More than 300 years ago, a man thought lost at sea re-appeared in Italy with accounts of a civilization inhabiting the interior sea of an undiscovered southern continent. Giuseppe Cognomi composed numerous volumes on this advanced and isolated culture - which he called The Linians - and the singular environment they inhabited at the bottom of the world. Though widely disregarded by the scientific community, the tradition of Linian scholarship has been kept alive through the years by a devoted few. The Society for Linian Studies is the first organized attempt to preserve Cognomi's legacy and progress his research.

Via Boing Boing. These guys sure are going to be pissed that we messed up all their ice.

We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I use my fingers as quotation marks, is part of the cooling process.

Tuesday!

* Cold fusion is back. More here. We're saved!

* Radiology art. (Hat tip: Neil.)

* My pursuit of all Wes Anderson-flavored cultural ephemera has led me to this video from Company of Theives, as well as Tenenbaum Fail. Via Fimoculous.

* The first eleven episodes of Quantum Leap are up at NBC.com.

* Anarctica travel blog.

* Who was dead at your age?

Hooray for Friday, hooray for everything.

* The Daily Show nicely nailed the hypocrisy inherent to the Republican position on the stimulus debate last night.

* Scandal at 1600: it turns out the practice of disrespecting the Oval Office by not wearing a jacket inside it—heroically revealed by former chief of staff Andrew Card just this week—goes back decades.

* They've remixed the audiobook versions of Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. The real scandal is that it took this long for someone to think to do it.

* Remixing the inaugural poem.

* Syllabus for another class on The Wire.

* West Antarctic ice sheet collapse even more catastrophic for U.S. coasts. Icemelt Could Shift Earth's Rotation, Moving Water Northward. Antarctic warming is robust. Everything is fine.

* And will Vermont towns finally get their chance to arrest Cheney? Oh, please yes.

Blog of the year The Big Picture visits the bottom of the world.

Friday morning enviropessimism!

* Another day, another record price for oil: $147.

* Antarctic ice sheet 'hanging by a thread.'

* The Environmental Protection Agency has determined that the value of an American life has dropped nearly $1 million to $6.9 million. Lest you think this merely a theoretical decrease, the number actually has real consequences in environmental policy, and of course the new devaluation won't be good for anyone but Big Pollution:

When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule. The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation, such as tighter restrictions on pollution.

Consider, for example, a hypothetical regulation that costs $18 billion to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At $7.8 million per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at $6.9 million per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted.

* Luckily our president takes these important issues very seriously.

* And of course there's good news, too: pollution may be slowing global warming. We're saved!

io9 teases ice sheet collapse.

The European Space Agency reported on Friday that satellite photos taken over the past several months reveal that the massive Wilkins ice shelf is crumbling, even in the depths of antarctic winter. The scary part is that the bit that's crumbling, as you can see in these images, is a small bridge attaching a massive, thousands-of-square-miles sheet of ice to another. Once this tiny bridge falls apart, it will unleash one of the biggest chunks of ice to break off the frozen continent ever. The ESA estmates the bridge will break up within the next few days.

One of the scarier increasingly likely apocalypses is ice sheet collapse, a scenario in which destabilized polar ice suddenly fractures and falls into the water, causing sea levels to rise dramatically.

The good news is that the now-collapsing Wilkens ice sheet in Antarctica, twice the size of Manhattan, was already in the water, so sea levels won't rise as a result—but the bad news is the stunning rapidity with which these changes are happening, significantly faster than any scientists or climate models predicted. More at Climate Progress, Open Left, and Washington Monthly.

* Kim Stanley Robinson informed me about the situation regarding the West Antarctic Ice Sheet during the video Allen linked last weekend. Holy smokes. That's not good.

* Another thing Kim Stanley Robinson taught me: Karl Popper's neologism "monocausotaxophilia," the love of single causes that explain everything.

* Nothing whatsoever to do with Kim Stanley Robinson: Towards a Sustainable Margaritaville.