Avalanche

A familiarity with practical avalanche science is essential for the mountain traveller. The mountains, as Nature in general, have one simple answer for those who think they can get away with mere academic knowledge. The world's glaciers are disappearing due to global warming, as discussed in Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, which I highly recommend to every haughty physicist, and everybody else as well, although Al Gore appears to have great difficulty understanding how difficult it is to change one's life whilst living in poverty. What does one care how that packet of salami was manufactured if all one sees is sustenance? Women in physics have been travelling amongst mountains all their lives, rarely finding a wide green valley in which to rest. Today the gentleman who runs the Gravity blog wrote a nice article on the work of Riofrio which has been studiously ignored by the vast majority of physicists for some time, as far as I can tell. But the truth will out, as they say, especially in an Internet age with all the wranglings recorded.

In other news, Paul Davies has a new book out, The Goldilocks Enigma. Of course I haven't read it, but apparently he discusses at the end the possibility that the laws of physics predict that the universe should contain life. Good for him. Any other solution to the so called fine-tuning problem is clearly hogwash, given recent advances in a ribbon diagram approach to M-theory. It was quite some time ago now that M. C. Shum pointed out the clear relation between the structure of biological molecules and tortile tensor categories in her thesis.

Update 25 Sep: Take a look at Riofrio's thread on Coral and Cosmology, about how the recession of the moon can tell us about the varying speed of light!