A mystery finally solved, and all thanks to those dedicated scientists at the FSM institute. Global warming, it turns out, is a result in the serious decline in Pirates in the last several hundred years, as this chart shows:

Actually, this chart brings to mind two good books I'm just finishing up which I'd like to recommend. The first, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward Tufte has become a bit of a cult phenomenon in design circles, not primarily for the information contained, but for the design of the book itself, which is excellent.

Design aside, I found the book to be excellent, and I'm happy to report, even useful. It provided me with an authority to refer to when I recently had to justify a heavy revision of some ugly graphs.

The other book is A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, which has been a really amusing and informative read. See, I really love science. But I'm really too dumb to understand it. So books like this are great for me, as they give me a kind of cocktail party knowledge about a whole slew of stuff, from cosmology to molecular biology, without getting bogged down too much in the actual science. I guess this sound facetious, and from time to time I try to approach a book with a more serious mission, such as Murray Gell-Mann's The Quark and the Jaguar which is itself supposedly approachable, but I find I'm just too damn stupid. Which is no real dig on myself, really, because M theory is fucking HARD.

Besides, learning about how Newton would jab himself in the eye or how Watson and Crick stole a bunch of their data from some other (female) researcher is just cool. It's like a condensed soap opera but with science!