Azolla? Key to climate moderation?

A fern appears to have affected climate 55 million years ago. It was really hot and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was much more abundant than before and since. Then, it suddenly went cool... Why? Fern bloom!
Click part 1 then  part 2. [Thanks to foxnews.com (Scroll down to: With your second cup of coffee), Scientific American.com and eenews.net]


There are several other links to the researchers' project pages:

http://pryerlab.biology.duke.edu/

http://pryerlab.biology.duke.edu/field-work 

https://experiment.com/projects/azolla-a-little-fern-with-massive-green-potential

Incomplete puzzle

Missing pieces:

Someone, somewhere, came up with this attributed triple injunction:

Out of clutter find simplicity. From discord find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. -- Albert Einstein

Someone else has made it virtual "wall-art" (as in Facebook "wall") as it reads above.

When a Facebook friend posted the text, I wondered, did Einstein really say or write it? An Internet search produces the probable intermediate source for the "wall-art" in the quotation:

Einstein's "Rules of Work"1. Out of clutter find simplicity.2. From discord find harmony.3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. - Albert Einstein

...from a collection of Einsteinians and Einsteinishes, The New Quotable Einstein, compiled by Alice Calaprice and Freeman Dyson (Princeton Press, 2005, p. 296; also in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, 2013, p 480). The "Rules" is included in a chapter of quotes attributed to the great physicist; so it is that they are only Einsteinish.  

The compilers' comments on the "Rules" read:

The first "rule" is probably a paraphrase of Einstein's many quotations about the value of simplicity. I traced the second rule to Horace, the Roman poet and satirist, who had it as "Concordia discors" (harmony in discord) in his Epistles I, xii. 19. And the third rule has probably been in general use for ages.

Using the "Search inside" feature in Google Books, the only other "cluttered" quotation included in either version of Quotable is documentably Einsteinian:

My intuition was not strong enough in the field of mathematics to differentiate clearly the fundamentally important...from the rest of the more or less dispensable erudition. Also, my interest in the study of nature was no doubt stronger... In this field I soon learned to sniff out that which might lead to fundamentals and to turn aside...from the multitude of things that clutter up the mind and divert from the essentials. (p. 17 [18 in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein], from "Autobiographical Notes," in Schilpp, Albert Einstein Philosopher-Scientist, 15)

The third "rule" is similar to a near-cliché, quoted in Wikipedia:

When written in Chinese the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.

This quotation, taken from a speech by then Senator John F. Kennedy in 1959 has a history of usage both before and since his.

I think we can infer that the contrasting senses of "clutter" between the documented Einsteinian and attributed Einsteinish mean that he did not say or write any of the three Rules.

My reason for this post is to deconstruct the Rules in this way:

Clutter, discord, difficulty...
Simplicity, harmony, opportunity...

Clutter and simplicity are near opposites, as are discord and harmony. But, difficulty and opportunity do not exhibit an apposite relationship. On the other hand, the rules could describe Thomas Kuhn's normal science and science in crisis. When all is well with a paradigm, normal science applies and extends the paradigm in a self-similar simple and harmonic manner. When clutter and discord enter and, ultimately endanger the working theory, the onset of a revolution is at hand -- a new paradigm is required. However, sometimes recognition of the existence of crisis doesn't come about until a new perspective emerges and supplant the cluttered and discordant predecessor. So it was when plate tectonics arose; so much of the previous simplicity and harmony were operating in the midst of hidden clutter and discord. 

James Taranto provided this tease for a link to a WAPO post (second bullet, below):

Question and Answer--IV

• "Sacha Baron Cohen to Play Villain in Alice in Wonderland Sequel?"--headline, Metro.co.uk , Jan. 22
• "Yes, Kazakhstan Should Change Its Name. This Map Shows Why."--headline, Washington Post website, Feb. 7

The blog post is a hilarious (an hilarious with silent "h"?) collection of flipped cause-and-effect which even one affected by dyslexia could see, not to add the not-plural typo.

In execution, the Myanmar government was just as unsuccessful at accomplishing this as it was at everything else it set out to do. The name Myanmar turns out to derive from a literary word for the Burmese ethnic group. And many activists and Western media outlets still refuse to recognize the new name because they see the country's government as illegitimate. So it was not a successful name change, but the point is that there is precedent for dropping a country name that is based on the country's largest ethnic group.

Even though the renaming of "Burma" to "Myanmar" was not successful, it provides a precedent for other countries to follow? Mind-numbing!

A better example might be Thailand, which has changed its name to and from "Siam" a couple of time. 

Is it time for English to drop [the] plural[s]? Yes, it's only a blog post which might make sense in Thai (if there are no plurals). And, based on the recounted history, shouldn't this read "...has changed its name from and to 'Siam'..."?

...In 1939, though, Siam's fascist military leader changed the country's name from Siam to Thailand, after the country's largest ethnic group, the Thai. He was backed by fascist-era Japan, his ally...

Why "fascist-era Japan"? Couldn't one also say "fascist-era China"? Is all about time, isn't it?

I guess it is a set-up for (emphasis added):

When Thailand and Japan lost World War Two and the Thai military government stepped down, the country's name was changed back to Siam.

 But then,

But then, in 1948, the same Thai military fascist who had declared war on the United States a few years earlier returned to power, with Western backing as an anti-Communist bulwark. He changed the country's name again, in 1948, to drive home his antagonism toward Communist China. If it were not for the Cold War, this probably would not have been allowed and Thailand would still be called Siam today.

So the military fascist change's the name to Thailand, again, but after the fascist-era was over, at the beginning of the Cold War era.

Kazakhstan is in sort of a similar position. 

I'm trying to decide which similar position.

There's no indication that Kazakhstan is on the verge of a similar national identity crisis over what it means to be a Kazakhstan citizen, and having a confused national identity does not in itself create crises. But the country has partly resisted these problems by being a dictatorship with little political competition and vast natural resources. 

There is nothing like a dictatorship to stave off national identity crises.