stand on the same platform and present the same message to the world in the form of a law of universal application.  What is scientific, you may ask, about an injunction to love our enemies?  I hope to explain that point.

Lives of great men all remind us
  We can make our lives sublime,
And departing, leave behind us
  Footprints on the sands of time.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - A Psalm of Life


Where science meets belief
Psychrolinguistics

I was going to title this 'cryolinguistics', but someone else already invented the term.   You have to admire the linguistic skills of anyone who can come up with a Department of Zaphodian Cryolinguistics

Desperately Denying Arctic Warming

This is the age of rapid public access to satellite images.  If you want to know what is happening to the Arctic ice you can see for yourself.

There are some people who don't want you to look.  They want you to read their drivel instead, and go away believing that the Arctic ice isn't really melting, or if it is then that is nothing unusual.

On Saturday, May 01, 2010, Paul Driessen wrote a piece of blatant propaganda called "(Desperately) Looking for Arctic warming".  It was "co-authored by scientist Willie Soon".
http://townhall.com/columnists/PaulDriessen/2010/05/01/desperately_looki...

The article has been multiply published, see e.g.