Polar Bears

Satiated,Polar Bears rarely attack humans unless severely provoked,whereas starving bears are extremely unpredictable and are known to kill, and sometimes eat humans. Due to warming air temperatures,ice-flow breakup is currently occurring three weeks earlier than thirty years ago,reducing dramatically the duration of the Polar bears feeding season.
Polar bears hunt seals from a platform of sea-ice. Rising temperatures cause the sea-ice to melt earlier in the year, driving the bears to shore before they have built sufficient fat reserves to survive the period of scarce food,in the late summer and early autumn. Reduction in sea-ice cover also forces bears to swim longer distances which further depletes their energy stores and occasionally leads to drowning.

       The greed and overpopulation of humans is causing this global warming change, so, bearing in mind the recent sad news,let us not be too hard on the starving polar bears.

Rene Descartes (pronounced Dacart) 1596-1650

Born 31 march 1596 in central France,Rene Descartes lived to become not only a soldier,but also a brilliant mathematician and philosopher.
As a soldier, Descartes joined the catholic army in 1612 and was present at the battle of White Mountain in 1620 when the Holy Roman Emperor routed the protestants during the thirty year war.He was also present in 1627 at the infamous siege of La Rochelle by Cardinal Richelieu.

Cardinal Richelieu at the siege of La Rochelle.

As a mathematician, he is best known for inventing the cartesian coordinate system in 1637.This introduced the idea of specifying the position of a point or object on a surface using two intersecting axes as measuring guides with the origin at the centre. this not only simplified many mathematical calculations, but also provided the first systematic link between geometry and algebra.

As a philosopher,Descartes is best known for the sentence "cogito ergo sum" which is translated as I think therefore I am, or  I am thinking therefore I exist, or  I do think therefore I do exist. Descartes proceeded on a system of acquiring knowledge based on deduction and perception with limited senses.

"And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgment which is in my mind."

Rene Descartes

Descartes, chasing the impossibility of original thought, left in his wake ideas that others developed into what is now modern philosophy and mathematics.he spent many years in the Dutch Republic, and it is there that he wrote most of his major works.

He died of pneumonia in 1650 in Stockholm where he was tutor to Queen Christina of Sweden.

Queen Christina with Descartes