A Warning Sign of a Mass Extinction Event Is On the Rise, Scientists Say (vice.com) 280
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vice: If you live near a freshwater river or lake, odds are good that you have seen warning signs about harmful algal and bacterial blooms posted on its shores. Alarmingly, a new study reports that these blooms may be early indicators of an ongoing ecological disaster, caused by humans, that eerily parallels the worst extinction event in Earth's history. Some 251 million years ago, the end-Permian event (EPE), popularly known as the "Great Dying," wiped out nearly 90 percent of species on Earth, making it the most severe loss of life in our planet's history. Ominous parallels of that upheaval are now showing up on Earth, according to a team led by Chris Mays, a postdoctoral researcher and palaeobotanist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. The researchers found that toxic algal and bacterial blooms during the Great Dying are similar to a recent microbial proliferation in modern lakes and rivers -- a trend that has been linked to human activities such as greenhouse gas emissions (especially carbon dioxide), deforestation, and soil loss.
The repeated correlation of these blooms with mass extinction events is "a disconcerting signal for future environmental change," report the researchers in a study published on Friday in the journal Nature Communications. Indeed, there's a lot of evidence to suggest we are currently in the midst of yet another mass extinction event, caused by humans. Not only do microbial blooms transform freshwater habitats into "dead zones" that can both choke out other species, thereby increasing the severity of extinction events, they can also delay the recovery of ecosystems by millions of years, the team noted. Mays and his colleagues reached this troubling conclusion by analyzing fossil records near Sydney, Australia, that were laid down before, during, and after the end-Permian extinction.
Though the exact mechanisms behind the Great Dying are a matter of debate, it was driven in part by an intense bout of volcanic eruptions that sparked a dramatic uptick in global temperatures and greenhouse gases emissions. Wildfires, droughts, and other disruptions swept across the woodlands, causing a collapse of plant life and widespread deforestation. The sudden loss of forests, which act as a sink for carbon, created a noticeable "coal gap" during the end-Permian that exposes this long-term interruption in carbon sequestration. Nutrients and soils that had once been metabolized by these botanical ecosystems instead seeped into nearby freshwater habitats, bolstering microbial blooms that were already thriving as a result of higher temperature and atmospheric carbon.
The repeated correlation of these blooms with mass extinction events is "a disconcerting signal for future environmental change," report the researchers in a study published on Friday in the journal Nature Communications. Indeed, there's a lot of evidence to suggest we are currently in the midst of yet another mass extinction event, caused by humans. Not only do microbial blooms transform freshwater habitats into "dead zones" that can both choke out other species, thereby increasing the severity of extinction events, they can also delay the recovery of ecosystems by millions of years, the team noted. Mays and his colleagues reached this troubling conclusion by analyzing fossil records near Sydney, Australia, that were laid down before, during, and after the end-Permian extinction.
Though the exact mechanisms behind the Great Dying are a matter of debate, it was driven in part by an intense bout of volcanic eruptions that sparked a dramatic uptick in global temperatures and greenhouse gases emissions. Wildfires, droughts, and other disruptions swept across the woodlands, causing a collapse of plant life and widespread deforestation. The sudden loss of forests, which act as a sink for carbon, created a noticeable "coal gap" during the end-Permian that exposes this long-term interruption in carbon sequestration. Nutrients and soils that had once been metabolized by these botanical ecosystems instead seeped into nearby freshwater habitats, bolstering microbial blooms that were already thriving as a result of higher temperature and atmospheric carbon.
Sucks to be them (Score:4, Funny)
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Heh, wait until the 90% come for your little piece.
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Unless you are saying the dead will rise as zombies and come for him. If we make that into a new zombie movie maybe we'll be able to afford the new methane tax that should more than double the cost of beef.
Re: Sucks to be them (Score:3)
Re:Sucks to be them (Score:5, Funny)
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Unless the bottom drops out of the food chain. Then you go the way of the dodo. Stupidity has a price.
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But didn't you read? There's plenty of algae to eat.
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Re:Sucks to be them (Score:5, Informative)
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Boiling it down to just "kill or be killed" is a ridiculous oversimplification. While a lot of predators might count as a bit psychopathic by human standards, they're not actually killing machines that relentlessly hunt down and exterminate all members of their prey species, for example. They hunt prey for food, sometimes have a little fun with it, but then mostly just go and take a nap. Predators that are too good and too dedicated to killing their prey species go extinct.
Re: Sucks to be them (Score:3)
Re: Sucks to be them (Score:5, Funny)
Based on my superficial reading as an American it sounds like half of them are in Australia's parliament, so it should be easy to get rid of some of them!
Re: Sucks to be them (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Those screaming hordes of passenger pigeons [audubon.org] wreaked havoc across the land when they used mounted lasers to devastate livestock.
And let us not forget the thundering herds of dodos [scienceabc.com] which rampaged across our cities and had to be taken down.
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You try to joke, but you forget that the thing that is most common in Eurasian folk tales is the story of the Big Bad Wolf. Because that is the animal that was still attacking and killing people in the forests in 1800s in large amounts where those forests still persisted. You could not routinely go unarmed into the forest in Northern Scandinavia or Karelia and reasonably expect to live through the experience. And where those forests were allowed to stand next to towns, you'd have chronic problem of wolf att
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Also, when humans drive a fishery to collapse, we're being saved from those fish being picked up by tornadoes and carried onto land and into cities where they might eat everyone. I've seen the documentaries.
Lifestyle Changes Needed (Score:3, Insightful)
Before you go ringing bells about human activity, consider that your own very lifestyle is what fuels it.
As Michael Jackson put it: "If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make a change."
Re:Lifestyle Changes Needed (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Lifestyle Changes Needed (Score:2)
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Re:Lifestyle Changes Needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Policy change is better. Many people will think, should I limit what I can do, so others can continue, and billionairs continue flying around the world in private jets?
Everyone has to do his piece, and this has to be enforced.
Worse, if large groups hold back, others might think it is ok to even increase what they do.
It is a game theoretical issue.
Personally, I try to be at the low end w.r.t. carbon footprint compared to people like me, living in the same country. I have changed my lifestyle somewhat, but expect steps from those that have a much much larger footprint.
The whole economy needs a "controlled decline", otherwise we will get an uncontrolled decline (collapse).
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Those billionaires and politicians with their private jets are the ones pushing for the legislation.
Therefore your next car will cost a lot more money, but don't expect any of them to give up their private jets.
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The ultra wealthy are mostly fo
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The whole economy needs a "controlled decline", otherwise we will get an uncontrolled decline (collapse).
Do you understand what 'controlled decline' actually means? Let me spell it out for you - high unemployment, high inflation, foreclosures and evictions, lost retirement savings and working seniors, pensioners and fixed income people becoming impoverished, wage stagnation combined with inflation pushing people into poverty.
Your ideological fellow travelers tend to also push for increased minimum wage. Do you know what going to happen to minimum wage earners in your 'controlled decline' scenario?
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Do you know what going to happen to minimum wage earners in your 'controlled decline' scenario?
Not to be snarky, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest a ditch digger is going to be far more in demand than, say, a full stack developer, a project manager, or a VP of marketing in the event there is a societal collapse.
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Then name some examples of such structures.
Cooperatives of free artisans that triple as education centers and social welfare for their members -- also known as guilds, in the classic meaning of the word. Every member a shareholder with voting rights. All guilds in a region voting for the role of economic sheriff, who in turn can settle economic imbalances, making sure the average rent produced by the artisans of all guild is balanced against each other. This is the Medieval system, also known politically as Subsidiarity and, on its economic side, as
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Capitalism is the default with no formal system in place.
No, it isn't. The default is the slavery mode of production, which relied upon social classes. You're confused free markets with Capitalism. Capitalism is one free market system, but by no means the sole one.
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Cooperatives of free artisans... This is the Medieval system, also known politically as Subsidiarity and, on its economic side, as Distributism.
It worked for about 1000 years...
The historical period that you are talking about is otherwise known as Dark Ages. Your definition of "worked" includes prevalent and documented phenomenon of people dying on the streets from starvation and frequent occurrences of famines.
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The historical period that you are talking about is otherwise known as Dark Ages.
No, it's known as Middle Ages. "Dark Ages" is a term used in pop culture, not in historical research.
Your definition of "worked" includes prevalent and documented phenomenon of people dying on the streets from starvation and frequent occurrences of famines.
Yes, because the Green Revolution of the 1960's was still 1000 or so years in the future. That said, when the climate wasn't doing it's best to eradicate humanity Europeans, everyone had a guaranteed right to work on the land for their sustenance. This included lots of common lands, whose cultivation was free to anyone willing to work on it. Those lands were closed off by the absolute monarchies that followe
Re:Lifestyle Changes Needed (Score:4, Insightful)
You are right. Of course this means the way many of us lead our lives is not sustainable. Thats why many groups are calling for system change. Continuing to lead out lives this way is not an option if we wish to protect our childrens future.
Re:Lifestyle Changes Needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Without greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and soil loss, you don't get your groceries and goods shipped into your urban environment, no iDevices or servers that run your social media platforms, no trendy IKEA or stylish wood-based furniture, and you don't get food/drink and your mango chai latte.
Te problem at base, is that there are just too many of us.
There is nothing inherently wrong with humans wanting that chai latte.
What is wrong is the artificial situation of almost 8 billion people on earth, with no signs of diminishment. https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
Any animal interacts and alters it's environment. The key is to keep that within bounds, and to do that without having to employ extraordinary means.
It is a troublesome equation. To live on earth in a sustainable way, we have to strike a balance. To live in the state we evolved at, we're looking a no extraordinary means. We are born, reproduce, then die at a young age. Fully natural, not much else.
But rather, we are doing the opposite. We are inventing more and more ways to temporarily support more and more people. Developing more ways to feed more people ant we're on the cusp of 8 billion people. I was an adult when we hit 6 billion. When the fall happens, and it will, it will be amazing. Just because Malthus was wrong once doesn't mean he will always be.
The other part of that balance is that only the pathological would want to return to prehistoric humanity. Few would want to return to even the 1700's. They like their lattes. They like their electricity and cooked food, and their lives that aren't centered around merely not dying.
Managed correctly with say a total of a billion people on earth, they can have civilization without destroying their ecosystem.
I don't think we can do it though. I'm predicting a massive dieoff in the not too distant future. That might be natures way of keeping us in line, Note that the larger the population, the more sensitive it will be to food disruption, a math thing where we seem to be holding our own, allowing population to continue on it's merry way upwards, thinking that some new miracle will come along, while each new miracle has a shorter and shorter time between each needed miracle.
Re:Lifestyle Changes Needed (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think we can do it though. I'm predicting a massive dieoff in the not too distant future.
I think you underestimate humanity's ability to adapt and change. People have been projecting doom and gloom based on over population for centuries now https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com] . Some how we always figure out ways around it and today we have far more tools to bring to bare than our ancestors did to solve our problems and we keep inventing more and at faster rates.
This doesn't mean we should just sit on our laurels and not do anything of course. I'm just saying I don't think doom and mass die-offs are at all inevitable.
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The essential question is, do beings like elephants and whales deserve to live? Basic philosophy of good versus evil is based upon social behavior. If you consider other species part of earth's society, then callously stamping them out is evil. If one doesn't care about other species, you are robbing future generations of humans enjoying the specta
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Centuries? Is that supposed to mean anything? In the geological scope of things a handful of centuries is so small that they barely register as existing. There are other species that have existed on this planet for hundreds of millions of years.
Modern human beings have been around about 200,000 years. Civilization for 6,000. We've been creating serious issues for our preferred environment since the Industrial Age a
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We don't really need coercion, just... tax policy unfavorable to large families.
And, if they can't/won't pay those taxes, send the cops to invite them jail, and if they won't go beat them until they do. But, we really don't need coercion.
The first time I read Tolstoy's claim that "government is violence," it took me a while to understand. Even if most us are well enough trained to avoid it most of the time, violence really is the underpinning of society. As citizens, I think we should at least be aware of that when deciding policy.
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The key is to keep that within bounds, and to do that without having to employ extraordinary means.
Why? What is wrong with extraordinary means? Electricity to the home seems rather extraordinary, if you ask me.
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I've long (as in, since the early 80s) expected that a "sustainable future" (to use the recent obfuscatory language) starts with between 4 and 7 gigadeaths. (The number has been going up by about 1 Gdeath for every 1.2 billion people added to the population.)
It's a crude estimate. Maybe the appropriate range would be 3 to 7.5 Gdeath.
One of these days, I may find an album by Megadeath, and find out if they are the irrepressible optimists their n
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a "sustainable future" (to use the recent obfuscatory language) starts with between 4 and 7 gigadeaths
If there are 8.5 billion people now, in about 120 years there will have been 8.5 gigadeaths, for the simple reason everyone dies. The problem isn't in people dying, because that comes quite naturally, just give it enough decades. The problem is in those people having too many children.
Mass murder is absolutely unnecessary. All that's needed is for people to have on average less than 2 children per couple, so that over time the total goes down as the currently living go about naturally dying.
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Just because Malthus was wrong once doesn't mean he will always be.
It actually raises the question of whether Malthus was wrong in the first place or if he was right, but it just takes a while for resource overuse to deplete reserves. Consider oxygen, for example. If we literally killed off every photosynthetic organism, we would die from lack of oxygen, but it would take somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 years. Assuming a magical supply of food from somewhere, it would be our descendants who would do the dying and people could spend the next one and a half thousand ye
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Before you go ringing bells about human activity, consider that your own very lifestyle is what fuels it.
In fact most pollution is emitted by businesses engaging in economic activity, and most people can't afford to patronize the few that are responsible, because they charge a premium above and beyond their increased costs because they can. Let's talk about the lifestyles of the average individual fueling climate change when they're getting paid enough to make responsible decisions.
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Without greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and soil loss, you don't get your groceries and goods shipped into your urban environment, no iDevices or servers that run your social media platforms, no trendy IKEA or stylish wood-based furniture, and you don't get food/drink and your mango chai latte.
What are you talking about?
1) Deforestation drives soil loss and deforestation can be averted by planting trees specifically for harvesting. This also solves your "wood-based furniture" problem.
2) Moving groceries/goods into and urban environment can be done with electric vehicles.
3) Building and running electronics can be done with renewable and nuclear energy.
4) You do know we make our food from farming the stuff, right?
Literally nothing you have written cannot be done in a sustainable manner. The probl
Re:Lifestyle Changes Needed (Score:2)
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As Michael Jackson put it: "If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make a change."
Stopped clock is right twice a day I guess, Michael was not a role model for me.
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You are in luck, you won't have to decide to change anything. Mother Nature will do it for you.
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As a species, we haven't got used to the idea that while we can have more than four grandchildren, that might not necessarily be a good idea.
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Re:Lifestyle Changes Needed (Score:5, Interesting)
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Before the Industrial Revolution there were about 1 billion people on Earth, give or take. From these, 90%, about 900 million people, lived in absolute poverty, enduring famine regularly. And every neighborhood had a children cemetery, given the huge mortality rates among children.
Nowadays, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, there are about 8.5 billion people on Earth. From these, less than 9%, about 700 million people, live in absolute poverty, enduring famine regularly. And neighborhood children cemeteries aren't even a memory anymore.
This means the Industrial Revolution not only reduced the percentage of those living in absolute poverty from 90%, which was the typical rate for all of the preceding recorded History, down to 9%, in an amazingly fast period of a little over 200 years, but it also reduced absolute poverty in absolute numbers by 200 million people, or a 22% reduction. More: projections suggest absolute poverty will be down to 0%, and 0 people, in about 30 years.
Oh, and per-capita violence is also at least an order of magnitude less than it was before. And this counting the dead from WW1 and WW2, plus all other wars, massacres, mass murders, and genocides that happened during the entire 19th and 20th centuries.
I'm thus quite curious on how, precisely, the Industrial Revolution was "a disaster for the human race". With before and after numbers, if possible.
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No need for numbers, You just provided them. No child cemeteries means mass population growth. Poverty = low resource consumption, by raising 22% of the now rapidly growing global population out of poverty we've drastically increased the amount of resources that have to be produced to maintain that.
Hell, the problems go away and these algae blooms and other na
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He might have meant that it was too much of a good thing. Thousands of years of evolution wiped out after a few hundred years of nice toys in the hands of primates that hadn't evolved enough to use them properly.
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He was referring to psycho environmentalists when he said that.
In context it seems that what he was actually saying was that we would drive ourselves extinct and just be a blip from the point of view of geological time.
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This is flat-out wrong. Capitalist economies produce almost exactly what is demanded. (Hint: unsold inventory incurs taxes, which is why businesses avoid it.)
If Marx had instead made a prediction about excessive consumer consumption he might have had a point.
Looking in the wrong place (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Looking in the wrong place (Score:2)
Instead we have more people dying due to Bidens inaction.
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That would only make them happy. "Ya I know I've screwed my voters, but that President Biden will take them straight to Hell."
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While these are positive developments the overall population growth is still a huge burden on the planet. A confounding factor is that population growth tends to drop as standards of living increase. And increased standard of li
Even in the US (Score:3)
As far as the American obesity problem, I commute on my bicycle every day it isn't raining. I can do snow, I even have studded tyres for when the streets ice over, but rain is my limit. The point being, I was obese when I started commuting on my bicycle, about seven years ago, and I am still obese. I am a lot fitter, but still obese. Yes, it is a tough one to solve
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Population doesn't have to equal devastation. We are using extractive rather than regenerative processes to support our populations, but it doesn't have to be that way. This is merely the way that enables some to become unnecessarily wealthy (as measured by whether they can spend their wealth or not) at the expense of everyone else.
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We will adapt as long as we can. I just took a trip through Texas and stopped at a Buckees (sp) and I was taking in the view and noticed blackbirds in the protective shade of vehicles, drinking air conditioner condensation, and eating bug
The population isn't ever increasing (Score:3)
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And how do you propose we do that? The places where population growth is a problem are also the places where people are desperately poor and having children is one of the *very* few ways available to increase family income and to not die alone in a gutter in old age.
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Wait.. "warning sign of"? (Score:2)
Re: Wait.. "warning sign of"? (Score:2)
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The fact we are in a mass extinction is clear. The question is how steep of a cliff are we about to fall off which is generally why this research is still valid. Then again if we start telling people how quickly this is going to happen, they probably won't change shit either because the classic "it's too late".
Great (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great (Score:5, Funny)
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Does the food chain ring any bells for you or are you really that daft?
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Does the food chain ring any bells for you or are you really that daft?
Humans are totally independent of the wild food chain. There is nothing in any lake in the world that a significant number of humans eat. Lake and river ecosystems have nothing whatsoever to do with human food. We only care about them for decoration and entertainment. (And there's nothing wrong with that.) We only care about the lakes and rivers for the water itself, and it's not hard to filter out the algae and treat away its byproducts. We do that already..
Predators (Score:2)
Re: Predators (Score:2)
Re: Predators (Score:2)
Capitalism does not require waste, thatâ(TM)s absurd. Waste is inefficiency, and that cuts into profits. Nor is there any productive enterprise that would magically produce less waste under a command economy like Socialism. If anything, production becomes far more inefficient and wasteful un
Re: Predators (Score:2)
Dumping waste into the rivers and ocean is only inefficient if recycling is cheaper than doing so.
Ignoring future costs for a moment dumping waste is a lot cheaper.
Re: Predators (Score:2)
But to go around talking about how wrong Marx was when all you've ever heard are Capitalist slogans about evolutionary psy
Re: Predators (Score:2)
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First big point missed - nearly every modern capitalism has mechanisms in place to prevent the monopoly end-state from occurring. They aren't perfect, but quite effective overall. Anti-monopoly laws in the early-mid 1900s probably contributed more to sustainable capitalism than anything else in the long run, with the possible exception of the move off the gold standard.
Second major point missed - in a well-functioning capitalism, anyone wh
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I'm sure you're going to come back with "that's not good enough". Well, when you come up with some economic system that can give everyone a nice car and a nice house in a nice neighborhood, I'll be the first to adopt it. But, Socialism and communism have been tried over, and over, and turned out to be abject, dismal flaming-bag-of-poo failures, so
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Capitalism does not require waste, that[']s absurd.
Capitalism in practice doesn't deliver maximum efficiency because of our pesky human nature.
One unambiguous example, when light bulb companies banded together as the market was nearing saturation and deliberately engineered bulbs to fail faster.
Also, any thing where you are style driven, shuffling around cosmetic appearance of a product to have owners of the older version obviously using 'old stuff' to pressure them to get new stuff.
Also, with externalized costs. When your business just dumps crap into wat
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No they don't. They have as many offspring as they possibly can, until they have too many offspring and the adults let the infants starve to death - when they don't actively kill them and eat them themselves. (Of course, they are more likely to eat their neighbour's infants before their own, but the same goes for their neighbours, so, "meh".)
The race is on (Score:2)
Will peak phosphorus kill us or will phosphorus run off kill us first.
Nutrients over temperature (Score:2)
Too many ignorants (Score:2)
think along the lines that Reagan did: a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at? [snopes.com], they totally fail to understand that we need biological diversity and we need a lot of nature (eg trees) to clean up the mess that we pump into the environment.
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That's what we get for trusting Hollywood.
Algae blooms (Score:2)
We can scoop it up and use it as a replacement for fossil fuels. Problem solved.
See how easy that was?
We are screwed. No news. The question ... (Score:2)
... is: How hard? And when will we act? We're 45 years late already in getting an ecological turnaround going. If we drag our heels any longer, the hope of modern civilization surviving is limited IMHO. The beef is in what the next 5 to 10 years bring in true action. After that my utility optimism will be used up.
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We won't act until it is far too late. It's the human thing to do - stumble on in blindly individualistic optimism.
Maybe we do need a 95% or 99% cull, and hopefully the remainder will build a more sanely based society (and social expectation) in the future. But that last bit sounds insanely optimistic. Humans aren't very good at learning to control their desires.
Sounds pretty flimsy. (Score:2)
Are we to believe that microbial blooms predict volcanic eruptions on the scale needed to burn away all the plant life and block the sun so new plants canâ(TM)t grow? Because that is what us being suggested.
EXTINCTION REBELLION! (Score:2)
The anthropocene mass extinction (Score:2)
We're already in the middle of a mass extinction. There's less than half as many living things today as there were in the year I was born, and there's more than 2x as many people alive today as when I was born. This is not a sign that specific species are going extinct, but rather that the rate at which living things die is accelerating much more broadly (and the algae just speed up the process in some places). Extinctions are happening at a bit more than 300x the pre-industrial rate. Ecologists had their "
Literally nothing (Score:3)
Pretty nearly NOTHING on the scale of modern human observation recordkeeping - call it a couple of centuries - is going to amount to even a pixel of difference on a chart of the world's history.
15 bn years vs 200.
If earth's history was the span of a day, our 200 years of observations amount to 0.001152 seconds.
And the "industrial warming" what, maybe 1/4 of that?
"Gosh, didn't it just get warm there?"
"What?"
"A moment ago, it got uncomfortably warm."
"Really? I didn't feel it at all."
"Well yeah, obviously, I mean I felt it. It was a distinct 1/1000th of a second, maybe more. Got super uncomfortable. Clearly, borderline catastrophic."
"Clearly."
Haven't Seen the Asteroid Yet (Score:3)
The best explanation for the Permian Extinction is an asteroid impact event. After 250 million years, it's difficult to find an impact crater, but the contemporaneous Siberian Traps (a large-scale volcanic eruption) were probably at the antipodes of the impact, which would suggest an ocean strike.
(The Deccan Traps of India are approximately contemporaneous with the Chicxulub asteroid impact, and are approximately at the antipodes of the Chicxulub crater.)
It's only been in the last 40 years or so that geological science has come to accept the existence of bolide impact events. Previously, the resultant die-offs were explained by other ongoing processes such as "climate change" or given biological explanations. But we can now see that the likely explanations for major and sudden changes in the planet have been extraterrestrial in origin.
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"Trump successfully got vaccines developed in a record time."
Former Alleged President: Pandemic? there's no pandemic.
Flunkie: There will be unless we do something.
FAP: Bah, nothing can be done.
Flunkie: errm, we could ask the drug companies to come up with a vaccine.
FAP: I've just had a brilliant idea, we could ask the drug companies to come up with a vaccine. It will complement the hydroxychloroquine I've been pushing.
Flunkie: You ARE a stable genius, aren't you?
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How is "Total revenue generated by arcades" and "Computer science doctorates awarded in the U.S." a spurious correlation? That, right there, is news for nerds and stuff that matters. :-)